After a year of development, the team KingAsphy (a collab between with Kinghime and Asphy) finally launched the Kickstarter campaign and demo for their first BL game project: Night/Shade: You’re the Drug.
The game takes place in 2040 in the city of Sobena, a place rife with crime and obscure figures you don’t want to mess with. You play as Sasha, a 27 years old drug dealer who gets caught with his not-boyfriend Mishka in a conflict between two crime syndicates. It makes heavy use of Russian terms and the city’s currency appears to be the Russian ruble (₽).
Night/Shade is set to be at least 200,000 words long (~15-20 hours of play) and feature 2 love interests with possible side couples. The demo is partially voiced and might receive full voice acting if they reach an astonishing $80,000 during the KS campaign.
Night/Shade is one of the 4 games I am anticipating the most along with SLOW DAMAGE, Valentyne Stories Necromancy and Love Shore. That’s why I was disappointed by its short, 10-minutes-demo; 1 minute of which is the trailer featured on Kickstarter and shows more characters and relationship dynamics than the remaining 9 minutes of narration does while ending up in a rather strange cliffhanger.
The game build, which runs on Unity engine and Naninovel, launches itself on fullscreen mode with no option to change it to windowed as well as using the engine’s default option menu despite the rest of the UI being lovingly designed, which I found a bit strange.
The bit of prose the demo offers is actually pleasing to read and tries to be immersive, though it could use a bit of proofreading by a native English speaker in some parts because some sentences sound a bit heavy.
I feel a strong influence from Nitro+Chiral’s Dramatical Murder. From its retro 80’s soundtracks a few of its artworks or the few instances of mysterious text that appears on black screen in-between scenes. It’s also not the first time I see someone breaking into MC’s home but then perhaps it has more to do with the genre itself.
Most of all, the fact that you don’t see half of the main cast of characters shown in the Kickstarter and especially doesn’t show any conversation between any of them makes me rather unimpressed with the demo, which is a complete and utter shame because the characters, theme and settings are interesting and the demo does not reflect any of that at all.
A quick look at the Kickstarter page will give you a better idea of whether this game is your jam than the demo.
What do you mean, it’s not Cyberpunk?
- Does it take place in the future? Check.
- Does it have neons aesthetics? Check.
- Does it heavily use the Magenta/Cyan/Yellow scheme? Check.
- Is it set in a dystopian society run by corrupt politicians and rife with crime syndicates? Check.
- Do the main character get their life screwed over directly or indirectly by the corrupt politicians and/or crime syndicates? Check or there would be no bad end.
- Does one of the characters look like the titular character of the series Battle Angel Alita, complete with the acrobatics and the fact he’s a killing machine? Check.
- Is sex a major component or at least one character is very sexy? CheckCheckCheck.
Really, the only thing that’s missing (for now) is the “high-tech” component, for the only high-tech item we’ve seen so far is their strangely thin smartphones.
I’ll take a guess and say the reason KingAsphy labeled Night/Shade as “Neon” but not “Cyberpunk” is the fear of criticisms from people who hail Altered Carbon and Cyberpunk 2077 as being prime examples of the genre and not seeing the irony of the former being written by a man who thinks “terf” is a slur or latter being made by a billionaire.
As far as I’m concerned, the Night/Shade may as well be a “cyberpunk BL game with no robots”.
