Loved it! Some of it wasn't to my taste, but overall the story was wonderful, and I like how a lot of it was handled, especially after ~the inciting incident~ after the new characters were introduced.
The only minor gripe I had are that I thought some of the sections could have used ADV to good effect, as it was sometimes distracting to sit with the art trying to see detail behind the screen (on PC this isn't an issue, middle click hides the screen).
Overall I'd recommend it, if you can handle the things listed in the content warnings
Hello, I played this game a long time ago, when it first released, I do not even know how I found it seeing as I was not into VN's or anything remotely close, but by sheer chance I gave this a try because I thought it was an action game or something, it was really influential for me and changed my worldview quite a bit, so thank you for making this, you made me pursue the passion of creating stuff I love, and now I want to inspire people with my games like how you emotionally moved me with your game, I am indebted to you, I really adore this game for it shaped a part of my childhood! thank you a million times! 😊
Tbh, I'm not much for reading visual novels, but something drew me to try this one out, and I really loved it, a lot! The descriptions were so primal and visceral they completely immersed me and drew me into the story. And when it comes to horror I've been quite jaded, but some of the moments I felt in my soul. Super great.
Also, not sure where the best place to ask this, but is there a way to get more specific song credits? There was one song I really liked and I'd like to hear more of, but there's a lot of songs to go through on the credits listed. Thanks in advance for any help!
Turning on the audio captions enables you to see the (often translated from Japanese) song titles. If you can grab that song title from the caption, we can point you in the direction of the original artist!
Please note that there is one artist that no longer distributes their music for free use. Thankfully, their tracks don't make up a lot of the soundtrack, so there's a good chance the song you liked isn't one of theirs, especially if it was a song you enjoyed in Adiaphoron.
Additionally, all tracks are converted from .MIDI using the soundfont mentioned in the credits, and will only sound exactly like the in-game version if you use .MIDI playback software with this soundfont.
Thank you for the reply! I managed to find the song now. :) I looked through a bunch of other songs from the same artist but managed to miss this one... 😓 At least I got it now!
I just finished the game after putting on my backlist for gosh knows how long. It was great! I actually especially liked the Adiaphoron content, even if it was a little more optimistic than I was expecting; it helped give closure to the cast and the experiences depicted there personally resonated with me more. All in all I'm really glad to have experienced this game!
I actually downloaded this VN a few years ago (maybe back in 2018 or 2019... Time flies aaa), but never made much progress for no particular reason. I probably got distracted and then forgot about it...
Then, I was discussing dark yuri VNs in my own Discord server a couple of days ago, and lamenting that there aren't many dark yuri VNs out there; most of them tend towards the cute and fluffy.
Then, I remembered Soundless, and that it was billed as a dark yuri VN. I never actually read enough of it last time to get to the yuri, but I thought I'd pick it up and try to read through the whole thing this time.
I wound up reading it over the course of 2 days, in 2 sittings, so I got pretty engrossed haha ;;
Ah, I enjoyed this a lot! I'm not sure why past me didn't get that far in it. I think the writing is very effective. It feels very to-the-point, and there isn't too much description, but that makes it easy to chew through. The writing feels a bit minimalistic, but that's not a bad thing at all: I think the plain and matter-of-fact writing style makes the horrible nightmarish things hit even harder than if you lavished a lot of descriptive text on it. Mercy's life is awful, but she's been conditioned to think that's the way it is, so she recounts it in an almost detached way because she thinks it's 'normal'. The writing style works really well with Mery's character; it makes perfect sense.
The presentation of this VN is also great! I really enjoy your art, even if the sprites are a bit old. I think the big eyed early 2000s anime aesthetic is charming, and the fact the proportions of the sprites are a little off actually adds to the creepy atmosphere. The character designs themselves are very striking; especially Auma's. Also, filtered photo BGs, my beloved...
The use of sound effects and music is great too. There isn't that much music here, so a lot of the VN is ambient noise and SFX, but it works really well in establishing this creepy/isolated atmosphere. Some of the gory SFX during the more violent scenes are also pretty effective, and they help make scenes more visceral even though the writing itself isn't too detailed.
I'll not say too much about the actual story b/c spoilers (and I already talked too much lol), but it's very unsettling and depressing. The small village setting succeeds in feeling claustrophobic, and the exploration of Mercy and Auma's relationship is heartbreaking. The ending sequence is very depressing. It might be one of the most uncomfortable experiences I've had reading a VN (and I have read Subahibi lol, and I can see the inspo... Are the uniforms here inspired by Subahibi's?), but it doesn't feel like misery for the sake of misery. It feels like there's a real point to this story, and it's ultimately a hopeful message. We can still change, even if we're afraid of changing, and perhaps Mercy can heal and move on after all.
I'll be rooting for her...!
Thank you very much for creating this VN. It's very atmospheric and thought-provoking, and I understand why I see it getting recommended so often on r/visualnovels; it really deserves the acclaim.
Also, several people in my Discord server had heard of Soundless and were pretty complimentary about it (one person even said it was their favourite VN of all time), so I thought I'd pass that along in case you wanted to hear that even more people are in love with your story!
Hi there! I am creating a collection of fully blind accessible games, and your game is listed under the "blind support tag". The word "blind" means different things to different people, and within that wide spectrum their are various levels of expertise with visual UI's. but as a fully blind gamer, I am wondering what features this game provides for those who can not see the screen at all. Do you have "screen reader" or "text to speech" support? Is your game fully playable with a keyboard or controller, rather than having to point the mouse at buttons on the interface? If the answer to those questions is no, it would still be great to know what options are provided for those with less severe visual impairments, so that I might make them aware of your game's usability for them. Thank you for any information you can provide, it's very much appreciated! :)
Soundless comes with both a self-voicing feature and a text-to-clipboard feature, both of which can be accessed by hotkeys that the player is informed about with a voiced line when they first open the game. Self-voicing uses the operating system's text-to-speech settings to read the text out loud, while text-to-clipboard is provided for those who would rather feed the text into a screen reader of their choice.
Players are capable of navigating the interface with both the keyboard and a gamepad. Additionally, we provide the option to activate image descriptions. As for those with less severe visual impairments, we provide Atkinson Hyperlegible as an alternative font. The font is also rather large.
The only issue we have is that Soundless is currently not capable of having text-to-speech and auto-read mode on at the same time, but this will be corrected in the next patch.
That's great! It seems like you guys are really on the ball when it comes to accessibility. Most Renpy games with accessibility don't include the text to clipboard option for instance , and that can be very useful if you want a fully customized voice.
You covered pretty much everything already, but now I'm just wondering if you have text for visual indicators, such as those used to show status on controls.
Soundless is a simple and choiceless visual novel, so for the most part visual indicators are limited to button colors changing when they're selected. These buttons are set up with alternate text that tells you if the button has been selected or not.
The sole visual indicator that lacks alternative text is the click-to-continue indicator. Fully blind players have to rely on an obvious lack of text being read aloud to figure out that it's okay to advance.
The upcoming ability to have auto-forward mode and text-to-speech mode on at the same time will remove the indicator because of the auto-advancement. However, we would like to ask you if it would be even more helpful for there to be alternative text for the click-to-continue indicator regardless, especially since some people prefer to have full control over their text advancement speed. We can bring it up on the Ren'Py GitHub page and workshop a way to implement it with other developers.
I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to this. I think the indicator would only be needed if you didnt' have a tutorial and/or help guide/menu showing the keyboard commands and mentioning that you need to hit space to continue or what ever it is. Being told every time isn't really necessary for most people as long as they are told up front and can look it up if they come back to the game and have forgotten.
One more thing to look out for that I missed before is visual puzzles. If you have a puzzle that can only be solved visually, that can be a big problem. But it seems like you guys are really on top of things already! :) Thank you for your solid work on this! You are a good example to others.
Easily one of the best visual novels I've read (and I am a big fan of the medium!), this is a fantastically written and visceral dive into isolation, cycles of abuse and mental illness. It is especially written with a lot of respect and care, especially regarding the mental health issues, sympathetic and less so, faced by all of the characters. The dread is at times palpable, the characterisation and dynamics superb, and the after-materials really expand upon the story whilst also allowing the main narrative to stand as is. I've been hovering around getting into denpa VNs for a while, and I'd definitely recommend this as an entry point into the subgenre!
i played this game five years late, but..... man. this affected me more than i thought it would. i've never read a visual novel that has affected me as much as this one. i wish i could forget everything and read it all over again whenever i want to. this is the type of story you only read once due to its weight, however those are always the stories that stick with you the most. the writing is beautiful, harrowing, engaging and thought provoking. absolutely amazing work.
i played this game several months ago and i still think about it on a regular basis. it surpassed my expectations and i still speak highly of it to others. truly fantastic work
Fantastic game, I read it a while ago however I've been coming back to it over time to reread again. Am currently writing my own kinetic novel bc of this :)
i think i'm late to review this VN (it's 2021 lmao) but dude i need sequel or something else I NEED IT. Surely one of my favourite VNs ever after Fate i recommend it really. The characterization of the characters is fantastic, the backgrounds, the music, the sounds, all wonderful. at a certain point in the plot I started not understanding anything anymore and it reminded me a lot of the madoka complex and I was pleased that you mentioned that masterpiece. thanks again for this fantastic experience.
I think this is one of the greatest visual novels I've ever read, although it's so genuinely harrowing that I'm never going to read it again. I shall, however, spend the rest of my days wondering what the ending meant. I have a solid theory about it (which I can't write here for fear of being removed as a spoiler), but I shall never know for sure...
I've played this game quite a while ago, but I just have to say that this is probably in my top ten VNs/KNs of all time. This is an incredibly layered and complex and thought-provoking story that just kills me more with each reread. <3 If you're deciding whether to download this game, do it. You will not regret the experience.
Absolutely loved this, but one thing I would nitpick: the transcripts note several pauses of under a second. This is too short to even register as a pause in conversation. (Source: am a transcriptionist.) I assume you're just intending to convey a pause of some arbitrarily short length, so something like 3-5 seconds would be more realistic. (Using the decimal points, pause for 3.26 seconds or whatever, is good to demonstrate that the transcription is presumably made by a computer program that can get that accurate, rather than a human being.)
This was really great! The part where she had the dream that everything had gotten better after she woke up and got out the private hiding area trolled me, lol.
Block 5 of the after stuff is bugged for me. It says out of memory? Not sure if it's just my laptop or not. Regardless, this story was... Intoxicating in several ways. I am a pretty big fan of sad things, but boy did this take the cake. Nicely done!
Hello, SpacePirateVex! Please e-mail us at support@milkplusvisual.com with a screenshot of the error and information about your system and hardware. We want to make sure that everyone can experience Soundless the way it was intended to be.
(And thank you for your kind comments, we're glad you liked it!)
That was really fantastic stuff. I got way more invested than I'd anticipated/been prepared for beforehand, hah. It was really nicely written and the characters were great. I felt so sorry for Mercy and really hoped she'd get her happy end all the way through. The artwork and character sprites were ace too. All in all, neat stuff all round, hope you continue making projects like this!
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Loved it! Some of it wasn't to my taste, but overall the story was wonderful, and I like how a lot of it was handled, especially after ~the inciting incident~ after the new characters were introduced.
The only minor gripe I had are that I thought some of the sections could have used ADV to good effect, as it was sometimes distracting to sit with the art trying to see detail behind the screen (on PC this isn't an issue, middle click hides the screen).
Overall I'd recommend it, if you can handle the things listed in the content warnings
Hello, I played this game a long time ago, when it first released, I do not even know how I found it seeing as I was not into VN's or anything remotely close, but by sheer chance I gave this a try because I thought it was an action game or something, it was really influential for me and changed my worldview quite a bit, so thank you for making this, you made me pursue the passion of creating stuff I love, and now I want to inspire people with my games like how you emotionally moved me with your game,
I am indebted to you, I really adore this game for it shaped a part of my childhood!
thank you a million times! 😊
Tbh, I'm not much for reading visual novels, but something drew me to try this one out, and I really loved it, a lot! The descriptions were so primal and visceral they completely immersed me and drew me into the story. And when it comes to horror I've been quite jaded, but some of the moments I felt in my soul. Super great.
Also, not sure where the best place to ask this, but is there a way to get more specific song credits? There was one song I really liked and I'd like to hear more of, but there's a lot of songs to go through on the credits listed. Thanks in advance for any help!
Turning on the audio captions enables you to see the (often translated from Japanese) song titles. If you can grab that song title from the caption, we can point you in the direction of the original artist!
Please note that there is one artist that no longer distributes their music for free use. Thankfully, their tracks don't make up a lot of the soundtrack, so there's a good chance the song you liked isn't one of theirs, especially if it was a song you enjoyed in Adiaphoron.
Additionally, all tracks are converted from .MIDI using the soundfont mentioned in the credits, and will only sound exactly like the in-game version if you use .MIDI playback software with this soundfont.
Thank you for the reply! I managed to find the song now. :) I looked through a bunch of other songs from the same artist but managed to miss this one... 😓 At least I got it now!
absolutely loved playing this--so very glad i finally did. thank you so much!!
I just finished the game after putting on my backlist for gosh knows how long. It was great! I actually especially liked the Adiaphoron content, even if it was a little more optimistic than I was expecting; it helped give closure to the cast and the experiences depicted there personally resonated with me more. All in all I'm really glad to have experienced this game!
will there has a chance for Android Version?This game looks really promising and I wanna play it deadly.Hope one day I can finally play it😊️😊️
You're in luck—we're starting development on an Android port in October!
THX,I'mLooking forward to it😊️
the new art is absolutely stunning!! and i can't believe the game is still free. amazing work, milk+ team!
I HAVE NO WORDS!! (not in a bad way)
Well, this was very upsetting! (in a good way!!!)
I actually downloaded this VN a few years ago (maybe back in 2018 or 2019... Time flies aaa), but never made much progress for no particular reason. I probably got distracted and then forgot about it...
Then, I was discussing dark yuri VNs in my own Discord server a couple of days ago, and lamenting that there aren't many dark yuri VNs out there; most of them tend towards the cute and fluffy.
Then, I remembered Soundless, and that it was billed as a dark yuri VN. I never actually read enough of it last time to get to the yuri, but I thought I'd pick it up and try to read through the whole thing this time.
I wound up reading it over the course of 2 days, in 2 sittings, so I got pretty engrossed haha ;;
Ah, I enjoyed this a lot! I'm not sure why past me didn't get that far in it. I think the writing is very effective. It feels very to-the-point, and there isn't too much description, but that makes it easy to chew through. The writing feels a bit minimalistic, but that's not a bad thing at all: I think the plain and matter-of-fact writing style makes the horrible nightmarish things hit even harder than if you lavished a lot of descriptive text on it. Mercy's life is awful, but she's been conditioned to think that's the way it is, so she recounts it in an almost detached way because she thinks it's 'normal'. The writing style works really well with Mery's character; it makes perfect sense.
The presentation of this VN is also great! I really enjoy your art, even if the sprites are a bit old. I think the big eyed early 2000s anime aesthetic is charming, and the fact the proportions of the sprites are a little off actually adds to the creepy atmosphere. The character designs themselves are very striking; especially Auma's. Also, filtered photo BGs, my beloved...
The use of sound effects and music is great too. There isn't that much music here, so a lot of the VN is ambient noise and SFX, but it works really well in establishing this creepy/isolated atmosphere. Some of the gory SFX during the more violent scenes are also pretty effective, and they help make scenes more visceral even though the writing itself isn't too detailed.
I'll not say too much about the actual story b/c spoilers (and I already talked too much lol), but it's very unsettling and depressing. The small village setting succeeds in feeling claustrophobic, and the exploration of Mercy and Auma's relationship is heartbreaking. The ending sequence is very depressing. It might be one of the most uncomfortable experiences I've had reading a VN (and I have read Subahibi lol, and I can see the inspo... Are the uniforms here inspired by Subahibi's?), but it doesn't feel like misery for the sake of misery. It feels like there's a real point to this story, and it's ultimately a hopeful message. We can still change, even if we're afraid of changing, and perhaps Mercy can heal and move on after all.
I'll be rooting for her...!
Thank you very much for creating this VN. It's very atmospheric and thought-provoking, and I understand why I see it getting recommended so often on r/visualnovels; it really deserves the acclaim.
Also, several people in my Discord server had heard of Soundless and were pretty complimentary about it (one person even said it was their favourite VN of all time), so I thought I'd pass that along in case you wanted to hear that even more people are in love with your story!
Hi there!
I am creating a collection of fully blind accessible games, and your game is listed under the "blind support tag". The word "blind" means different things to different people, and within that wide spectrum their are various levels of expertise with visual UI's. but as a fully blind gamer, I am wondering what features this game provides for those who can not see the screen at all. Do you have "screen reader" or "text to speech" support? Is your game fully playable with a keyboard or controller, rather than having to point the mouse at buttons on the interface? If the answer to those questions is no, it would still be great to know what options are provided for those with less severe visual impairments, so that I might make them aware of your game's usability for them. Thank you for any information you can provide, it's very much appreciated! :)
Hello!
Soundless comes with both a self-voicing feature and a text-to-clipboard feature, both of which can be accessed by hotkeys that the player is informed about with a voiced line when they first open the game. Self-voicing uses the operating system's text-to-speech settings to read the text out loud, while text-to-clipboard is provided for those who would rather feed the text into a screen reader of their choice.
Players are capable of navigating the interface with both the keyboard and a gamepad. Additionally, we provide the option to activate image descriptions. As for those with less severe visual impairments, we provide Atkinson Hyperlegible as an alternative font. The font is also rather large.
The only issue we have is that Soundless is currently not capable of having text-to-speech and auto-read mode on at the same time, but this will be corrected in the next patch.
We hope this helps!
That's great! It seems like you guys are really on the ball when it comes to accessibility. Most Renpy games with accessibility don't include the text to clipboard option for instance , and that can be very useful if you want a fully customized voice.
You covered pretty much everything already, but now I'm just wondering if you have text for visual indicators, such as those used to show status on controls.
Thanks for the response!
Soundless is a simple and choiceless visual novel, so for the most part visual indicators are limited to button colors changing when they're selected. These buttons are set up with alternate text that tells you if the button has been selected or not.
The sole visual indicator that lacks alternative text is the click-to-continue indicator. Fully blind players have to rely on an obvious lack of text being read aloud to figure out that it's okay to advance.
The upcoming ability to have auto-forward mode and text-to-speech mode on at the same time will remove the indicator because of the auto-advancement. However, we would like to ask you if it would be even more helpful for there to be alternative text for the click-to-continue indicator regardless, especially since some people prefer to have full control over their text advancement speed. We can bring it up on the Ren'Py GitHub page and workshop a way to implement it with other developers.
I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to this. I think the indicator would only be needed if you didnt' have a tutorial and/or help guide/menu showing the keyboard commands and mentioning that you need to hit space to continue or what ever it is. Being told every time isn't really necessary for most people as long as they are told up front and can look it up if they come back to the game and have forgotten.
One more thing to look out for that I missed before is visual puzzles. If you have a puzzle that can only be solved visually, that can be a big problem. But it seems like you guys are really on top of things already! :)
Thank you for your solid work on this! You are a good example to others.
Holy shit- that was a surprisingly good experience. Terrifying, but crazy good.
Easily one of the best visual novels I've read (and I am a big fan of the medium!), this is a fantastically written and visceral dive into isolation, cycles of abuse and mental illness. It is especially written with a lot of respect and care, especially regarding the mental health issues, sympathetic and less so, faced by all of the characters. The dread is at times palpable, the characterisation and dynamics superb, and the after-materials really expand upon the story whilst also allowing the main narrative to stand as is. I've been hovering around getting into denpa VNs for a while, and I'd definitely recommend this as an entry point into the subgenre!
Nice new update! So fun to see the characters again also surprise pairing hehehe
One of the best visual novels I've read (and I've read a lot), and easily THE best EOLVN. Incredibly underrated in the vn community.
i played this game five years late, but..... man. this affected me more than i thought it would. i've never read a visual novel that has affected me as much as this one. i wish i could forget everything and read it all over again whenever i want to. this is the type of story you only read once due to its weight, however those are always the stories that stick with you the most. the writing is beautiful, harrowing, engaging and thought provoking. absolutely amazing work.
i played this game several months ago and i still think about it on a regular basis. it surpassed my expectations and i still speak highly of it to others. truly fantastic work
I really loved this. Amazing work.
I love this game It's dark but interesting you need to make more games like these
Fantastic game, I read it a while ago however I've been coming back to it over time to reread again. Am currently writing my own kinetic novel bc of this :)
i think i'm late to review this VN (it's 2021 lmao) but dude i need sequel or something else I NEED IT. Surely one of my favourite VNs ever after Fate i recommend it really. The characterization of the characters is fantastic, the backgrounds, the music, the sounds, all wonderful. at a certain point in the plot I started not understanding anything anymore and it reminded me a lot of the madoka complex and I was pleased that you mentioned that masterpiece. thanks again for this fantastic experience.
I think this is one of the greatest visual novels I've ever read, although it's so genuinely harrowing that I'm never going to read it again. I shall, however, spend the rest of my days wondering what the ending meant. I have a solid theory about it (which I can't write here for fear of being removed as a spoiler), but I shall never know for sure...
A masterpiece.
Have you read the after-info? It's one of the options of the title screen, it explains everything
I've played this game quite a while ago, but I just have to say that this is probably in my top ten VNs/KNs of all time. This is an incredibly layered and complex and thought-provoking story that just kills me more with each reread. <3 If you're deciding whether to download this game, do it. You will not regret the experience.
Absolutely loved this, but one thing I would nitpick: the transcripts note several pauses of under a second. This is too short to even register as a pause in conversation. (Source: am a transcriptionist.) I assume you're just intending to convey a pause of some arbitrarily short length, so something like 3-5 seconds would be more realistic. (Using the decimal points, pause for 3.26 seconds or whatever, is good to demonstrate that the transcription is presumably made by a computer program that can get that accurate, rather than a human being.)
This was really great! The part where she had the dream that everything had gotten better after she woke up and got out the private hiding area trolled me, lol.
Block 5 of the after stuff is bugged for me. It says out of memory? Not sure if it's just my laptop or not. Regardless, this story was... Intoxicating in several ways. I am a pretty big fan of sad things, but boy did this take the cake. Nicely done!
Hello, SpacePirateVex! Please e-mail us at support@milkplusvisual.com with a screenshot of the error and information about your system and hardware. We want to make sure that everyone can experience Soundless the way it was intended to be.
(And thank you for your kind comments, we're glad you liked it!)
Ending was completely out of place to the point it felt like trolling.
I loved the VN it was fantastic. Cant wait to see what you make next.
That was really fantastic stuff. I got way more invested than I'd anticipated/been prepared for beforehand, hah. It was really nicely written and the characters were great. I felt so sorry for Mercy and really hoped she'd get her happy end all the way through. The artwork and character sprites were ace too. All in all, neat stuff all round, hope you continue making projects like this!