While most original English visual novels (OELVNs) either stick with Japanese genre tropes or completely go off on their own aesthetic direction, Keinart managed to strike a brilliant balance in his first VN. I personally find it hard to think about this game without comparing it to One Thousand Lies, so I’ll start from there. I hope that my comments might help you decide if Lotus Reverie is for you! I completed my first playthrough in “Mixed Mode” over the course of a day or two of intermittent reading/playing, then unlocked all the endings in “Novel Mode” and spent some time gathering my thoughts (and replaying some of the content from the beginning) before putting together this write-up. Keinart has kindly provided an advance copy to me and Madeleine for this review. Why is there an odd number of people? Who can she trust when time finally runs out? And what is she willing to do to survive? As the clock ticks and tension quietly builds, she only has so much time to find the answers she so desperately needs. Taken in by an alliance of six survivors, she soon settles into a calm life at the castle and befriends the people with whom she is fated to fight to the death. As the lives of tulpas and their human hosts are connected, they are forced to cooperate to survive until the very end, when the last surviving pair will be granted their greatest wish.Ĭinque wakes up in this bleak reality with no knowledge of the past - who she is, where she came from, what the Incident was, or whether she is human or tulpa.

Though tulpas cannot die through normal means, they have limited lifespans that can only be extended through absorbing another tulpa in a duel. Every surviving human in the world has a tulpa, a unique being birthed from its host’s subconscious. Inscribed in white letters on its dark face are the binding rules of a game. The end of the world came with the Incident, in the form of a giant black monolith extending up to the sky. Since I’m a writer and editor for MAL Rewrite (check out my synopses here ), I’ve taken it upon myself to write my own synopsis for Lotus Reverie: First Nexus. I’m surely not the only one excited for its release on January 14, 2021! Because of my immense adoration for his debut work, I’ve been checking up on Keinart’s new project Lotus Reverie. It was after reading One Thousand Lies in March 2017 that I became interested in visual novels (VNs) as a literary medium, especially kinetic novels. That last title there is perhaps the most important one. įrom Itch.io: The Wind at Dawn is a work of literary magical realism that adopts the quaint nostalgia and yearning of Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun, the painstaking attention to setting and style of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the heartfelt experimentation in form and medium of Keinart Lobre’s One Thousand Lies. I’m here as a guest writer on NookGaming to tell you about Keinart Lobre’s newest visual novel Lotus Reverie: First Nexus. I’m the director and writer of The Wind at Dawn, set to be released in July 2021.

Lotus reverie first nexus