fault – Silence the Pedant tech demo overview by Lolinia – Developers: ALICE in DISSONANCE – Publishers: ALICE in DISSONANCE – Genre: Visual Novel
It isn’t often that Indie developers give us a real taste of their upcoming game. Especially indie visual novel creators. After all, considering the content of their game, it’s like giving away tiny bits of spoiler material for the story they are crafting. However, the fine folks over at ALICE in DISSONANCE (AiD) put together a demo for their next title in the fault series, Silence the Pedant (or StP for short) and showcased off how their new game will work. If you’d rather see how it works yourself, the demo was publicly released on AiD’s Patreon (link to post HERE) and you can play it for yourself if you want, but here’s a basic overview of it.
StP won’t be the typical visual novel, so to speak. While the fault series as a whole has been a rather straight-forward kinetic novel series (meaning that there are no choices to be made) with the exception of one ‘seemingly’ meaningless choice in the first game, this installment of the series will also be interactive. Gameplay elements similar to a point-and-click adventure game are added into StP that allow the player to gain a deeper understanding of the fault universe. Players can use the camera to zoom, pan, and click their way around the game to find more to interact with while they read the story.
This doesn’t mean that there will be elements to stop players from advancing through the story. No random puzzles before going to the next scene or forcing a player to stop perusing the text to go click a random doorknob. At its core, the fault series has been and always will be a visual novel. AiD has, to my knowledge, no plans of changing that recipe. Personally, I think that’s a wise decision on their part. Changing the game plan in the middle of the game is always a toss-up on if it’ll be a successful change or not. There’s always the possibility of alienating some of your loyal consumer-base away from the rest of the series and that’s not what AiD wants. So much so that they even reference a conversation about older machines had on their ASK.FM page.
In the end, I’m extremely looking forward to fault – Silence the Pedant coming out. Those who know me well know that games like fault, Tokyo Babel, Kindred Spirits on the Roof, and the Grisaia trilogy really make me happy. More so than games like Fallout 4, Dark Souls III, and Call of Duty. Being able to get a small taste of what I can expect to see in the next installment of fault while getting 4th wall treatment from the characters in the game makes me happy. And seeing the developers of a game that makes me happy being so open with the people watching out for their game makes me even happier and I want StP and fault – milestone 2 side:below so much more now after their effort. Keep on keeping on, AiD!
