I'm not sure I've ever played a game as poorly paced as STEINS;GATE. Maybe I just don't like visual novels -- The only one I've ever played before is Doki Doki Literature Club. So that could definitely be the case.
But man this game is a drag.
All of the hearsay and reviews have informed me that the narrative gets great around the 4th chapter, but at this point I'm not sure I can make it that long. The sheer amount of exposition being thrown at me seems to dominate somewhere around 75-80% of all the text boxes, and that's further slowed down by a "tip" feature (which is basically just a codex) that inexplicably does not allow you to simply click the popup to relocate directly to the tips page, but makes you cycle through the entire damn menu to see the new entry that popped up. So whenever I want to find out what something is, I have to leave the already-boring-me-to-tears game to navigate through a clunky, poorly designed menu. Ugh.
The attempts at humor in this game that I assume many of its fans find quirky and charming is completely lost on me. The characters haven't really been given any depth yet, leaving not much to sustain my curiosity so far. The music is incredibly generic and fails to set any sort of interesting tone. And there has been literally no gameplay aside from a few dialogue choices via e-mail so far. I'd be able to deal with all of this if I were a couple of hours into the game, but I'm nearing 6 hours at this point and I'm not foreseeing any drastic changes in the near future. There are bits and pieces of the narrative that I find intriguing, but they're too few and far between to keep me wading through heaps of the main character's dry, expository inner thoughts, or his fat creepy friend's weird crushes, or his almost literally retarded "little sister" friend's ADD addled musings. This game is about as exciting as a meal of cardboard so far.
Overall though, the main reason I'm confident I can recommend against this game is because it's a downright awful port, which I haven't seen mentioned in many reviews. The resolution tops out at 1080p, the menus are obviously not optimized for a mouse and keyboard and the mouse and keyboard controls are wonky to begin with (plus there's a delay in switching between the two), it doesn't alt tab well, etc. All the hallmarks of something that was poorly ported from a console to PC are here. I've had a couple of crashes as well which have forced me back a ways thanks to the game's archaic save function.
I'm going to try and keep playing but figured I'd post my thoughts so far in case I decide to give up on this game. I'll update this review if I play more and change my thoughts. If they're all like this then perhaps visual novels just aren't for me.
Edit: Just went back after alt+tabbing to write this review and the game froze, causing me to lose 30 mins or so of gameplay. I'm done, just going to watch the anime instead.
⭐
Playtime: 6 hours
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