I’m not crazy about visual novels. I don’t say that to take some sort of weird, morally superior position—it’s a fantastic genre, and I’ve enjoyed games like Butterfly Soup, the Ace Attorney games, Slay the Princess, and more. They just tend to miss with me more often than not, and I’m saying this to lead up to the fact that I’ve taken a chance on a visual novel today. I played the demo of Truth Scrapper, and I want it on record that despite my hangups, I’m really, really happy that I did.
I’m interested in Truth Scrapper because I fell deeply in love with the last work by insertdisc5, In Stars and Time. In Stars and Time is a beautiful turn-based RPG about a time loop that goes fully off the rails as the protagonist struggles to break free. My favorite thing about In Stars and Time is the writing, and the deeply lovable yet messy party of funny, kind, queer, and earnest characters. Truth Scrapper being a visual novel, then, gives me a lot of optimism that its core component is going to be to my liking.
Like In Stars and Time before it, Truth Scrapper‘s free demo is a modified version of the game itself. It’s intended to give you a taste of the vibes of the full game, but is not exactly the same as what you’ll encounter when you actually begin for real, so you don’t feel like you have to repeat a bunch of stuff you’ve seen before when the game fully releases. I like this approach a lot, especially for a story game based around choice-making where I want to feel committed to my own decisions. The demo is short but sweet: you play as Sosotte, a “truth scrapper” who loses all her memories at the end of each day. Sosotte is able to regain some of her memories by touching her scrapbook whenever she wakes up, and is able to recall anything she’s recorded therein. Your choices largely revolve around deciding what to remember and what to forget each day, whether those are feelings, sights, sounds, smells, or pure information.
Sosotte is visiting a sinkhole known as The Dwell, and is assisted by two individuals: the buff softie Amour, and the more serious, princely Betz. Together they’re investigating a string of attacks on members of Sosotte’s guild, though at the outset of the demo it looks like Sosotte has already been attacked herself. I think there’s an easy trap that Truth Scrapper could fall into here in immediately dropping the player into heavy exposition about its seemingly intricate fantasy world, especially given Sosotte’s amnesia. But like In Stars and Time, Truth Scrapper doesn’t do any of that. It gives Sosotte what she needs to know, and then lets the player learn about the world through experience. I love when games nail this. Shockingly few do.
It’s clear from the outset that my choices of what to remember will impact my relationships with both Amour and the beautiful, brave Betz (no I have not already picked a favorite why do you ask?). I like both of them, though thus far I’m a little less sold on Sosotte herself, who adopts a false cutesy uwu attitude in her initial interactions with the pair until she’s called out on it, after which she’s still just a little too tumblr for me when she speaks. Her inner voice works for me though, so I want to believe she’s just putting on a weird series of fronts for reasons I’ll learn later.
Truth Scrapper is also very pretty to look at. It’s distinct from In Stars and Time but also does a lot of the same things that I think In Stars and Time did well. The game is mostly in black and white, with a story told in the sort of aged-looking photos one might find in a scrapbook. But color is used thoughtfully to indicate important characters or items, and it’s suggested that it may play a larger role in the story. I like the character designs, and the breezy, joyful ways the art plays with gender expression in every single character. Which, speaking of, In Stars and Time was real queer, in ways that were very meaningful to me personally. This is looking to be real queer too, and even if it doesn’t hit my soul in the precise way the last game did, I’m still stoked for all the cuties.
While I don’t think Truth Scrapper has quite gripped me as immediately and as tightly as In Stars and Time did, the reason I keep bringing up its predecessor is because that game earned a lot of trust from me on behalf of insertdisc5’s ability to tell a really good story, especially one that unfolds in a (relatively) contained space and time, and spends a lot of time in a main character’s head. Truth Scrapper is mechanically and tonally a very different game, but it’s following up on so many of the same things In Stars and Time did well that I can’t help but want to see it through.
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