VALIS II

Are you familiar with the author Philip K Dick, and his Valis trilogy? How about the series of Japanese “magic girl” Valis video games? (Bonus points if you have heard of the PC-88, but that’s for overachievers only.) Learning that these two Valis projects exist (now you know!) suffices to get you going – the piece takes care of the rest, and has a fun mechanism for doing so. I consider it wonderful that this strange project even exists, and love the execution!

I covered this as one of the projects from the Videotome creative community I want every one to check out -- for Part 2 of my Videotome article series for ChoiceBeat Zine Issue 16 now published here: https://choicebeat.wordpress.com/2026/03/02/choicebeat-16/

It's a "kinetic novel," where you don't make any choices. (You can click "auto" to make the game autoplay, revealing the text without human interaction.)

That's fine, but the art feels like it's stuff pulled off of Google image search, and blurred so it wouldn't be obviously out of place in this game.

In a kinetic novel, the art needs to support the text, and I feel like the art is just there because the author felt like "there ought to be art here."