The games in February are Brady's choice! First up, we have a visual novel called Cherry Tree High Comedy Club. It's a cute story about a high schooler who wants to revive a school club with her best friend. However, her plans are thwarted when she finds out two students are not enough people to have an official club and she will have to recruit at least one more person before the end of break.
Similar to other visual novels I have played (admittedly few), you control the main character and get to choose how they spend their day to day life. Our main character here is an outgoing and determined girl who takes on the challenge of recruiting new members for her club in stride. You can choose to do different things like read magazines, go to the movies, or play video games which will increase your stats in certain areas of expertise. Of course, you can also choose to spend your time with one of the candidates for recruitment to your club which will raise your friendship level depending on which topic you choose to talk about. There are two options to make money depending on the time of day (limited by your fatigue level) and finally, you can simply do your homework. So, there is no shortage of ways to spend your time, although each option is really just some basic dialog and an increase in a stat.
There is a chance spending time with someone will result in a short cutscene, and there seem to also be predetermined events. Otherwise, the game is mainly just navigating around the town and choosing what you want to do. As you learn more about the potential candidates for recruitment, you learn a little about the main character as well. The character development unfolds at almost a too slow pace, but I may have been feeling impatient.
It's a pretty calm game, the story and premise are not over the top, and I can see how it's popular with fans of this genre. However, I felt like there was not enough going on to keep me engaged. A lot of the dialog is reused, and I didn't feel the need to go out of my way to talk to everyone each day, I just decided on a whim. I didn't dislike this game, and I see it has good reviews on steam, but it just didn't click with me.
-Caitlyn
PS - I will come back to this, someday, only because I want to give it another chance and finish the story. From what I can tell it's not a very long game.
