Visual novels like Deluge are why I am so hard on games in this genre that are free. It has excellent production values from the menu to the models to the music that I am not afraid to point out other free visual novels that are bad as obviously you can still have standards and be free of cost. The only issue I had with the models are the noses looked weird. Other than that the rest of the art has a great style and colour palette. The music worked with the scenes really well and the sound effects were top notch. The story and characters were great up until the end. I didn’t hate the endings but I did feel unsatisfied by them. I just felt like there were a lot of unanswered questions as well as depending on which character you followed the stories branched off into extremely different paths that felt like they weren’t part of the same world. The journey leading up to them was fantastic though as I felt like the buildup of tension was great as was the lore. The characters were all interesting in their own way and I didn’t hesitate to play each ending to see where it went which I don’t usually do.
I played Deluge on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. I did however notice at least four spelling and grammar issues. The game also lacked certain features I have come to expect to be standard on visual novels such as the ability to skip text and to go back to the previous line. You can manually save whenever you want and there are fifty four save slots. Alt-Tab didn’t work.
Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.11.2266
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 1.4 GB
Game Version Played: 1.0
GPU Usage: 0-85 %
VRAM Usage: 938-1724 MB
CPU Usage: 4-15 %
RAM Usage: 3.0-4.0 GB
Despite my lukewarm feeling on the endings I still recommend Deluge as everything else is of a very high quality and maybe somebody else has different feelings on the ends. I finished my first play through in two hours and forty eight minutes and finished the rest of the endings in a total of three hours and fifty nine minutes.
My System:
Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.3.6 | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.1.12-zen1-1-zen