The Crown of Leaves

I have a soft spot for games that feel like they were drawn by hand at a kitchen table at midnight, and The Crown of Leaves lands squarely in that territory. Lingrimm and the small crew behind it built the world of Shang-La from scratch, populated it with goat-people, spirits, and cipher-obsessed dandies, and wrapped the whole thing in pastel backgrounds so detailed you end up clicking every corner just to linger. For a first game from a non-professional team, the ambition on display is quietly staggering. The setup is a slow burn that earns it: Roui, a half-educated jeweler and lapsed scholar of magical constellations, slinks back to his hometown of Latori after a public failure in the city. He despises the local mysticism. Latori doesn't care. When he takes a commission from the Black Baron to craft a bracelet from special wood, a mischievous spirit called the Mad Rook meddles with his work and drags him into exactly the supernatural mess he wanted to avoid. The tension between Roui's rationalism and Shang-La's lived-in magical folklore is where the writing finds its best notes. It is not a conventional VN: the game layers in point-and-click exploration, item collection and gifting, hidden clue hunting, and cipher-decoding puzzles, so there is always something to do beyond reading text boxes. Choices carry real weight, and the hero-or-villain branching genuinely changes how characters respond to Roui across both available chapters. The sound design is the part I keep thinking about. Composer Blacksmith built an OST that shifts from warmly ambient to genuinely unsettling, and the ambient layers underneath scenes, distant crowd noise, rustling wind, silence that lands like a held breath, do more world-building than a dozen exposition dumps ever could. That attention to soundscape is rare in games at this price tier and it shows where the team's real love lives. The honest caveats matter here, though. The base game contains Chapter 1 only; Chapter 2 exists as a separate paid DLC, and Chapter 3 is still unreleased years after launch. Players who finished Chapter 1 expecting a complete story have found that cliff-hanger landing genuinely frustrating, and some report Chapter 2 leans heavier on dialogue and lighter on interactive puzzles compared to the first chapter. The English translation carries occasional awkwardness rooted in its Russian origins, a few invented words that read as mistranslations rather than charm. Performance on some machines has also been reported as choppier than the visual style would suggest it should be. None of these are dealbreakers if you go in informed, but they are real friction points worth weighing. If you want a complete narrative in one sitting, wait until the series is finished or at least buy both chapters together. If you are the kind of player who is happy to spend a couple of hours inside a world that clearly has a team of artists pouring themselves into every background tile, every ambient audio cue, every branching line of sarcastic Roui dialogue, then the entry chapter alone rewards that attention. There is something genuinely alive in Shang-La, and it is the kind of handmade alive that deserves to be found.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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