Raging Loop

Raging Loop is a VN that’s both intelligent and makes use of the game mechanics itself to tell what starts as a tightly focused story. With each play through the scope keeps getting bigger until the end when they’ve dumped a whole franchise’s worth of world building on you. The main character pulls off a neat trick in that they keep surprising you with him in a first person narrative. Overall, still one of the best VN’s I’ve played, and I highly recommend it.

So I didn’t actually come into this knowing it was going to be a Zero Escape-esque ‘you will go through this entire flow chart and get information from certain endings to unlock new parts of the story’ and thought that it would be more like The Letter where the story splits massively depending on who lives or dies and initially I was a bit sad but then it turned out this is probably the best Zero Escape-esque VN I’ve gone through? Everything about it just works — there’s a more Western artstyle pretty distinct from most VNs and basically all the CGs are really striking and I consistently looked forward to seeing them. The main draw of ‘Werewolf but a visual novel’ is very well explored by the branching routes and provides a great hook into uncovering the deeper mysteries of the game’s story. All the major characters are great in their own different ways and even most of the less relevant characters have at least one good moment to remember them by. The looping/story locks mechanic is iterated to be pretty player-friendly (in terms of how it never stops the story in its tracks to tell you to go back and try again, rather just not allowing you to offshoot off a path until you have the information you need to do so) and is also responsible for creating what’s probably my favourite Game Over screen in any video game. Kiiinda wish I wrote up this review less than six months after completing the game because right now my memory on this is sadly pretty fuzzy but this is a really good VN, go get it.

I've gone back and forth on my thoughts about this one but I think Raging Loop is "okay" at best. It's nice to have a protagonist who is both an adult and also not brain dead as far as murder mystery anime games go, but the writing is a little rough especially with the ending, though there's more to it than that without trying to go into spoilers.

Raging Loop is pretty cool and it does hit when it hits, just depends on how you feel about good ideas with flawed execution and if thats the kind of thing you can handle after investing a lot of time into it.