Frequent Flyer: A Long Distance Love Story

I went into this one expecting a lightweight casual title and came out having read a genuinely heartfelt queer romance. Frequent Flyer is a visual novel, full stop. There are no minigames, no stat systems, no combat loops. You read, you make dialogue choices, and the story of Emi and Isobel unfolds accordingly. If that sounds thin to you, fair enough. If that sounds like exactly what you need after a long week, keep reading. The setup is clean and relatable. Emi has just come out of a relationship and books a solo trip to Scotland to reset. She meets Isobel, sparks fly fast, and then the complications arrive. The long-distance angle gives the story a specific emotional texture that a lot of romance games skip over entirely. It is not just "will they or won't they" - it is the harder question of whether something real can survive geography, time zones, and secrets. That is a more interesting dramatic engine than most games in this genre bother to set up. NewWestGames, a solo studio run by developer Katie Browner and focused on queer visual novels, built this on a small budget and it shows in places. The production is modest. Artwork is competent rather than striking, and the writing occasionally stumbles into familiar visual novel rhythms where every emotional beat gets spelled out a beat too early. The branching is present but not especially deep. You will hit the achievements list - GameFAQs notes four of them - fairly quickly, which gives you a rough sense of the content volume. This is a short-to-medium read, not an epic. What it does well, though, is sincerity. The queer representation feels authentic rather than performative, which matters a lot in a genre that often reduces it to a skin over a straight romance template. The Scotland setting adds personality. Isobel's secrets, when they surface, land with genuine weight. For its specific audience, these things count for a lot more than a bigger art budget would. The bottom line on fit: if you play visual novels regularly and you want a story focused on a sapphic long-distance relationship with some real emotional stakes, this is worth your time. If you need mechanical depth, choices that meaningfully reshape the plot, or a longer runtime, you will probably feel the edges of the experience too quickly. Go in calibrated and it delivers what it promises.

Alex · Scout Team

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