I'd call this more of a demo than a completed game. It's 273 screens, and seems to barely scratch the surface of the potential of the world it takes place in, or tell a complete story.
I think there's two things that work well in this game.
The art works for me. I like the production value of the art and CGs - the characters are nice to look at. I also like the white-silhouette look of the background characters, which makes the rooms feel full without (I assume) requiring a huge amount of work or distracting from the lead characters. The backgrounds seem quite stylish for unprocessed(?) photos.
I also think that there's a lot of potential in the premise, that there's a small number of PRODIGY students, who are being groomed for something. That works well, provides a lot of justification for weird anime looks, and has a ton of story hooks that you could go into if you so chose.
The biggest problem I have with this game is that the story doesn't seem to be moving in a coherent direction:
It starts with a teaser, but the teaser is so short that it really doesn't generate much interest in the game. So it just feels kind of wasted.
The next is an info-dump about the various types of people in the world, introducing the LOW, NORMA, and PRODIGY distinction. The game spends a lot of effort (4 CGS!) ensuring that we get this distinction - but apart from PRODIGY/everyone else, it doesn't come up again. We don't see any LOW characters, for example.
It then moves into some standard high school plot - introducing the student council and a transfer student. And some sci-fi stuff - a robot cook, which is fun but ultimately doesn't add anything to the story.
And then CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK captures a student, and kills her for not being able to answer his riddle. So we have a murder on screen, which should be a huge event - except it's not, because nothing leads up to it, we don't know why it happened, it's not a character we've met before, we don't know who CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK is, and the game ends right after it happens.
What we have is a game made up of several scenes, some of which work somewhat in isolation from each other, but that don't really work as a story - the scenes don't really lead into each other, and there's no sort of overarching plot, no change in tone, no sort of happiness from resolving a conflict. I don't want to say "get a writer" - I don't think it would be helpful to have someone else writing this. Rather, I'll say "work with a writer" - someone who can help you to plot out the story you're capable of telling. (Alternatively, maybe read the book
Story, by Robert McKee, which covers a lot of the craft of storytelling, albeit from a hollywood perspective.)
I'd also say that the writing could use some polishing - the main character is supposed to be a world-class genius, but he doesn't seem to think or talk like one.
There are a couple of technical flaws - there are hard pauses, in one case to force me to listen to the incredibly standard end of class gong sound effect. I know what I'm hearing, I don't need to be forced to listen to the same thing. The game forces text_cps, which is also annoying.
I think I would like to see more done in this universe - I'm a science fiction fan, and a high school bishoujo game fan, and I think the ideas in this are worth further exploring. The characters have a lot of _look_ to them - they all seem to have personalities, but those don't show up in the game itself. I don't think that this needs a sequel - but I think an order of magnitude larger game that tells a complete story that supersedes this one would be an interesting project.
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Another Old-Fashioned Bishoujo Gamer
Supporting creators since 2004; Code > Drama
(When was the last time you backed up your game?)
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt
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