Thank you Tagetes Team for sending this game to us on our Steam Curator!

JUSFASLEX is a kinetic visual novel (for those who don't know, this means it's a story without choices) about a man named Theo who, previous to the events in this story, gains god-like powers. He is thankfully not a malevolent fellow, though he is certainly aloof. He seems to have power over a dimension he lives in, and can open a gate from the real world to where he lives now.

Over time, he brings in a few people who no longer feel bound to the normal human world. One was deathly ill, and another sought suicide. He also grants them a unique Gift that even he doesn't know what it will be. Part of the story is about when Emma and Rebecca discover their gifts, and the consequences of that. Since this is a fairly short story, one I finished in right around ninety minutes, I don't think I should go into too much more detail to avoid spoiling the story.

For those who have not played a visual novel before, the most common format used is a simple background with characters in front of it and a text box on the bottom of the screen where you read the narrativeho. JUSFASLEX follows this common format. In this case, all spoken text is voice acted in Ukrainian, while narrative or internal monologues are silent. There are about seven songs that help set the mood. This music changes depending on the scene, and sounds like it's done on synthesizer with high quality piano (probably samples). They are simple, but set the mood well and sound very nice.

As I mentioned before, the voice acting is Ukrainian. Over the years I have found listening to games in other languages can help me have an appreciation for how they sound. For example, a recent visual novel I reviewed was all in Chinese, and I came to really appreciate that. I can say the same here; listening to these voices in this different foreign tongue has done the same. It was also interesting in that one of the characters sounds similar to the stereotype of how I always thought Ukrainian women sounded, which made me laugh when I first heard it!

A visual novel isn't very visual without art, and in this case it appears to be mostly hand drawn, though some may be computer aided. What I can say is it looks like at least two different artists with very different styles were involved in the art in this one. Most scenes have a much simpler hand drawn style that looks nice, but is clearly of much lower detail. A few scenes, those meant to really make an impact, are drawn with much more detail and look incredible. The contrast in styles could not be greater, so the juxtaposition is startling when it happens.

The story itself is fairly well written, and it certainly makes you think about 'what ifs'. I wouldn't say it's the best story of its length I've read, but it's certainly not bad. It's pretty good for a first project, I would say.

On a technical level it seems fine, and it's a visual novel so not too much there. It does take oddly long to start up, but my main issue is that it crashed to desktop for me two times. Thankfully, I was easily able to skip forward to where I was before, but it was annoying.

There are certainly moral concerns, though it's probably fair to say a story like this can't really avoid most of them. Theo and some of the other characters are 'gods', or at least have superhuman attributes to them. Some of their actions are morally ambiguous at best, and some are quite dark. There are some scenes with blood and torture. I only caught one curse word, 'b*tch'. There are kisses, but nothing really bad when it comes to sexual content.

JUSFASLEX is a good first effort for a new developer/storyteller writing visual novels. The voice acting is really good, and the art and music is interesting if not amazing. It's not a bad story for what it is, though I really feel like it could have benefited from a longer narrative. I hope there's a sequel, as I want to know more about what happens in the end. I suppose that means it was good enough to get me invested in the story! I recommend it for visual novel lovers, as long as you have reasonable expectations for a first effort.