Videoverse

Genre: Visual Novel / Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Videoverse is a Visual Novel and Simulation-style game released on PC in 2023 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, players take the role of Emmett, a 15 year-old German boy in 2003 who’s been enjoying his increasingly outdated videogame system, the fictional Kinmoku Shark, which has received a Samurai-themed RPG allusion to the Final Fantasy series named Feudal Fantasy.

While this RPG’s cutscenes play throughout the game’s story as Emmett progresses through the game, it’s not really the focus of the story. Instead, the focus here is the friendships and sense of community that Emmett finds in the Kinmoku’s own online community, the titular Videoverse, which contains themed message boards and an instant messenger service with a built-in camera feature. Your interactions with the game will have you “heart”ing posts by other players, replying to their message board posts (with multiple-choice options), reporting trolls, and navigating private chat conversations with other users (again, multiple choice).

Through these conversations, you’ll find multiple plot arcs that you’ll be influencing. A friend of yours is looking to collect fan art based on the game, while another friend is seeking help spying on his girlfriend who’s a fellow gamer. One gamer is constantly posting dark and depressed artworks that might hide deeper problems, while another fellow gamer is pining for a crush in the community who may or may not return those affections.

In addition, everyone on Videoverse is growing increasingly depressed and anxious at the impending end of this online community as the Kinmoku Shark’s successor, the Kinmoku Dolphin, which is set to release its own online community, at which point Videoverse will be shut down. In the early days of the internet when not everyone can afford their own computer, this means the loss of community, friends, and a place of belonging.

Throughout all of this, the main story thread that this game follows has Emmett befriending a fellow Feudal Fantasy fan and skilled artist in the community named Vivi, who quickly grows to become a dear friend, though Vivi’s unknown situation leads to unexpected shifts in their conversation that both make for a lot of drama and also build a mystery of just what is going on. Without spoiling anything, I can say that Vivi is a wonderful and complex character and a true highlight of the game, with the mystery surrounding them being a truly compelling driving force in the game.

Unlike many Visual Novels where the story takes you from one conversation to the next automatically, here the game loosely simulates an old-fashioned online community, complete with user pages, art postings, and conversation threads between other users. You’ll get multiple chat invites at a time and take them in the order of your choosing, and not only do your choices affect the story, but they also influence your options in the future.

For example, if you’re active in reporting trolls and cleaning up the message board, and being an active participant in the community, you’ll be able to choose conversation tree choices that reflect this care for your community. Build up your personal relationships with various characters and you’ll have insight into those characters to unlock conversation tree options involving them. And if you repeatedly answer in ways that express compassion or bravado, and you’ll unlock later conversation tree responses that require those traits.

As stories go, the stakes are fairly low – whether or not friendships and romances will survive, whether or not the community will thrive or degrade in its last days, and what sort of person Emmett grows up to become.

I’ll say that Emmett isn’t always the brightest or most thoughtful in his wording – one of my complaints here is that his answers often don’t seem to give players much choice, and sometimes an answer you select will lead to him saying things you didn’t intend. It’s also frequently not clear how an answer will affect the conversation, in a way that can make it frustrating when you select a seemingly-innocuous answer and it results in Emmett sticking his foot in his mouth and getting others’ upset as a result. I suppose you could brush this off as being pretty accurate to the experience of being a teenager, but it’s frustrating all the same.

I’ve gone all this time without talking about the presentation, but this is one of the more distinct elements of Videoverse, making use of a 1-bit pixel art visuals (only two colors), with players able to select different color schemes for those two colors. Despite this limitation, the artwork here is lovely, with some really wonderful cartoony character designs for the Game Boy Camera-esque video chats, along with more standard cartoony 2D artwork for characters outside of the game. This is joined by some nice chiptune music that fits the tone of the game quite well, even managing to be appropriately dramatic when conversations get more heated.

In the end, Videoverse is a surprisingly moving story that’s lovingly nostalgic for the early days of the internet’s message boards and private messaging, one with some great characters and a unique aesthetic. And while I would have liked more agency when it comes to the ways you’re guiding conversations, I definitely feel like players who think they’ll enjoy a game about the nature of digital friendships will find themselves quite pleased with this one.

tl;dr – Videoverse is a Visual Novel and Simulation-style game that has players taking the role of a teenage boy speaking with friends using message boards and chat apps on an early internet-capable retro console. This game pairs some great retro nostalgia with some wonderful characters and an excellent character-driven mystery, and while I was a tad frustrated at the way this game handles player choice, this is still a wonderful low-stakes game that’s well worth playing.

Grade: B+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2025 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Simulation, Best Graphic Adventure / Visual Novel, Best Story, Best New Character (Vivi)

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