A Sketchbook About Her Sun

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

A Sketchbook About Her Sun is an odd game that’s probably closest in genre to a Visual Novel, but it’s a great deal more abstract than Visual Novels tend to be. This game follows the story of a young woman working through her feelings for someone through her charcoal art sketches.

The presentation here is good, with this game featuring a few different kinds of hand-drawn art. On the one hand, you have the art of the woman in various still poses, often with animated wind moving her hair and foliage in the scene. Occasionally you’ll see her sketches pop on-screen, with some nice but unspectacular charcoal art. There’s also what appears to be some stop-motion animated manipulation of said charcoal art, which is visually-striking in a way you don’t often see in videogames.

While the game’s title makes the art the centerpiece here, in a way this game is more of an interactive showcase for the game’s music, with all of this game’s songs coming from the album Planet X from the indie rock band Red Ribbon. The music is nice, but I don’t know that it really stood out to me, and it may be in part because I don’t think the game itself really did a good job of highlighting the music.

However, the real issue here is the gameplay and story… or the sort of lack of both of those things. As you progress through each stage (or perhaps, track?), you’ll be given multiple choices between two words or phrases, alongside a timer. Players can choose one, or the other, or let the timer lapse. At the end of each stage, you’ll get a sort of abstract poem using the choices you selected. However, it’s not really clear exactly what these choices mean as you’re making them, and the end result is written in a way that you don’t really feel like you had a significant influence on what was being written, it seems like you were often only selecting between what was likely two similar ideas expressed in different ways. And because of the abstract nature of the story, it’s hard to feel invested in it even as a passive reader.

I should also note that A Sketchbook About Her Sun is a short game, easily completed under an hour. And while this isn’t an outright terrible game, and it’s a vaguely pleasant experience, it’s also a largely disposable experience, and one I have little desire to return to. I suppose there are worse ways to spend $5… but surely there are also better ones…

tl;dr – A Sketchbook About Her Sun is a Visual Novel where players follow an abstract story about a woman processing her feelings about someone else through charcoal drawings. Players choose between one of two phrases repeatedly throughout the game to determine what the story will ultimately become, but it doesn’t really feel like you’re having much of an impact, and there’s neither a sense that you’re making a profound difference, nor is there anything particularly profound in this game’s story. It’s not an unpleasant experience, but it’s a pretty forgettable one.

Grade: C-

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