Perfection | Paper-thin
A downloadable Visual Novel for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android
Information:
This Visual Novel was created for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam 2021.
Playtime: ~90+ minutes (ca. 120 minutes for a 100% clear)
Genre: horror, psychological
Content Warnings: death, violence, unhealthy mental mindset, mild gore
Features: Full voice acting for everyone but the MC, 4 CGs, 2 endings
Instructions: Press start to start and advance the story by left-clicking. Click your mouse wheel to toggle the textbox if you want to see the whole background and right-click to open the menu with settings, saving, loading, a handbook etc.
Hold CTRL to quickly advance past already read text, in case you have to start over.
Summary: While investigating a town for occult activities, Emma is separated from her assigned partner. During her search for him, she stumbles upon a warlock who - to her surprise - also wants to stop what's going on. Despite their differences, they team up to try and find her missing partner and solve the town's mystery.
The Sequel & Other Related Visual Novels:
Credits:
Several team members worked multiple jobs at once. For a detailed list of who did what, please check out the game's credit section or the credits at the end of the story!
Art
Pop
Zoe Keidong
Matthias "Illumenos" V.
Audio
Voice Acting
Artur - @MikeYoungVO
Patrick, Preacher2 - Ron Guan
Valerie - Amber Barile
Preacher1 - Melissa White
Agatha - Sam Slade
Writing
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Animations, Intro, and Mobile ReleaseOct 31, 2022
- Small fixesOct 17, 2021
Comments
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Played through its entirety and i think its time to make a compliment sandwich!
I absolutely enjoy eldritch stories! And this novel follows suit with many other stories I've read to date. The choices you make in game actually have an effect on what possible ending you'd get and I love it.
Something that I didn't quite care for it just one aspect of the voice acting. The man in red, can't think of his name right now. It sounded like the voice actor was too close to his microphone when recording most of the first lines he had so it sounded like reverb in my ears.
Other than that bit I loved a lot of the voice acting! At first I was surprised because so many games say there's voice acting and usually there's not a lot, but this game keeps its promise and delivers line after line.
All in all I greatly enjoyed the experience. Solid 8.5 outta 10!
Thank you very much for the kind review :)
Really cool game in terms of both world-building and characters!
This was a really cool game! I loved the story, contrast between the colored sprite art and the black&white absurdist backgrounds, and voice acting.
Thanks for your lovely comment. There will be a sequel for NaNoRenO :)
Oh, I love this a lot~! <3
The art style of the sprites was gorgeous (and the little extras, like shading bars over Artur in the beginning, nice!!) Even Patrick looks pretty (but he makes me so angry, lmao!) The background characters really make that "this is unnatural" feeling soar. I really like the style of the backgrounds themselves, too! The shapes and perspective are really nice to look at.
The music was great, the sound effects great, the voice acting: great!!
I love Emma as a main character. She's very relatable and I love to see how the choices effect her. Artur is very charismatic and I kept looking between him and Emma like, "I love you both. You should... /// erm, hold hands. ;3"
The minigame was very fun and that one in the pharmacy if you make /choices/ had me scrambling when the timer appeared, hahaha! The whole concept of doing the anxiety grounding technique as a interactive activity is genius.
I think one of the more smaller memorable bits for me was when Artur asks for Emma's name and she's not listening. I think having the voice acting go on without it being narrated was a very cool concept.
Overall, the story was really interesting, the worldbuilding was done at a perfect pace of understanding the rules of the world without being overwhelmed by so much as once, and... I want to know more about it all! So I'll definitely be looking out for your future game!
Thanks to your team for working so hard on this!
> "I love you both. You should... /// erm, hold hands. ;3"
Our editor/composer totally ships them lol
> I want to know more about it all!
This is sort of a spin-off of our long-term project WYSAPOOMP (which is still in development). We released a demo for it earlier this year, but it's not on the same level as PePaThin, as far as assets go - some sprites are missing, there is only one pose per character, we don't have all the background music we want, no voice acting etc.
It's mainly there to gauge interest in the story and figure out what works and what doesn't work with what we've planned. The whole thing currently spans 450k words while the demo includes about 40k of those. We'll also be updating the demo every now and then with some quality of life improvements.
WYSAPOOMP is about the same cult Artur hails from. We follow a fairly young member (~ university age) that has been tasked with keeping an eye on the cult's chosen Host that they want to use to incarnate their eldritch being into our plane of existence.
10 days before the ritual, strangers show up looking for the Host in order to stop the ritual, engaging with our MC and causing him to reconsider this whole sacrificing business. These strangers are some of Emma's buddies and their goal is to assassinate the Host before the ritual goes down.
While Artur stars as a side character (PePaThin actually just started as "some spin-off that should have Artur in it"), Emma sadly hasn't made it into the script yet. Maybe we'll find a place for her in the later routes.
This got kind of long >_<
Anyway, thanks for your comment, it's very much appreciated!
I just finished playing through several endings, and I wanted to write to say, thank you for making this! I liked the style of the character sprites, I really enjoyed the writing and the story, and the voice acting is excellent (I was happily surprised to recognise Artur's VA). I also really appreciated the use of a handbook screen with click-able definitions you find as the visual novel unfolds.
Question: How do we unlock the final handbook definition? I tried to unlock it, but I have no idea how.
Thanks for the nice comment!
And you found a "bug". I simply forgot to put the unlock code for that entry into the VN! I'll fix it whenever we push our next update (there are some other small things we want to change).
The entry in question is about Emma's calming technique! It reads:
"The 5-4-3-2-1 technique is a way to ground yourself when overcome by anxiety. There are variations that involve all five senses while some switch back and forth between only a select set of senses. For Emma's version, she counts five things she can see, then five things she can hear. Next, she goes back to her sense of sight, counting four things she can see, followed by four more things she can hear. This repeats until she counts a single thing each. Between rounds, the same object may be counted - this isn't a competition, it's not supposed to be stressful to come up with items to count."
Thanks for finding that issue :)
Ah, thank you so much for letting me know. ^^
I can see you've found my one weakness, sexy Brits. God Artur's hot. I confess that my first thought upon seeing him was "He is good looking" and when he spoke he slew me. His stupid sexy self distracted me all through the game. >u< Artur was surprisingly "nice" for a murderous mage, which I found interesting...
The point and click segment threw me for a loop the first time I played it, but soon I figured out what I had to do. I actually really liked that! (and would request more of the same :p) It reminded me of y;n a visual novel I played so long ago, that was a point and click visual novel hybrid. It brought a whole new way to interact with the world of WYSAPOOMP (I'm assuming these games share a world)
I felt sorry for miss perfect. It's a shame she had to (spoiler: die). I hoped she could grow, maybe reverse what she'd done and have a happy life. Guess not :p Patrick was a jackass.I was tempted to let him DIE, but I figgered it would be more in character for Emma to spare his dishrag life but turn him in.
All in all I enjoyed your game!! Good work owo I look forward to your next works~~~~
> It brought a whole new way to interact with the world of WYSAPOOMP (I'm assuming these games share a world)
They do! Artur and the MC's dad curate POOMP's post-dead-end scenes and Artur is part of the 2nd branch in the demo (the branch that's more hidden). His sprite is a bit different in there because the artist for this PePaThin changed some things about him. We'll add these changes to POOMP (like his hair is a bit different for instance), while keeping the old style since that's simply a different person's art style.
> I hoped she could grow, maybe reverse what she'd done and have a happy life.
In a 2 month jam, this may have happened. With the time we had, she had to redeem herself in death :P
Thanks for checking out the game and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Perfection: Paper-Thin is unorthodox, to say the least.
An OELVN true-and-true that, while deriving inspiration from JVNs in things like sprite design, sound design, the relevance of music and the use of certain graphical effects, is also attempting to carve a niche of its own in more ways than one.
The contrast between the character art and the background art creates a weird atmosphere that, agree with the art direction or not, I don't think most will forget so soon. The character sprites are great, with a variety of detail, poses and expressions that are put to use for good effect.
The ‘paper sprites’ (you will know then when you see them) are downright bizarre, but fit the narrative and at one point are used for an impactful scene in a way I don’t think the use of ‘‘normal sprites’ could.
The music is very nice, with a couple of themes I really enjoyed. The loops play in the background seminglessly helping set the tones of mystery, urgency, or imminent danger.
The game has point’n’click sections, which is something I am not really a fan of. But they are quite original in their implementation and you can clearly see what the Devs were going for with them. They help with getting to know the protagonist, and peeking inside her mind, rather than just being a ‘game-y' entertainment feature.
One of the biggest 'selling points’ of P-PT is the voice-acting. The game has full VA except for the protagonist, and the voice actor of character ‘Artur’ clearly steals the show with the combination of his witty, sarcastic lines and the British accent they’re delivered in.
The story is a small episode set in a modern expanded universe inspired by Lovecraftian horror, but the execution made it feel more like a tale that one could expect to find in edgier versions of something like the older versions of ‘Dr. Who’, ‘Twilight Zone’ or ‘The Outer Limits’.
There are very few VNs who delve into the genre of Horror/Suspense/Modern Magicks tale that P-PT does, and even less (perhaps none, as far as I know) who do it in the way this VN does.
If you are interested in the genre, and like adorable bastards with suave British voices you know you should not be liking, give it a try.
It is not Perfect, but neither is it Paper-Thin.
First choiceL Shoot.
Me: Hell nah, he hot!
Lol. Anyway, great story. I love Arthur soo much. I love characters with a crazy hot smirk ahahaha.
Also, I think I didn't get the true ending because I didn't see the last CG from the gallery?
Hey! Thank you so much for the comment (and for not murdering poor Artur, haha)!
A lot of team members like Artur (he's from our long-term project, so he was the one character that was around before this jam), so you're in good company. Our editor/composer is pretty much in love with him :D
Yes, the final CG happens in one of the two endings and it depends on whether you try and save Patrick at the end or not. I honestly haven't chosen either of these endings as the "true" one, since I usually can't decide. If there's ever a sequel, I guess I'll have to make a choice, but until then, both endings are equally valid!
Again, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment!
Ohhh! What's the name of that long-term project? I'm so excited to see more of arthur yayyyyy!
It's WYSAPOOMP, but it's not out yet. We have a demo out there as a proof of concept (he's in 1 of the 2 major branches within the demo and if you end up on the branch without him, there'll be a hint on how to get onto his branch at the end). The overall quality isn't the same as in works like PePaThin, since we mainly want to check if the story concept works. It doesn't contain all the art and music we'd like to have in there, but if you're fine with reading something sort of rough, then we're always glad for some feedback on what works and what doesn't :D
Edit: also Artur's design needs a touch-up after this jam, since some of it changed with his new sprites for our jam game.
Oh that's exciting. Before you replied, I was looking through your profile to see if I can find that game with arthur ahahahha. Glad you linked it! I'll def check it out after playing through some other jam games! X33 Good luck with your endeavors!
Oh yeah, the month of October is reserved for jam games! Just got done with my first playthrough of yours. Amazing job! :3