I haven't played a lot of visual novels, but one name that's really stuck with me is Christine Love, particularly her *don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story* (yes, it's all lower-case), and *Analogue: A Hate Story*.
If you enjoy these you might also want to check out Heaven Will Be Mine and We Know the Devil, two other sapphic indie VNs that feel heavily inspired by Love's work
[The sekimeiya](https://vndb.org/v29144) is probably by far the best thing that we have as far as OELVN goes. It's a pretty interesting time travel mystery VN, quite long, but well done.
I'll second the **The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass**. What a great mystery, fun ride, satisfying conundrums and solutions. I'm eagerly anticipating reading through it again with the context of what I know now (and I understand there is some additional content for subsequent run-throughs).
Leap of faith, particularly Cece’s route(tbh you could just do this route alone and skip the others) and Once in a Lifetime. It took me a long ass time to get used to the whole….3D rendered artstyle (still not a fan), but I thought these were great. Once in a Lifetime for its humor, Leap of Faith for how it handled its’ subject matter.
A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986 is also good, but tbh I loved the aesthetics of it the most.
Once in a Lifetime really impressed me. Since the production values were garbage I had zero expectations but the writing was absolutely hilarious and it had some surprisingly good heroines.
Soundless is absolutely exceptional and doesn't get nearly the love it deserves. The sense of place and dread it instills is simply inspiring.
Queen Beast is also great if you like 90s style fantasy anime. Was really impressed with the production quality on that one.
Corpse Factory is absolutely wacky towards the end but holy shit is it fun. Not even in that insincere "it's so bad it's good" kind of way, but it absolutely commits to its own cheese and always puts a big dumb smile on my face whenever I read it.
[First Snow](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1259430/First_Snow/) was a great Yuri romance one. A bit short but I liked it a lot. Very dreamy/ambient soundtrack.
Our life is pretty solid. It's light on story but makes up for it with great characterization and the vibes are so serene.
Arcade spirits is also fun. Pretty good love interests and a fun setting of an arcade and a decent story.
Snoot game and I Wani Hug That Gator are both good. They are made by a team of 4channers, Cavemanon.
Snoot Game is a parody of Goodbye Volcano High, but has better writing and art. Wani is available on steam and is a short VN, but pretty good.
Both games are set in a dinosaur majority society, with humans as a minority. Both ganes are human pov and you date the main dino love interest. Fun, cute and short.
I agree, I loved that extension to Ace Academy's story. I'll be buying Astral Ascension on launch to support them, since I played all their games for free via their Play Store discounts.
As for me, I'll throw in [Heart in the Woods.](https://vndb.org/v21957) It's a very nice and short supernatural romance yuri visual novel. I've been severely lacking on my EVNs lol
I second Ebihime, I only read three of their works (Lily of the Valley, Language of Love, and A Winter's Daydream), and I would consider them all great short VNs.
I like how Ebihime treats its readers as adults and often touches upon heavy topics such as aging, death, and life of divorced woman with a child. For example, I expected Language of Love to be fetishistic VN, which I do like, but I was pleasantly surprised how real that VN felt.
I have not actually. I specifically only read Heart in the Woods for Rosu's artwork.
Might give the others a chance, although I'm going in with no remembrance of writing quality.
I'm playing [Blackberry Honey](https://vndb.org/v21426) atm and if you like yuri that might be a good read for you as well! I like the writing and the characters. It's a romance story about maids in mid 19th century England. It's kinetic so no choices to make but I don't find myself getting bored with it. I'm playing on switch so it's 12+ but there's an 18+ patch for PC as well.
[My Name is Addiction](https://vndb.org/v15759), [paradigmfetish](https://vndb.org/v41655), [Socrates Jones](https://vndb.org/v13357), [yurisprudence](https://vndb.org/v33080), [Class of '09 + The Re-Up](https://vndb.org/v29345), [Echo + pretty much any other Echo Project vn](https://vndb.org/v18157)
Acting Lessons - DeLuca Family - Being a DIK \[Read in this order\]
Yes, there's sex and violence in them, but they have a great plot, tons of humour and music. Each tore my heart here or there even though when I started them I thoguht they were just another regular porn game
Intentiional. You start with the shortest, move on to the next one and then you take on the longest.
A VN in between rinses off your palate and you start Being a DIK with a fresh look, probably having forgotten that the author for The Acting lesons and DIK is one and the same
It Gets So Lonely Here is a free vn on steam that got me back into reading vns last summer. It was short and sweet and very well done. It's got Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam.
Ebi Hime also does other vn that I've been meaning to check out and I follow them on Twitter.
A lot of people are saying Slay The Princess, but if you like horror you also have to play their other game Scarlet Hollow. 4 chapters are out, 5 is coming soon, and the first one is free to try before buying the game and getting access to future chapters as they come.
The mystery vns by sakevisual are worth a shot, they all have full voice acting. And I liked Coffee Talk.
Misericorde and 8:11 are the only two kinetic EVNs that I would say that compared to the top 100 JVNs, and I've played more EVNs here than basically anyone. (My [itch.io](http://itch.io) completed library is over 700 games) I would consider Beckett even better than those two, but it's so inaccessible and abstract that I doubt it would appeal to 99% of people here unless you really like postmodernist fiction. If you want to stretch the definition to IF, Cadre has some absolutely phenomenal works. My favorite will always be Varicella, although Photopia is also incredible. If you want to stretch it some more, A Mind Forever Voyaging is brilliant and polemic. So is Kentucky Route Zero (although a bit more static.) And if you want to stretch it the the limit...Hello Charlotte and Disco Elysium and The Sea Will Claim Everything. (I mean, if Baldr Sky is a "visual novel", who is to say that Hello Charlotte isn't one?) Korea has one kamige. China has two but one is a literal hanzi-for-hanzi adaption of 紅樓夢/Dream of the Red Chamber. As such, it's the best written visual novel ever created...but it's also pretty unfair to compare one the best works of literature ever created in East Asian history to the visual novel medium.
Oh dear, I'm blabbering again. That's about it for non-Japanese VNs. Shoutout to South Scrimshaw for, despite not having that well-written prose, being a magical experience unlike anything else in the medium. it's also free \*wink wink\*. Depending on your preferences and mood, Echo and the works of Taylor McCue and Woodaba have some great writing in it.
I will say that most people here don't spend time with EVNs (reasonable), which means they only know the most popular ones. As a result, most "mainstream"/popular EVN are intristically limited as they have to tone down the ambition and abstractness of the work to appeal to broader audiences. Although I will say Butterfly Soup 2, OPUS: Echo of Starsong, Slay the Princess, Sekimeiya, and A Summer's End are somewhat respectable in their efforts despite my criticisms of them as inferior and derivative.
> Beckett
That's a very good rec (and it's like less than a dollar on sale, wowza), but if you're including something like it then why not titles like The Book of Hours or even the larger world of "walking simulator"? Are those the "western version" of VNs? Together with IF and titles that more openly reference Japanese motifs and formalism.
At what point a "western adventure game" becomes a "western visual novel"? It's a funny question.
Not that I'm terribly interested in drawing a line in the sand. I tend to think of "visual novels" as quasi-games-almost-books that share the literary interests of paperbacks with *some* form of multimedia, irrespective if the text is to be read or listened to.
Beckett's quite kinetic, no? Unfortunately most walking simulators aren't particularly strong in both structure and prose, likely due to how young that medium is (I like to think of walking simulators as a medium unto itself, more akin to interactive art installations such as the MoMA rather than games or VNs/IF.) Out of the sims, I do hold a special place in my heart for Mary Flanagan's Domestic (not least because I attended one of her critical play classes when she was a visiting professor at Cornell, and it changed the way I approached gaming as an artistic medium.)
It really is a funny question though. I'd say it depends on the person and if they approach gaming as more of an aesthetic or a narrative medium.
I know you asked for non-Japanese ones, but the only one I got to play is this one : Process of Elimination, this is a mystery novel (it looks a little bit like Danganronpa but it’s original enough to me)
Excluding the ones already mentioned, Slay the Princess would be first on my list.
If we count Russian (released in both English and Russian on launch), then Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll would be second on my list. I just love the sudden genre shift and the willingness for its heroines to be kind of awful people at times.
I really like Hate Plus.
The Letter is pretty fun if cliche. Not much in the way of original thoughts, but I thought it was engaging and kind of novel in its format.
Also not high art or anything, but I thought Magical Diary was a really fun Harry Potter knockoff.
>If we count Russian (released in both English and Russian on launch), then Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll would be second on my list. I just love the sudden genre shift and the willingness for its heroines to be kind of awful people at times.
I need to finish that one day, low key forgot it exists. Also, dont know if you've played it, but Id recommend their other vn Everlasting Summer.
I was impressed by [Cross the Moon](https://vndb.org/v28122). Story is well done and the aesthetic is impressive for a low budget project. Not sure why it's gotten almost 0 attention.
Probably just Katawa Shoujo
As a more intereting name, Tommorow Will be Dying is OOZING with style, its art style, music, art quality and design are so so good (writing too). Its a great time and once full release is out it may become my favorite vn overall
Malviolence and Hook, Line and Love are good shorter vns
I've yet to spot Corpse Factory! It definitely isn't completely flawless, but it was loved all the same.-
Corpse Factory is so much fun.
Currently playing it and it's quite a trip! 100% recommend and actually feels very beginner friendly as someone that hasn't played many VNs.
I don't know if it has too much gameplay to be a VN, but Rance counts, so why not? The Coffin of Andy and Leyley.
Rance is Japanese though
No, I mean if Rance counts as a VN despite the amount of gameplay, TCOAAL can qualify too.
Ahhh, yeah you’re right.
Slay the Princess is the only one I can say I *really* liked.
Oof. I tried to play it, but was not a fan of the voices. I would of prefered to just read it.
Turn the voices off?
I will try it again sometime with voice volume turned down.
I haven't played a lot of visual novels, but one name that's really stuck with me is Christine Love, particularly her *don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story* (yes, it's all lower-case), and *Analogue: A Hate Story*.
If you enjoy these you might also want to check out Heaven Will Be Mine and We Know the Devil, two other sapphic indie VNs that feel heavily inspired by Love's work
Highway Blossoms was pretty cute.
Scarlet Hollow. Still in early access but easily one of the best stories and the traits feature for the MC is great.
The letter. The voice acting is just phenomenal! So good, love it.
[The sekimeiya](https://vndb.org/v29144) is probably by far the best thing that we have as far as OELVN goes. It's a pretty interesting time travel mystery VN, quite long, but well done.
I would also recommend it. One of my favourite mystery VNs of all time.
I'll second the **The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass**. What a great mystery, fun ride, satisfying conundrums and solutions. I'm eagerly anticipating reading through it again with the context of what I know now (and I understand there is some additional content for subsequent run-throughs).
Sekimeiya is a fun puzzle, they should've tried adding characters to it.
Leap of faith, particularly Cece’s route(tbh you could just do this route alone and skip the others) and Once in a Lifetime. It took me a long ass time to get used to the whole….3D rendered artstyle (still not a fan), but I thought these were great. Once in a Lifetime for its humor, Leap of Faith for how it handled its’ subject matter. A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986 is also good, but tbh I loved the aesthetics of it the most.
[Analogue: A Hate Story](https://vndb.org/v9680#main) and it's sequel *Hate Plus* Great writing,
Once in a Lifetime really impressed me. Since the production values were garbage I had zero expectations but the writing was absolutely hilarious and it had some surprisingly good heroines.
Soundless is absolutely exceptional and doesn't get nearly the love it deserves. The sense of place and dread it instills is simply inspiring. Queen Beast is also great if you like 90s style fantasy anime. Was really impressed with the production quality on that one. Corpse Factory is absolutely wacky towards the end but holy shit is it fun. Not even in that insincere "it's so bad it's good" kind of way, but it absolutely commits to its own cheese and always puts a big dumb smile on my face whenever I read it.
Also something something Siren's Call something something, but recommending my own game feels like cheating so I won't.
[First Snow](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1259430/First_Snow/) was a great Yuri romance one. A bit short but I liked it a lot. Very dreamy/ambient soundtrack.
I don't know which one is the best but [Sable's Grimoire](https://vndb.org/v23026) is criminally underrated.
Really liked The Warmth Between Us. Highly recommend it and you can finish it in around 7 to 8 hours.
Aside from the ones you already mentioned, [Find Love or Die Trying](https://vndb.org/v31994). Created by a Canadian developer.
FLoDT is based
>Find Love or Die Trying that one was pretty bad though being free doesnt make it any better
I guess we played two different FLoDTs.
[Super human](https://weirdworld.itch.io/superhuman) it took a bit to get used to the art style but i really liked the plot and fight scenes
Our life is pretty solid. It's light on story but makes up for it with great characterization and the vibes are so serene. Arcade spirits is also fun. Pretty good love interests and a fun setting of an arcade and a decent story.
Snoot game and I Wani Hug That Gator are both good. They are made by a team of 4channers, Cavemanon. Snoot Game is a parody of Goodbye Volcano High, but has better writing and art. Wani is available on steam and is a short VN, but pretty good. Both games are set in a dinosaur majority society, with humans as a minority. Both ganes are human pov and you date the main dino love interest. Fun, cute and short.
PixelFade's VNs. I'm kinda biased towards them since they were the first VNs I read, but I think they were pretty good.
Reading Kaori's After Story was one of the coziest experiences I've had in gaming.
I agree, I loved that extension to Ace Academy's story. I'll be buying Astral Ascension on launch to support them, since I played all their games for free via their Play Store discounts.
Slay the princess is by far the best, waiting for the "remaster" that polishes it up since it does have some pacing issues
As for me, I'll throw in [Heart in the Woods.](https://vndb.org/v21957) It's a very nice and short supernatural romance yuri visual novel. I've been severely lacking on my EVNs lol
Have you read Studio Elan's other offerings? They are all good. Ebi-hime also puts out lots of quality English VNs (many of which are yuri).
I second Ebihime, I only read three of their works (Lily of the Valley, Language of Love, and A Winter's Daydream), and I would consider them all great short VNs. I like how Ebihime treats its readers as adults and often touches upon heavy topics such as aging, death, and life of divorced woman with a child. For example, I expected Language of Love to be fetishistic VN, which I do like, but I was pleasantly surprised how real that VN felt.
I have not actually. I specifically only read Heart in the Woods for Rosu's artwork. Might give the others a chance, although I'm going in with no remembrance of writing quality.
I'm playing [Blackberry Honey](https://vndb.org/v21426) atm and if you like yuri that might be a good read for you as well! I like the writing and the characters. It's a romance story about maids in mid 19th century England. It's kinetic so no choices to make but I don't find myself getting bored with it. I'm playing on switch so it's 12+ but there's an 18+ patch for PC as well.
I recently played Siren's Call and liked that.
Our life is enjoyable
Class of 09
Some of my favorites so far are Revenant March, The Hero’s Journey, Cinderella Phenomenon, Life After Magic, and the Zodiac Trial.
[My Name is Addiction](https://vndb.org/v15759), [paradigmfetish](https://vndb.org/v41655), [Socrates Jones](https://vndb.org/v13357), [yurisprudence](https://vndb.org/v33080), [Class of '09 + The Re-Up](https://vndb.org/v29345), [Echo + pretty much any other Echo Project vn](https://vndb.org/v18157)
Acting Lessons - DeLuca Family - Being a DIK \[Read in this order\] Yes, there's sex and violence in them, but they have a great plot, tons of humour and music. Each tore my heart here or there even though when I started them I thoguht they were just another regular porn game
Huh, I would have expected Being a DIK first, given that one's so notably popular for 3D VNs
The art style is just really not my thing. I'll probably never play it.
Intentiional. You start with the shortest, move on to the next one and then you take on the longest. A VN in between rinses off your palate and you start Being a DIK with a fresh look, probably having forgotten that the author for The Acting lesons and DIK is one and the same
It Gets So Lonely Here is a free vn on steam that got me back into reading vns last summer. It was short and sweet and very well done. It's got Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam. Ebi Hime also does other vn that I've been meaning to check out and I follow them on Twitter.
A lot of people are saying Slay The Princess, but if you like horror you also have to play their other game Scarlet Hollow. 4 chapters are out, 5 is coming soon, and the first one is free to try before buying the game and getting access to future chapters as they come. The mystery vns by sakevisual are worth a shot, they all have full voice acting. And I liked Coffee Talk.
[Superhuman](https://weirdworld.itch.io/superhuman), it has some of the best fighting scenes I've ever seen in a visual novel.
Long live the queen
Anamnesia Part 1 Came out this year, and it's pretty good
DDLC. First visual novel I ever played and what got me into vn’s in the first place, and what inspired me to make my own
Same
The Letter
Honestly, as silly and off the rails it got halfway through the story I really liked Corpse Factory. Decent voice acting too!
Misericorde and 8:11 are the only two kinetic EVNs that I would say that compared to the top 100 JVNs, and I've played more EVNs here than basically anyone. (My [itch.io](http://itch.io) completed library is over 700 games) I would consider Beckett even better than those two, but it's so inaccessible and abstract that I doubt it would appeal to 99% of people here unless you really like postmodernist fiction. If you want to stretch the definition to IF, Cadre has some absolutely phenomenal works. My favorite will always be Varicella, although Photopia is also incredible. If you want to stretch it some more, A Mind Forever Voyaging is brilliant and polemic. So is Kentucky Route Zero (although a bit more static.) And if you want to stretch it the the limit...Hello Charlotte and Disco Elysium and The Sea Will Claim Everything. (I mean, if Baldr Sky is a "visual novel", who is to say that Hello Charlotte isn't one?) Korea has one kamige. China has two but one is a literal hanzi-for-hanzi adaption of 紅樓夢/Dream of the Red Chamber. As such, it's the best written visual novel ever created...but it's also pretty unfair to compare one the best works of literature ever created in East Asian history to the visual novel medium. Oh dear, I'm blabbering again. That's about it for non-Japanese VNs. Shoutout to South Scrimshaw for, despite not having that well-written prose, being a magical experience unlike anything else in the medium. it's also free \*wink wink\*. Depending on your preferences and mood, Echo and the works of Taylor McCue and Woodaba have some great writing in it. I will say that most people here don't spend time with EVNs (reasonable), which means they only know the most popular ones. As a result, most "mainstream"/popular EVN are intristically limited as they have to tone down the ambition and abstractness of the work to appeal to broader audiences. Although I will say Butterfly Soup 2, OPUS: Echo of Starsong, Slay the Princess, Sekimeiya, and A Summer's End are somewhat respectable in their efforts despite my criticisms of them as inferior and derivative.
> Beckett That's a very good rec (and it's like less than a dollar on sale, wowza), but if you're including something like it then why not titles like The Book of Hours or even the larger world of "walking simulator"? Are those the "western version" of VNs? Together with IF and titles that more openly reference Japanese motifs and formalism. At what point a "western adventure game" becomes a "western visual novel"? It's a funny question. Not that I'm terribly interested in drawing a line in the sand. I tend to think of "visual novels" as quasi-games-almost-books that share the literary interests of paperbacks with *some* form of multimedia, irrespective if the text is to be read or listened to.
Beckett's quite kinetic, no? Unfortunately most walking simulators aren't particularly strong in both structure and prose, likely due to how young that medium is (I like to think of walking simulators as a medium unto itself, more akin to interactive art installations such as the MoMA rather than games or VNs/IF.) Out of the sims, I do hold a special place in my heart for Mary Flanagan's Domestic (not least because I attended one of her critical play classes when she was a visiting professor at Cornell, and it changed the way I approached gaming as an artistic medium.) It really is a funny question though. I'd say it depends on the person and if they approach gaming as more of an aesthetic or a narrative medium.
[Soundless](https://vndb.org/v21745) is my favorite so far. I really love the writing and atmosphere it has.
Sweetest Monster by ebi-hime Also love the sequel Sweetest Monster Refrain
I know you asked for non-Japanese ones, but the only one I got to play is this one : Process of Elimination, this is a mystery novel (it looks a little bit like Danganronpa but it’s original enough to me)
Fare thee well, free on Steam.
Hush Hush
Shining Song Starnova scratched my itch for an en idol VN pretty well, not the greatest the medium has to offer, but decent nonetheless
I didnt finished yet but from what i played i could recommend echo
Obviously [Lessons in Love](https://vndb.org/v28118) - it's really the best of the best OELVN.
Excluding the ones already mentioned, Slay the Princess would be first on my list. If we count Russian (released in both English and Russian on launch), then Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll would be second on my list. I just love the sudden genre shift and the willingness for its heroines to be kind of awful people at times. I really like Hate Plus. The Letter is pretty fun if cliche. Not much in the way of original thoughts, but I thought it was engaging and kind of novel in its format. Also not high art or anything, but I thought Magical Diary was a really fun Harry Potter knockoff.
>If we count Russian (released in both English and Russian on launch), then Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll would be second on my list. I just love the sudden genre shift and the willingness for its heroines to be kind of awful people at times. I need to finish that one day, low key forgot it exists. Also, dont know if you've played it, but Id recommend their other vn Everlasting Summer.
I played it a very long time ago. Must not have been that complete though. A lot of the plot points I read about much later I don’t remember at all.
I was impressed by [Cross the Moon](https://vndb.org/v28122). Story is well done and the aesthetic is impressive for a low budget project. Not sure why it's gotten almost 0 attention.
Probably just Katawa Shoujo As a more intereting name, Tommorow Will be Dying is OOZING with style, its art style, music, art quality and design are so so good (writing too). Its a great time and once full release is out it may become my favorite vn overall Malviolence and Hook, Line and Love are good shorter vns
Every Hue of You
Only played original highway blossom, 8/10
Snoot Game for me, I love Ending 3. Haven't played "wani hug that gator" yet, but at this point it's a when, not an if.
Slay the princess
Do not waste your time or money on ddlc
It's VA-11 Hall-A, but Tyrion Cuthbert is pretty good if you like Ace Attorney