KnS Impression

KnS is a VN that offer a murder mystery story with absolutely amazing atmosphere. The story itself is pretty good, however the flow of the story isn’t that neat. There’s many inconsistency in the story and the cases often felt like abandoning one case for the other case. The exection of the climax and the ending also feels forced and lacking.
There’s no heroine route in this VN. Once you clear one route, you’ll started to feel like it’s linear since instead of truly branching into another story,  it stay on the same storyline with only a few scene and the ending that different. The route only act as an information of a character or event, so although it’s not enforced playing order, you must play all the route in order to understand the main cases, or the story itself.

The interactive gameplay itself is only act as a branching points instead of actual gameplay, in fact most of the game branches are decided in the gameplay section. So you couldn’t really explore anything with the gameplay without fear of getting the bad end.  I would personally think it would be better without the gameplay tbh.

Now about the writing, the writing in KnS is quite good actually, some scene is even nicely presented, especially when presented from 3rd PoV. But 3rd PoV is also the PoV used for the murderer, so that mean reading the process of chopping human limb or torturing people with good detail, and honestly the writing was at its peak when it come to chopping human limb and torture scene.  The writing also match with the settings and atmosphere;  among other aspect, writing is arguably the main contributor that make the atmosphere of KnS so amazing. Despite of it, there’s a lot of inconsistency in the writing throughout the game.

KnS has fascinating and amazing characters, however many of them has lack of development because of their role as a supporting chars despite their potential as an important characters in the story. So every characters in KnS always has their own interesting side and backstory, even for the most unimportant chara that die early or is a victim from the beginning of the story, but don’t get too hooked with the character in KnS, or you’ll regret it later.
The visual art is great. Because it’s Sugina Miki works in 2008, so don’t expect an amazing art that Sugina Miki have now. The characters design is still amazing however.  The arts are another main contributor that make the KnS atmosphere so amazing

The Music is great, especially for the BGM in the main menu and some other BGM that play especially in the climax or during some scene. The OP and ED is also great.  And just like other aspect, Music became one of the main contributor to the atmosphere.

So overall, KnS was good, but it doesn’t offer a solid and amazing murder mystery experiences like I expected. Despite of it, I still able to enjoy KnS.
And so, it’s time for KnS2. I expect a lot of great things and improvement from KnS1 in KnS2.