A pretty good introductory chapter to the rest of the series. The art's pretty, the voice acting is great and the atmosphere was extremely well done. Aslong as you make sure you use a guide and go in with the expectation that this is part of a bigger trilogy and not at all a standalone experience you should be able to have a good time, but if it is possible I do recommend you play the the remastered version ("The shell part 1: Inferno") instead with the patch since i think thats less finicky and all round a better, streamlined experience with abit more content aswell (full voice acting for Reiji the protag, better visuals, a few extra scenes, better translation, etc). This is still not at all bad though so if you prefer the older aesthetic then go for it :)

I'm moderately new to VNs - I've only played AA, Nonary Games, and Raging Loop so my reference for story branch quality is pretty low, but I do enjoy good puzzles and overall this game mostly beats them out in how much I enjoyed them.

I liked the game's story and dialogue quite a bit, and the character art was definitely up there. I did get stuck early on because I discounted a decision but I was able to figure it out with a guide after 5-10 hours of trying (lots of AFK time and messing with stupid things) and didn't get spoiled on anything else. The puzzles seem quite fair (some people complain about a specific investigation but I don't find the potential ones I'm thinking of to be difficult to deal with at all), and I only had that initial blockage in Char/Evidence Selection and one later on that were tripping me up, both of which could just be due to me going through stuff on autopilot.

The only part that makes the game hard to recommend are the H-scenes for me. I don't care for them, but if you're not a total prude you can just skip through them all. There's one that's forced, but I think all the others are avoidable and give a dialogue option to deny it (par one on the True Ending, as you'd expect). If you're not comfortable with some gore then the game could still be for you, but you'd have to put up with a few scenes (image and text) that are moderately gruesome. I do think they made me much more emotionally invested in seeing the perp caught because of them, though, so they serve their purpose very well (alongside story).
Hold CTRL to skip everything, press the SKIP button on screen to only skip seen dialogue (this would've made my early playthrough way easier if I'd realized that second part).

There is a modernized version that likely censors some content but I have no clue what. Just play this one in fullscreen if you're on a 2k or higher monitor because you can't resize in windowed mode and it ends up tiny :(
Otherwise, I had one series of crashes early on and never again (I did already have my system locale set to JP so I avoided any problems that might arise otherwise).


Basically, if you're new to VNs and tolerant of some gore and raunch this is a great pick-up. If you're not new, then I'm sure my opinion is irrelevant. Lots of people say you should use a guide after getting an ending, but I think the true ending is reasonably achievable if you just keep notes on where people are on certain days and a few particular pieces of evidence that show up in certain permutations. At the very least you could likely get most if not all of the normal ones before using a guide to see romance options and the true ending if you're stuck.

Early into the story I can say it has me very intrigued. It may be one of my favorite VNs a few hours in bc there are numerous mysteries I want to see through. Characters are mostly interesting and unique.