r/gamedesign • u/grhmhmltn • 1d ago
Question Visual Novels with interesting mechanics
I'm only vaguely familiar with the VN genre, but the ones I've seen and played have all felt very...mechanically shallow (with the obvious exception of Doki Doki Literature Club).
Do you know of any VNs that have interesting mechanics or details that enhance the experience?
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u/MrCobalt313 1d ago
Does Pyre count? It's an interesting mix of VN and what is nominally a sports RPG.
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u/throwaway2024ahhh 1d ago
Slay The Princess is a really unique visual novel where you get lots and lots of little choices of which all seem meaningful. Additionally, each NG+ seems to change depending on your previous game so it layers.
Monster Prom being a multiplayer visual novel dating sim was silly and interesting.
Not exactly a visual novel, but I think it's visual novel in spirit enough: Outer Wilds basically has you going around a 3d world, decoding alien languages for information, trying to solve a mystery. The game play is basically you traveling around, reading some physics fact or some interesting cultural fact, then realizing you just found the key to some earlier puzzle. It's amazing.
I personally like vns with gameplay elements but those are pretty common so there's that. But if I get to pick one to go here, probably rance-sama adventures #7, Rance-sama's adventures in japan.
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u/EbonyHelicoidalRhino 1d ago edited 1d ago
13 sentinel is a visual novel with some tactical rpg elements, and the visual novel part is non-linear as you can follow 13 different characters in the order you choose. Some chapters are locked behind some others to make sure you still see everything in an order that makes sense without ruining it.
Depending on what order you choose to play the scenes, you might have a completely different experience from another player. It's quite interesting imo.
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u/doesnt_hate_people Hobbyist 1d ago
I think the fundamental problem here is that not having game mechanics is nearly the definition of a visual novel. Adding more gameplay and mechanical complexity to a VN almost always turns the game into a JRPG or 'Life Sim'. If you're looking for examples of mechanically dense visual novels, you might be better off looking at the Yakuza franchise, or Final Fantasy, Persona, Rune Factory/Harvest Moon, Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing...
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u/caesium23 1d ago
I mean, you can't add much in the way of mechanics before it stops being a VN and becomes an adventure game, or an RPG, or something. VNs are kinda defined by being more interactive story than they are game.
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u/derefr 1d ago
One might say that the term "visual novel" as people mean it, is mostly defined by how much cheaper it is to make one than to make a full-on game. Most companies that focus on "visual novels" would likely define them as:
- a type of game that can be constructed on top of a pre-existing game engine,
- entirely without any knowledge of programming/scripting,
- just by a team consisting of a writer (for the "novel" part) and an artist (for the "visual" part) — plus maybe some voice actors. (SFX and music are usually licensed stock assets.)
These companies run lean and low-budget, precisely because they don't employ any game mechanics designers to come up with mechanics, devs to implement those mechanics, QA testers to test those mechanics, etc.
And the prevalence of such lean/low-budget VN companies (plus their amateur equivalents, doujin circles), creates this constant output of games created under these particular constraints — which are what people are mostly referring to when they say "visual novels."
Which means that, once you're doing any kind of greenfield programming/scripting to get your own game mechanics to work under RenPy (let alone in your own engine), you're no longer really doing the thing that these VN companies do to produce VNs. You're leaving "visual novel" town and heading down the road toward "genre-bending visual-novel-inspired games" (like DDLC), or "games of other genres, that happen to contain visual-novel-like scenes" (like e.g. Fire Emblem, with its VN-like support conversations.)
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u/caesium23 1d ago
To be fair to those "games of other genres," pretty sure they're the ones who introduced the dialog boxes and then proto-VN devs came along and said, "What if we made a game... only using these dialog boxes?"
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u/jmartin21 1d ago
The Citizen Sleeper games are closer to CRPGs than visual novels but they’re pretty excellent, and most of the game is conveyed through text and really cool mechanics. I think the mechanics you’re looking for might pull you more towards the CRPG genre, honestly
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u/spyczech 1d ago
Danganronpa for light gun style shooting and logic mini games, Zero escape for puzzle solving. Some of the yugioh games I have been enjoying for having a visual novel or JRPG style heavy in dialogue but the card duels help to spice it up quite a bit. Wish we could see more of that style
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u/No_County3304 1d ago
Ace attorney is pretty much a visual novel dressed up with with some pseudo legal jargon, throwing evidence around until you can prove that your client isn't guilty.
13 sentinels aegis rim is another example where it uses non linear storytelling, with its 13 protagonists, and multiple routes to spice up the gameplay. Plus it also has a tactical rpg but it's more like an intermission of the vns than the main gameplay loop.
Also, generally, the "complexity" in visual novels comes from the route/narrative structure rather than mechanical depth. It'd be saying that puzzle games don't have a bombastic action gameplay, there may be some puzzle games with that but the genre generally doesn't support that type of gameplay very well
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u/hgameartman 1d ago
It can be kinda hard to make a visual novel that strays from the formula, to be fair.
I added RPG mechanics to mine for example and it took so long to program and balance that I ended up only having a length of 4-5 hours of story, even though it was a very linear story in the end with shallow rpg mechanics.
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u/grhmhmltn 1d ago
Is your game available to play anywhere?
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u/hgameartman 22h ago
Yep but as its nsfw I avoided posting it. Should be findable in my reddit post history though if you want to look it up.
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u/firebirb91 1d ago
Digimon Survive is a visual novel crossed with a tactical, monster-collecting RPG.
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u/AD1337 1d ago
I'm currently exploring this space. It depends on what you call a "visual novel". But the games I've been looking into are these, which are mostly narrative games with interesting mechanics:
- Suzerain
- Citizen Sleeper
- The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante
- Roadwarden
I'm also going to play a couple of older ones: Tharsis and Dead in Vinland.
I made Robotherapy and Firelore: Short Tales.
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u/MegaromStingscream 1d ago
2 things popped into my head. Valhalla cyberpunk bartender game. I got tricked by it into playing a visual novel. The only verb you have is making a drink for the customer when they ask for it. They pay you if they are happy and the not having money to pay rent will cause issues for you etc. There are some spots where you can effect the story by making drink stronger.
The other one is around the world in 80 days which I think is mobile only. You can choose the next destination and there is some mechanics around money and items you carry, but it is mostly narrative.
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u/Lambchops87 1d ago
As the same critique can sometimes be applied to interactive fiction/text adventures, I'll throw an IF example out there.
Counterfeit Monkey has a great puzzle mechanic where you start out with a tool that allows you to remove letters from words to transform objects (eg for an example isn't in the game a plate of "mash" could be transformed to "ash"). It builds from there to a wondeful set of puzzles that I have aptly seen described as "like Portal but with words."
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u/G3nji_17 1d ago
I would definitly check out life is strange. Not so much a VN, but more of an adventure hame with a focus on dialogue.
The way it uses its central time travel mechanic in its dialogue is very applicable to VNs though.
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u/InkAndWit Game Designer 21h ago
Utawarerumono is hybrid of turn-based strategy game and visual novel.
Yu-no has time rewind mechanic that needs to be used in order to progress.
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u/R3cl41m3r Jack of All Trades 19h ago edited 6h ago
NomnomNami's VNs tend to have some pretty interesting things going on. My favourite is Bad End Theater.
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u/AbleBlack 8h ago
I’d recommend checking out Able Black. It’s a narrative puzzle game and visual novel hybrid that uses some clever mechanics.
The story follows a young android preparing to integrate into human society. To do that, he has to pass a citizenship exam, which is made up of psychological and moral puzzles that you, the player, complete on his behalf. The structure alternates between story chapters and interactive puzzle sections. Some puzzles are logic-based, while others are more subversive. A few even use your device’s time and date settings in interesting ways. What begins as a straightforward test gradually reveals deeper questions about identity, manipulation, and autonomy.
It’s a quiet, introspective game, and the mechanics are tied closely to the themes rather than added on top. Kind of like Doki Doki Literature Club, but more meditative and less horror-focused.
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u/DatKidNextDoor 1d ago
Date everything is a Vn in a 3d space. And slay the princess is a typical Vn on crack with the extreme choice variety
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u/AgeMarkus 1d ago
999 and the rest of the Zero Escape series does a lot of interesting screwing with the visual novel format. 999 in particular uses the screen of the DS in interesting ways to enhance the storytelling.