Retrograding

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.