It Comes Around - A Kinetic Novel

My usual strategy before sitting down with any visual novel is to check whether the format gives me anything to push back against, any decision point or system to stress-test. It Comes Around stripped that option away before I even launched it. This is a kinetic novel, which means zero choices, zero branching, zero interactivity beyond pressing a button to advance text. That is a legitimate format with a strong lineage, but it places the entire weight of the experience on the quality of the writing and the art, and that is exactly where things get complicated. The premise is genuinely interesting. Students and teachers of the Sugimori Occult Club attempt a ritual to solve a classmate's mysterious death, and the ritual goes wrong, trapping everyone in something closer to a cat-and-mouse horror scenario. That setup has the bones of a tense, atmospheric short story. The problem is that the execution does not honor the tension. Community players have pointed out that a central gimmick, characters communicating via text message during the ritual because they cannot speak aloud, is never reflected in the actual writing style. Characters send grammatically immaculate, multi-sentence messages in the middle of what should be terrifying, life-threatening moments. That disconnect drains the atmosphere faster than any jump scare could restore it. The art and presentation carry their own problems. Character sprites have been described by players as samey in pose and expression, and the game reportedly lacks a CG gallery, which is a basic quality-of-life feature even low-budget visual novels tend to include. The font choice drew repeated criticism for being difficult to read, which is a fairly serious flaw in a product where reading is the only activity on offer. Some reviewers also noted inconsistencies between the text descriptions and the CG scenes, small things that compound into a feeling of a project that needed more polish time. On the technical side, the Mac build is no longer compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina or above, so that platform option is effectively off the table for most modern Apple users. To be fair, the minority of players who responded positively focused on the horror atmosphere doing some genuine work in spots, and the core story idea being solid enough to leave lingering questions after the credits. For a debut horror visual novel from a Singapore-based indie studio, the ambition is clear. The Occult Club setting, the ritual-gone-wrong structure, the cat-and-mouse framing, these are competent genre choices. The team acknowledged they wanted feedback to improve future work, and that spirit of iteration is worth acknowledging. But right now, in its current state, the rough edges outweigh the atmosphere for most readers, and the runtime of under an hour does not give the story enough space to recover from its early missteps. Diego, Scout Team

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