Just wanted to hear what the community is into!
I mainly like mystery and romance VNs, and recently played episode 0 (the demo) of of the Devil (which I loved and I instantly bought episode 1) and played the demo for Urban Myth Dissolution Center (visually impressive but the story and MC didn’t catch me).
Apart from that I’m very slowly working through Mamiya, on my second playthrough of Jack Jeanne, and in the middle of my first route of Lkyt!
I should get around to my visual novel backlog. The last few I finished were the Zero Escape series and Gnosia.
Is Gnosia good? I found out about it via the anime announcement and got curious
Anime? May have to look into that! Personally I went in with minimum expectations and loved it. It has some light RPG attribute allocation junk that I didn’t care for as it felt a little tacked on (and I don’t like RPG stat/progression systems on the best of days), but besides that I enjoyed it a ton.
It narratively integrates its whole gameplay loop, since it’s a timeloop game, which is what made it really click for me. Toss that narrative framing out (or don’t care for it) and you may not like it as much.
The more I think about it the more I think they chose the perfect type of game for a timeloop narrative, since a well-designed visual novel allows you to rapidly skip through repetitious elements. All this said, since there are several characters, some are much less developed than others and make it a drag at some points as you try to work things out, but there were still enough written and developed well that made up for that in my opinion.