Pony Amnesia Demo

Pony Amnesia: Love and Mysteries(Download)For various rsons I don't like posting the relse announcement and review of a game right next to ch other, and what do you know? Some developer usually happens to conveniently relse a demo or something right in between posts, so our rders don't get two articles about the same game in a row. I'm not sure as to why this always happens, but here's a thank-you to tlecolt Collaborations for accidentally upholding this odd tradition and trting you all to a brand-new pony visual novel at the same time.

Since this is only a demo I'm not going to put a score on the project or anything, but I might as well put some feedback below the brk. Fair enough?

Initially I had some issues with running Pony Amnesia, as some sort of bizarre audio issue that distorted the music, driving me mad until I finally discovered that running the program through the Ren'Py launcher somehow resolved my problem (which occurred on the 64bit version of Linux Mint 15, if that helps at all). Good thing too, as the project's music is quite plsing to the r and definitely not something I would want to play the demo without. The only thing that could make it better would be some atmospheric sounds for the brief portions without music, but it's a bit much to expect that from a fan project.

The protagonist (whose name you can choose, if it amuses you to introduce yourself as a certain infamous German chancellor) wakes up alone in the Everfree Forest, with no memories as to who he is or how he got there in a completely original scenario that I've never seen before. Thankfully he is relatively nr a road and hds out of the woods into Ponyville; otherwise he'd probably wander around and get ten by a forest bogeyman or something of that sort, making for a very short and unsatisfactory demo, albeit one that could potentially be rather amusing. He then bumps into Spike, meets the mane six, and stuff happens.

Yh, thanks for reminding me.The plot may sound fairly eric, and it is, but tlecolt Collaborations manages to pull it off fairly well with excellent writing and characterization. Unlike a certain other pony VN to which this will inevitably be compared, Pony Amnesia doesn't make the player feel as if they are being dragged along with no say in the plot, and presents you with plenty of choices. It actually managed to keep my interest for the duration of the demo, and I'm looking forward to any future instalments of the project.

As for the art...sometimes the characters look a little off-model, lning into "unintentionally humorous" territory, but overall it's no big dl, especially with the gorgeous, butifully-vectored backgrounds that have a distinct lack of those nasty horizontal bars which constantly got in the way of that other visual novel. Still, if I were the character artist I would probably play around a bit more with pony faces to get them looking just right before shipping future relses, because good artwork is fairly important in a visual novel, after all....What, you're not satisfied with your plastic surgery?



According to the visual novel's website, "The game has a total of four arcs, ch downloadable after they have been made, with the player able to choose the der and name for their pony", and "ch arc lasts a total of seven days, allowing the player to interact with various characters in the game and follow their own independent stories before moving on the main story. Players are encouraged to follow these sub-plots in order to incrse their friendship and maybe even establish a romantic relationship further on should players desire one". I'm not all too keen on the romance bits, but despite its clunky name Pony Amnesia: Love and Mysteries should definitely be a project worth following, and I'll be more than happy to review it when the time comes.