Aoi Sora no Camus

I've basically accepted the fact that Camus just isn't for me. By the end, my apathy levels were through the roof, which is kind of ironic, since the tagline for this VN is " I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."

My first major point of contention is the third person narrative. I view VNs as a highly personal medium and third person can remove some of that intimacy with the reader. I like getting into the same headspace as the protagonists and having that element basically be non-existent is a shame. Having the characters whisper to themselves to get their thoughts is pretty unnatural to me.

A good 90% of the scenes in Camus followed a singular structure: Go to new place -> discuss for a bit that the new place is pretty good -> monster comes -> they panic and escape to a new place -> rinse and repeat

When scenes are this repetitive, it becomes a chore to read because I know what to expect and the thing I expect is not good at all. While the VN is short, what it does with its time is a lot of time wasted and could have been allotted to something else more exciting to read through.

This repetition also removes any sort of tension this VN tries to create. When things are this cookie-cutter, the supposed "horror" falls flat on its face. So with all the horror removed, Camus does sort of feel like a walking/running simulator with a few philosophical sprinkled here and there. The "philosophy" present isn't even engaging or doesn't really do anything with the idea of nihilism that is alluded to in the title screen.

I really hate how the arrow choices are handled since they jump up in random places to break up the flow for no reason. These arrow choices also take the reader to some new pieces of information and since they are delivered in bit sizes pieces it can be hard to keep track of them as opposed to if they were all set up in a single flashback (I like my long flashbacks). The info presented in these arrow choices also tend to be unrelated to the scene it is presented in, so it creates a bit of a dissonance.

Lastly, the characters feel non-existent to me. The beginning of the VN presents the two characters and just tosses them into the fray and I have no reason to care about them from the get-go. The lack of tension in the writing and lack of any significant reason to care for the reason are the major factors to my total ambivalence towards this VN. Since most of the scenes are the same structure, this doesn't allow much wiggle room for the characters to develop and grow at all, so they end up becoming husks that I'm forced to watch walk around because the story demands it be that way.

I will say, the music is pretty damn good and some of the art is cool to look at, even if the character sprites are a bit too squishy, for lack of a better term, for my tastes.