CAFE 0 ~The Drowned Mermaid~

In this Visual novel, the heroine is Marin Umino. She is a young Japanese teenager who escapes from a little drowning in the swimming pool of her school and finds herself totally amnesiac, after having drank a glass of water in a curious Café held by the strange sui. The mystery is not maintained for a long time, especially since it is revealed openly in the presentation of the game: Marin learns through sui that she has become a ghost and that he has 7 days to make the right choices in order to be appeal about her life in order to know a serene death or on the contrary fuel his anger and send his soul into the darkness with a thirst for vengeance. She will then have to investigate with Ami (her best friend), Tooru (her ex) and Shou (the doctor of the school) to discover the secrets of his past and the real circumstances of his death. We are thus entitled to a succession of still images not very beautiful or very detailed and not very varied on which can appear and disappear our three interlocutors. The Japanese voices are accompanied by French subtitles. Every day you choose who you want to talk to and you have a few choices of dialogues and actions. It is then to unlock the 6 possible endings (a totally bad, two alternative endings concerning both Tooru and Shou and the true) by multiplying the parts until finding the right combinations of corresponding actions. Fortunately, we can pass the sequences already lived. I found the first part terribly annoying, especially because of dialogues not always inspired that drag in length and the very typical personality of the Japanese teen that I found very annoying. However, the following parties find a bit of interest while some parts of the plot are unveiled and you can benefit from the previously obtained information and use the objects collected before. Despite an identical main frame, the narrative can evolve very differently in an astonishing way depending on the choices made. The title reveals then a police investigation aspect eventually not so unpleasant. I think I am not at all the kind of player to which this game is intended, which explains that I personally had a little trouble to hang (before I take the game to get all the successes to know all the versions of the story) but probably that e the real addicted to Visual novels will find their account, especially if they are amateurs of investigations, if only the price seems a little exaggerated. A title that takes its time to unveil its qualities but ultimately proves to be relatively sympathetic once it has reached the final revelation.