What Games Like Degrees Of Lewdity Combine Visual Novel And Adventure Elements?

I’m also open to recommendations for stories with similar intensity and player drive but in a more structured, non-sandbox environment. ‘Degrees of Lewdity’ is unique in its blend of text-heavy reactivity and game systems to create a story that feels entirely emergent within a pre-determined framework, so there’s a lot of room for recommendation for players who appreciate deep, interactive stories with a focus on consequence in more standard narratives. For a non-adult oriented option, The Letter (a visual novel) is a very well-written and highly branching horror story where choices have a large impact on the main character’s relationships and the ending. Long Live the Queen is a fantasy-focused game with extensive role-playing and lots of consequence in a dark story where you try to reach the top of a magic school. It has life-or-death skill checks and a pretty personal story that is told through gameplay mechanics. Lastly, Knightly Passions is an adult oriented game that follows a classic fantasy adventure story with lots of focus on character relationships that change based on your actions, rather than a completely open-ended sandbox. If one is to step outside of the adult game genre, than games like 'Disco Elysium' or 'Planescape: Torment' would be the ultimate recommendations for story lovers. Both games are primarily based around interactive stories in which you can influence the world and its characters through mostly dialog. As a result, most of the games’ narrative is comprised of lots of written text and the player can experience the effects of each conversation in a very profound way. Therefore, I am mostly looking for titles where the story is the main part of the game and is significantly shaped by the player’s decisions.

Game jams! NaNoRenO (National Novel Renovation Month) and Ludum Dare are just two of the many events held throughout the year where participants complete a visual novel in a short span of time. The jam pages on itch.io collect all the entries to a particular jam in one place, and you can play through as many of the 20 or so entries to a jam within a weekend. Quality can vary wildly, but creativity is always high. Because games are made to be completed in one sitting, you can try out all sorts of new styles and writers. You might even find the next big indie developer before they make their first paid game.

For writers, those tiny free browser VNs are an inspiration. Getting to see how other writers use their space to lay out their story, their characters, their dialogue, and their player’s choices is amazing. It’s like a course on minimalist writing. You see immediately what you can keep in and what you have to cut. I got more ideas from playing three tiny odd browser VNs than I got from a dozen writing how-to guides online. It’s just so cool to see that something as simple as a short free browser-based VN can be made, and that all a good story needs is an idea and the guts to put it out there. Often the semantic imperfections of the presentation itself actually add to the VN’s charm and power, highlighting the core emotional truth of the story in a really beautiful way. They’re raw, uncut, and I love ’em.

The ‘Canvas’ section of Webtoon’s home page includes a ‘Story Games’/‘Interactive Stories’ category, which are primarily read as linear comics but some creators use the interactivity to create choose-your-own-adventure style visual novels that can be read within the Webtoon app or on the Webtoon website. Note that while the Webtoon platform itself includes ads, they are ads between episodes/chapters, and not ads overlaid on the art itself. Thus, while a banner ad between chapters is required to support these stories, there are some very high quality interactive stories being created for Webtoon, read entirely for free. This is a ‘hybrid’ model in which the content itself is ad-free.

Arthur Ransome wrote the classic British children’s book ‘Swallows and Amazons’ – it’s a Tom Sawyer style book where children go sailing, camping and make pretend battles as pirates on a lake in the Lake District. The children are given a huge amount of freedom in the book. For quieter take on independence read ‘My Side of the Mountain’. The main character runs away from home to live in the wilderness. While this book is very different from Mark Twain’s work it also goes back to a time when there were far more possibilities. It suggests that the world is a very big place and that you can go and do anything with it.

Project Gutenberg has an 'interactive fiction' section with a number of classic choose-your-own-adventure style gamebooks from Project Gutenberg. While not exactly interactive fiction in the modern sense, some of the books, such as the ‘Lone Wolf’ series and ‘Heart of Ice’ are classics of the genre and have complex stories with a surprising amount of player control. Reading them online through an interpreter that handles the page turning and inventory management for you makes them easy to read. For adults interested in the roots of interactive storytelling, the ‘interactive fiction’ section of Project Gutenberg is a rich and free resource. Often the prose is dense and the challenges to the player are merciless and need to be solved through careful planning and mapping of the game world.

Years ago, I contracted a nasty virus while attempting to download Katawa Shoujo from a mirror site. After that ordeal, I made sure to only download free VNs from official websites listed on vndb.org or from a developer’s own itch.io profile. While there are some aggregator sites that host free VNs for download, I never download games that are only available through such sites. With thousands of free and legitimate VNs out there, I figure missing out on one title isn’t worth the risk. Using a download manager to scan files as they download can also help to catch any potential viruses – some download managers even have virus scanning capabilities integrated into them. Better to safe than sorry, I figure – it’s a lot easier to reformat a drive when it’s healthy than it is when it’s been infected with a virus and needs to be reinstalled from scratch.

The brilliance is that no single ending gives you the 'full' story. You have to piece together the truth from fragments scattered across all of them. The complete picture exists only in the overlap, in the contradictions between endings. It turns the player into an active detective, not just a passive reader. You're not just consuming an ending; you're compiling evidence from multiple realities to understand what might have really happened. It's an incredibly engaging way to structure a mystery.

A previous thread seems to have forgotten the huge amount of time to invest into most of the VN’s out there. ‘Muv-Luv Alternative’ already reads like ‘War and Peace’ in novel length, and ‘The Fruit of Grisaia’ already is a trilogy of huge games. That’s why I prefer to read kinetic novels without any choice in the first place, or even shorter VNs of very good quality instead of getting stuck in huge games that would take a casual player weeks to even months to complete. Many visual novels are novels. ‘Muv-Luv Alternative’ is like reading ‘War and Peace’ twice. Even ‘The Fruit of Grisaia’ trilogy consists of three very long games. So, unless you are a very dedicated reader, you have to prepare for a very long time to read all the visual novels you want to. That’s why I prefer kinetic novels (no choices) or shorter novels (even if they are not as good). For example, ‘Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet’ (a 5-hour long kinetic novel that is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a museum robot recounts the events leading up to the apocalypse) and ‘Emily is Away’ (a nostalgic simulation of early 2000s chat clients, with a powerful and concise story) are much better examples of the medium than the typical harem-style game with 100 hours of gameplay. So, if you are new to the medium, I would recommend starting with a shorter, highly-rated game, as your ‘top’ game might be the one you actually finish.

Ignoring star ratings on popular platforms and reading one-star reviews is basically a side job I do to find good character-driven stories among the deluge of recent publications. Often the only indicator for me that a highly hyped novel is actually character-driven are the same complaints that every other novel receives: ‘too much talking’, ‘not enough action’, ‘boring buildup’. It was a novel by a relatively unknown author. According to the reviews on bigger sites, it was actually really bad. People would say that instead of having the demon lord conquer the world, he'd be cursed to feel the pain and suffering of every living thing. He meets a human knight who is emotionally numb because of trauma from his past. Together, they have a romance. The plot of the novel is the development of their relationship, and their relationship is that he tries to help her feel emotions and she helps him to develop emotional barriers that would allow him to function. The physical intimacy between the two is a deep form of communication for her, but extremely intense and even terrifying for him. The author handles it surprisingly sensitively.