Play time: around 1 hour
Price: $1 USD
Where to get: itch.io
Age rating: 18+ (one skippable sex scene)
Supercircuit is a one-person-team who has been making queer, science-fiction visual novels since 2014.
Chronomuxed was a submission for the Yaoi Game Jam 2019, an annual game jam where gave devs are given 2 months to create a BL game from scratch. It’s one of the very few BL space operas out there that tells you the story of Jaro, a researcher in a space station who wants to develop a method of travel that involves time-traveling. He meets Yxil, a space elf Thealexian who is strangely keen and interested in Jaro’s researches. It’s also one of the very few BLVNs available in English that feature a battle system.
One of the main sources of entertainment in this game, at least for me, was watching the love interest Yxil time travel and find increasingly ridiculous ways to get close to Jaro and save him from the disasters he’s bringing to the poor researcher. Jaro being horny and finding Yxil cute helps the making the “getting close to Jaro” a load easier.
When you download the game, you are greeted with a curious file named ‘instructions.txt’ that gives you some strange instructions and a passcode you suppose you will have put in-game at some point. While playing the game, I kept wondering when I was supposed to use it while being entertained by the few twists and turns the game offers as well as it’s few battle sections. The battle system, while barebone, is functional and allows the space pirates you’re facing to shine for a little while.
If I were to suggest a few improvements, it would be making the inventory a little easier to read and the battle conversations not timed–they are easily missable and cannot be rollbacked like the rest of the dialogue. That said, I’m very much aware that when you’re only one person to make a game within 2 months, some places end-up more polished than others, and these are minor nitpicks.
All in all, Chronomuxed is a game that tries to experiment a few things–and mostly succeeds– while offering you a nice amount of content (it was made in 2 months!), a story with fun and cute dialogues and an ending I actually found satisfactory. If you like sci-fi, have 1 dollar to spare and don’t mind playing a game jam title, I would gladly recommend Chronomuxed to you.
If you want to know more about the creator you can follow them on twitter.
