ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS 1.0

Get a high grade for your faith

ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS is a free role-playing video game wherein you must survive your religion. Developed by team★CPU and published by MAVERSSOFT, this visual novel indie game lets you play as a teenaged girl who’s going away to attend school. However, everything is not as it seems in her overly-strict life. This game offers episodic updates but doesn’t outline a set schedule for releases so you may have to wait a while for the ending.

The family business

In ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS, you follow the story of Twigs, a 13-year-old girl from a conservative and religious home. Her family has an interesting background as they are deeply involved in LoveCorp, the elite organization that runs their Church of Mother religion. At the start, she’s preparing to go enter a new school. However, she’s reluctant to go or to even continue her boring studies of focusing on her faith due to how suffocating it is.

The gameplay here is pretty standard for visual novels. You simply have to click through dialogue and select action choices every now and then to progress the story. Unlike most VNs, however, the text here displays over the visuals—making it look like a low-budget project created by a newbie developer. The character designs and background art themselves appear to be cheap 3D assets. Surprisingly, this stylistic choice works well with the text.

This game really lays out how a teenaged girl’s perspective would be like with its first-person POV. The typos and writing quirks found in the narration are reminiscent of how Twigs would write, as well—although the dialogue is well-crafted. The only drawback is that this game’s style makes it tricky to figure out who’s currently speaking. Plus, this is actually a horror game and doesn’t warn you that it contains loud noises and flashing images.

Actually a horror game

All in all, ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS is an interesting stylized horror visual novel about the struggles of the sheltered girl. Its art style can take some getting used to but the plot itself is actually engrossing and is worth the read. It’s only too bad that its text design makes it hard to figure out during conversations. It also doesn’t warn you that it has flashing lights and sudden loud noises. It could use some settings, too.