BLVN Review: Psychic Eclipse (C-Garden NEXT-B)
I finally decided to play this VN after seeing a lot of information about it in Cool-B magazine! It was released in 2021, by a BL visual novel company called C-Garden NEXT-B. It's their first visual novel, but the scenario writer and artist have both worked on some other BL visual novel projects in the past. I played the PC version, but it also has a Nintendo Switch port now (which is probably not too different as both versions are all-ages).
Story The story takes place in the near future, in a world in which humans developed psychic abilities. It was believed that these new psychic abilities would lead humanity to a brighter future, however, one incident changed the lives of everyone. "On that fateful day, the sky was stolen from us".
The protagonist of this story is Kei, a young man who lives together with his childhood friend Subaru. In this game, a person's psychic ability is ranked on a scale from 1 to 6, and Kei has a level 2 ability which is considered quite weak. His ability allows him to sometimes predict an event in the near future, but since he never knows if his visions will really come true, it sometimes causes more bad than good. After a certain incident in the past, all humans started living in domes, controlled by an AI system called Polaris. Six years ago, people suddenly started transforming into creatures called "eclipses", who are known for their aggressive nature. Once a person turns into an eclipse, it seems like they completely lose their humanity and it is unknown how the disease is transferred. Some theorize that it is contageous.
This game has three main routes and a fourth extra route which focuses more on the past of some side-characters. I recommend playing Subaru's route first because I think it doesn't go too deep into some of the plot elements yet. I personally played Licht's route first as I liked his design the most, but it did kind of spoil some other routes, so I think it's better to pick Subaru or Sirius first. After playing all three of the main routes, you unlock a fourth route, which focuses on some of the side characters (unfortunately no Mikage route but they pair him up with a side character who appears later).
Subaru is Kei's childhood friend and both of them lost their parents when they were younger. They currently live together as they don't really know anyone else who's living in the dome. Subaru has the ability to control fire (blue flames), but he rarely uses it as those living within the domes are told to not use their psychic abilities. He seems to know a lot about technology and Kei gets a bit suspicious why Subaru seems to be hiding certain things from him.
The second character who has his own route is Sirius, an AI who Subaru created. He has a cheerful personality, a male idol who enjoys singing. He talks to Kei through Kei's phone, but he often also shows up as a hologram. This made me wonder how the romance in Sirius's route would even develop since Kei can't touch him, but I kinda liked having a non-human love interest. I've played a lot of visual novels but the only AI/robot character I can remember right now is Clear (from DRAMAtical Murder), so I would love to see more of that.
Kei's first encounter with the other two characters, Licht and Mikage, happens one day after Kei finds a dead body of an eclipse at work. Licht immediately uses his psychic ability to stop him from moving (he's the only person alive who has a level psychic 6 ability, who can use psychokinesis) and later Mikage also threatens him, so Kei doesn't have the best first impression of these two. In his route, Licht actually turns out to be pretty nice, he just has no idea how to interact with people normally because he only talks to Mikage and his own father... One thing I should mention is that psychic abilities do come with certain side effects, they take a huge toll on the body of the user and if they use it too often, it can lead to permanent injury and eventually death, which is also a big theme in this route.
Each character has three kinds of endings: good, normal and dark. The normal ending is the one you'll most likely get first, though don't be fooled by the name because some dark stuff usually happens to the characters in these endings too and it's not really 'normal' lol. The dark end is basically a bad end, but it's a bit more difficult to get. Luckily each route only has 3 different choices, so I figured it out with a bit of trial and error.
This game is technically "all-ages" but they do occasionally mention explicit topics and some pretty gruesome stuff happens during the human experiments, so I guess "all-ages" just means they won't show any explicit CGs. I think a 17/18+ rating would be better, as some of the endings also get really dark and some CGs can be a bit gory (limb amputation, decapitation, etc.) I think it doesn't look too bad in this artstyle but it's probably good to be aware of it before playing!
This is the company's first game, so there's a couple of things that could be improved, but it's mostly just minor things. One example I can think of is that most side character models are all silhouettes and unvoiced, which makes it difficult to really get attached to them. This includes the enemies/eclipses, which is a shame because I would have loved to see more cool enemy designs. Some endings also left me wondering if there's more to the story, but I think they will explain more of this in the fandisc, which they are currently working on. There's a lot of things about this game I did like though, the game was much darker than I expected and I really enjoyed seeing what would happen in the "normal" and dark endings. I also quite like the artstyle, and the game's OST is really good! Apparently the guy who composed the music used to work for Capcom and has created music for the Monster Hunter games in the past???
They recently tweeted that they would postpone the release date of the fandisc to 2024 (now 2025) because of the large number of scenarios they were adding to it. It seems like they're going to focus a bit more on two side characters I didn't mention before, who only appear in the final route: Licht's brother Kanade and Mikage's acquaintance Kousaka. I might check out the fandisc when they release it!