Looking for horror or action VNs that get good within the first hour or so.

[GXOALMD]

Title pretty much says it all.  Read Sakura no Mori Dreamers recently and, after how amazing it's prologue was, now I can't bring myself to sit through hours of mid af slice of life and/or romance at the start of whatever novels I try to read.  Translated suggestions preferred.

[Silvz]

Hmm the ones I'd recommend you have already played/started playing and, I might add, given bad scores lol

You could try Swan Song - it's not horror, but instead a very depressing post-tragedy story.

 

[Clephas]

Tokyo Babel for action (Dies Irae and Fate both only get action-y relatively late)

Even though this isn't translated: End Sleep for horror

[Zalor]

Sayonara wo Oshiete if you don't mind an untranslated title. It's probably the representative Denpa horror VN. Also, I second Swan Song.

[GXOALMD]

Thank you all for the suggestions.  I'll have to look into Swan Song, I've seen it come up when I've been scrolling through vndb, but I never gave it much thought before.  Tokyo Babel definitely interests me as well, I actually bought it on steam a few years back but never got around to it.  End Sleep and Sayonara wo Oshiete both look great and I'm sad that I don't know Japanese; it feels like whenever I ask for suggestions the most intriguing ones are untranslated.  For now, I have some friends who insisted I stop putting off Steins;Gate, so following up on these will have to wait.

[Stormwolf]

Saya no uta is an obvious recommendation

[littleshogun]

You can read Sayooshi even if you can't understand Japan, because there's an English patch that translate the whole VN. Said patch has some controversy because apparently it was badly translated, although if you already want to play it perhaps you may test the patch to see if you'll find the translation is sufficient or not. That said if you still need some other recommendations, perhaps you can try the title such as Kikokugai, Corpse Party, and Muramasa. I hope that my recommendations here can be helpful to you.

[GXOALMD]

On 1/25/2022 at 2:35 AM, littleshogun said:

You can read Sayooshi even if you can't understand Japan, because there's an English patch that translate the whole VN. Said patch has some controversy because apparently it was badly translated, although if you already want to play it perhaps you may test the patch to see if you'll find the translation is sufficient or not. That said if you still need some other recommendations, perhaps you can try the title such as Kikokugai, Corpse Party, and Muramasa. I hope that my recommendations here can be helpful to you.

According to vndb the Sayooshi patch was taken down; is there somewhere I'd still be able to find it?  Kikokugai looks interesting, thank you for bringing it to my attention.  I've actually already played Corpse Party a few times, it's one of the games that got me into VNs originally; perhaps I should play another of the sequels.  Muramasa is one I've been waiting on for a long time.  I'm surprised but also glad to see if finally got translated.  If we're actually seeing progress on long Nitroplus VNs, any chance the Sumaga translation is going to be completed one day?

[littleshogun]

Yeah there's a lot of place where you can find translated Sayooshi if you search enough, and I can't give you the link here. As for Sumaga translation, well we may see it in the near future although my interest here was already change to Tokyo Necro when it come to Nitroplus VN though (Being that it's quite recent is also help here).

[NoSanity]

Just been released recently, Corpse Factory. Released in English dubbing only but with some very good voice acting, the hook hits you pretty fast and it has lots of twists and turns. Warning for some heavy psychological themes including distressing and disturbing topics, and overall quite a morbid and disturbing story. I absolutely loved it, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys psychological horror.

[GXOALMD]

20 hours ago, NoSanity said:

Just been released recently, Corpse Factory. Released in English dubbing only but with some very good voice acting, the hook hits you pretty fast and it has lots of twists and turns. Warning for some heavy psychological themes including distressing and disturbing topics, and overall quite a morbid and disturbing story. I absolutely loved it, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys psychological horror.

Sweet, I actually backed the kickstarter for that one, so glad to hear to it came out well.  It's probably what I'm going to read when I finish Hatsumira.