Steam has become a haven for visual novels over the past few years, but they’ve come in such a flood that it’s nearly impossible to tell good from cheap, amateurish, and bad. However, the appearance of Steins;Gate on Valve’s marketplace might just give newcomers a chance to see just what a visual novel can do.
Steins;Gate tells the tale of a group of students who learn how to change the past via mail and a modified microwave. Their adventures eventually get them tangled up in a conspiracy concerning the company that owns the Large Hadron Collider and a man who claims to hail from a strange, dystopian future.
The story promises non-linear choices and a multitude of endings, thanks to its phone trigger system, where players can choose which calls to receive and which messages to reply to, altering the story’s ultimate outcome.
Visual novels are niche genre, and may always be, but Steins;Gate has received an immense amount of praise for its smart storytelling and compelling characters. We’ll see if it can attract a wider audience when it hits Steam in September.
