Oh, visual novels, why must you be released with such regularity, forcing me to try to sort out my feelings for you? As you may have guessed, and already know if you’ve been a regular reader, while I’m game for playing new releases for just about any genre or play style, visual novels are something I struggle with. Maybe it’s my ADHD, my English degree program that made me feel like I read a lifetime’s worth of prose in a few years, or just my desire to jump into something more exciting, but my struggle to read walls of text with little to interact with is real. 

Thankfully, to Synesthesia’s credit, it at least manages to set itself apart a bit from its brethren in the subgenre space. The first thing it gets right, is simply opening with a premise ripe with potential. While perhaps teenagers tend to be visual novel staples, ones with enhanced abilities at a school that’s supposed to be for their benefit, but may have something more sinister in mind, at least piqued my interest. Another is that the number of characters is high enough to help keep the dialogue and story beats more unpredictable and engaging, but not so high that you don’t feel any connection to anyone at all. While both of these may feel like small things, in my experience they’re both helpful to overall engagement.

Moving beyond the basics of the story, which I have no interest in spoiling, there are other elements that stood out. Considering that my most common complaint for visual novels is a lack of player agency, I am happy to say there are at least some choices to be made through the course of the story, and they do seem to matter. Better yet, the game goes the extra mile to help prove your decisions matter by having a view where you can see a flowchart of the story, with branches representing the different decision points that you can then explore. It’s a nice feature, though I’d argue it also points out the somewhat limited number of decisions you have when compared to some more engaging competitors. I even appreciated how your synesthesia is represented visually when you’re able to make some choices, just underlining an element from the story for you to experience as well. While I don’t think it will sell anyone new on the genre, I do think for fans it’s a reasonably-good option.