Retrograding

(Note: I was originally going to skip this game due to the “flashing images” warning, but others who had played it said they encountered no flashing images, so I gave it a shot. To the best of my knowledge, I explored 100% of this game’s content, and I also found no flashing images.)

Retrograding’s blurb states that its protagonist, the cyborg Ioanna, works in “waste management”—quotation marks and all—and I have to say I expected that to be a euphemism, but this is indeed a game in which you collect trash, and many of the key choices involve what pieces of trash to collect.

In fact, Ioanna is the best trash collector in this whole dystopian future (run by a single interplanetary Corporation, which is so monopolistic that it doesn’t even appear to have a name). She could be promoted, but prefers not to be because she prefers dealing with trash to dealing with people.

Unfortunately for her, doing your job with unusual skill and efficiency can get you saddled with responsibilities you don’t want even without the promotion. In the game’s first major route split, she is offered a choice of two unenviable waste management jobs, each of which includes an aspect of essentially baby-sitting a problem worker. The first is Raven, a death-row inmate who is scheduled to be executed at the end of the job, and the second is Zinnia, a nepo baby who keeps trying to rebel against the Corporation and being demoted (and brainwashed, it sounds like?) each time.

Due to this very early route split, Retrograding is functionally two games, one very good and the other distinctly underbaked. I spent about two hours seeing everything the game has to offer; a little over half an hour of that was Zinnia and the rest was Raven. His route has more variation, more endings, better pacing, more convincing relationship and character development, and more information about Ioanna’s backstory and the worldbuilding. Zinnia’s is elliptical and confusing, with a somewhat unconvincing romance and dialogue options that often change at most a word or two in the response. Also, one of Raven’s five endings is a solid happily-for-now, while Zinnia’s three are all different shades of downer.

Also, I have to say, the Raven route had a weird toxic horny energy (complimentary) that was completely and totally absent in the Zinnia route. (To be clear, there is nothing spicier than kissing in either route, but the Raven route ramps up the tension via things like Raven rummaging around in Ioanna’s internal robot parts and Ioanna making Raven suck on her gun, and one of the requirements for the best romantic ending is to be consistently kind of mean to him, which he seems to enjoy.) I understand that the two routes were written by different authors who have different styles and interests, but Zinnia's route just felt a little bloodless to me and I wanted it to be about 50% more unhinged to better suit the energy of the rest of the game. (I am also personally less interested in male/female romances than in any other gender configuration, so my bias here is that if the genders of the two romanceable characters were swapped, I would be obsessed with this game and would talk about nothing else for weeks regardless of its structural flaws.)

Regardless, I enjoyed Ioanna as a protagonist, and the setting in the Raven route is very atmospheric with some interestingly off-kilter concepts. The character art is loosely sketched, but appealing, and the music and backgrounds chosen mostly do a good job of setting the mood (it’s a little distracting that some of the photos of places that are supposed to be abandoned have people in them, but I understand that when looking for free-to-use photos you get what you get). I also liked that each character you meet and each bit of trash you pick up adds to a database labeled “Records”, which provides you little extra scenes to attempt to piece together with the larger story. (Some players may find this annoying or distracting, I think, especially in a game that already gives you a lot to take in and doesn’t explain much of it fully. It’s possible I was simply brainwashed into liking this mechanic through exposure to the When They Cry series’ similar “Tips” mechanic at an impressionable age. But whether or not it’s objectively a good idea, I enjoyed it.)

Even leaving my personal preferences aside, the clear disparity in attention given to the two main routes is noticeable and awkward, and makes Retrograding cap out at merely good when I think a fully fleshed out version could be great. More content for the Zinnia route could also help with the larger setting feeling ultimately kind of underexplained. But there were a lot of striking moments and interesting character beats here that I think I will find particularly memorable. For those who only checked out the Zinnia route and left with a somewhat lackluster impression of the game, I do think the Raven route is worth a try.

You play as an employee in a waste management job, in some sci-fi setting which involves spaceships and different planets. Unfortunately, it was pretty tough to get immersed in this one for reasons which have nothing to do with text.

You pick a partner to travel with you. There are two people you can choose from, with wildly different personalities and backstories, and the choice of each partner brings you down a totally different route in the game. The writing was fairly solid, although I didn't feel particularly attached to either character. If you want to see most of the content, you'll want to play at least twice, one with each character.

As far as VNs go, you get a good bit of choices, mainly around choosing what sort of garbage artifact you want to pick up and bring back (that's your job), as well as some dialogue options around your partner. According to the walkthrough, picking different garbage options may affect the outcome of the story, although this wasn't very well-advertised in the game, and I was largely picking space junk at random on a blind playthrough.

A more glaring issue was the art. This is a VN... so I guess it's fair to talk about this. The game uses photographic images for backgrounds, and a lot of them are easily recognizable as pictures from modern day earth. Some pictures even have people going about. The picture of the spaceship interior appears to be that of a modern aircraft cockpit (with the control stick and flight screens). It was hard to imagine myself visiting planets in a spaceship when the game was showing something which looked like the busy mall near my house. Additionally, the character art and character cards also looked really out of place against the photographic backgrounds, even if it was in itself pretty solid for a free VN.

I get that it's hard to get good art, and I also strongly appreciate the effort which went into collecting all these art assets to make a VN-entry. Still, I do think my immersion in the game really suffered heavily for it.

It can provide a good bit of entertainment if you're willing to give it a shot. There's lots of content here. Still, try to suspend your disbelief when you see all those people in the background.

Originally posted at intfiction.org on September 25, 2025

This is a visual novel that drops you straight into the life of the PC with little to help orient you. In short order you meet a virtual boss and a character that seems to be an AI that lives in the PC’s head, and learn that the PC is happy with her low-level waste management job and has no interest in climbing the ranks (which, it’s later revealed, does seem like it comes with more risks than rewards).

What is “waste management” in this sci-fi world? It seems to be collecting detritus from various planets, cataloging it, and then destroying it. But it was never clear to me why this is being done. Why is this corporation “managing waste” on a bunch of long-abandoned planets? In a way the finds are treated as archaeological objects, with the cataloguing component of the process, but the motivation behind documenting rather than just destroying is never elaborated. Also, when the gameplay shifts to you going on these search-and-collect missions, you’re only allowed to take one object from each, which seems entirely counter to the idea of waste management, and is likewise never explained.

The heart of the story, though, is the PC’s relationships—with Maria, the AI she (from what I gathered) designed and had implanted in her own brain, and with the two mission companions you get to choose between. I replayed to experience both paths, one with the company golden child turned defector turned reeducated drone (or so the PC initially believes) Zinnia, and the other with the volatile former racer, now condemned criminal Raven. In my playthroughs, at least, the PC develops an attachment to whichever one you choose, which happens largely without player input; the main player choices are of which piece of junk you salvage on each trip, and from peeking at the walkthrough, these are what determine which ending you’ll get.

On the Raven path, my choices led to (Spoiler - click to show)me forming an attachment to him, ripping the AI mechanism out of my head, and preparing for the two of us to flee together… only for me to ultimately betray him to the company, turning him in and ending the story with my AI back in place. I’m not sure what it was about my choices of objects that led to this dramatic series of events. The Zinnia path, in contrast, was much more subdued—the PC’s opinion of her slowly changed, and (Spoiler - click to show)the two ended by professing love for each other. This path also had more tension with Maria; her presence seemed like more of a burden to the PC in this route, with regular interludes emphasizing that.

While the sprites are original art, the backgrounds are photographs of real places (mostly buildings), some with real people in them, which made them a hard sell for portraying abandoned sci-fi planets. Maybe this was on purpose, the game using its sci-fi trappings to comment on real life, but if that is the case, the parallels it’s drawing definitely went over my head.

So yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but my main feeling coming away was one of confusion. The company the PC works for seems to be powerful and evil, but I was never sure what they were actually doing aside from sending employees on these waste management missions. What do higher-ranking employees do? What does it mean to be a “defector” in this world?

I’m not sure if this is the kind of VN where getting all the endings will unlock a “true” ending that sheds new light on everything that’s gone before; I only played each path once, but the walkthrough reveals they both have a variety of possible endings. Having spent an hour and a half with the game already, though, I wasn’t particularly motivated to replay several more times in order to collect all the endings. I may dip back in at least once, though, to at least see just how different the outcomes of each path can be.