Loren does a great job of mixing turn based combat with a typical visual novel. In fact I would say that out of all of the visual novels I have played where they tried to add in some form of game play Loren did it far better than any other. It was actually well thought out and fun. It’s simple to get used to but has lots of options when you look at the RPG mechanics as well. You have lots of different attacks you can learn for the various characters that will suit a lot of different play styles. The visual novel mechanics were solid as well. Instead of reading lots of different dialogue responses and picking the one you want you pick one of three themes between joking; forceful and friendly. Once you pick one then it will go into the full response. It reminded a bit of the Mass Effect games where you were given an idea on what your response would be without spelling out each option beforehand. I do wish that dialogue options branched the story more, as it is I only spotted a few choices you run into. Those were who you romanced, who you were friendly towards; and a couple options later in game. Overall though for all the conversations you partake in there isn’t much to alter story wise. That being said the story was very good as were the characters. There were a good amount of settings and races and the pacing was good. The visuals were well done with a good style and use of colour. There was a mention of voice acting on various sites but I never noticed any in my play through. One thing I will say is that near the end of the game there were events that could dictate the death of certain characters and while I won’t spoil anything I will say that I really don’t understand how it was handled. It seemed almost random and not really mentioned after the fact. I also noticed not every side quest got added to the quest log.
I played Loren on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. You can manually save whenever you want and there were forty eight save slots. You can’t change the difficulty once you start the game which is a shame seeing as the only thing that would effect is the combat and you don’t start getting into that until maybe twenty minutes into it and won’t see harder combat until well after that. Not being able mid game could waste valuable time of the player as they adjust to which one suits them and start over each time.
Game Engine: Ren’Py 6.99.10.1227
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: 1.3.4
GPU Usage: 0-23 %
VRAM Usage: 588-758 MB
CPU Usage: 4-16 %
RAM Usage: 2.9-4.4 GB
I have played several games from Winter Wolves and I would call Loren their magnum opus. It hits all the notes of a great visual novel while incorporating a great turn based combat system as well as great RPG progression skills for each character. While not perfect it is as close as it can get and nothing that was a negative came anywhere close to harming my enjoyment of it. I finished the game in seven hours and forty eight minutes. The current price tag of $27.99 CAD for the deluxe version is well worth it.
My Score: 9.5/10
My System:
Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.3 | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.0.10-zen1-zen