4LS still exists??? Wow. I thought that the members moved on to their own projects.
I’m pleased to see Katawa Shoujo is still alive. It was perhaps my first VN, and although it does contain sex scenes, you don’t play KS just for the smut, you do it for the characters.
And, even if the name of the novel is literally “crippled girls” (a mix of a red herring and a “tomato on the mirror”), it avoids really well defining the love interests solely by their disability - something that would boring, flat, and stereotypical.
It’s somewhat embarassing to admit how much this game resonated with me when it came out. I think I’m afraid to see if the cripple porn game still holds up today though.
This game is my litmus test for new relationships. When I say I love a cripple dating simulator and they are into that, I know to be careful
(It has waaay too much dialogue/monologue that doesn’t move the plot or bring any new information to the table, imho. With writing being the one part where an indie game can excel, I find that a bit disappointing. Man, I’m happy I can share this opinion here, where people may actually know the game)
This is unfortunately typical of visual novels. The line level sentence-to-sentence prose is rarely even adequate, and often what they choose to describe is already shown as an image on the screen. The best ones, I feel, simply omit the prose and have only dialogue, and if they choose to describe an already-visible image, the description ought to tell what isn’t already available as visual information.