Starting in on Sunlight Scream, I think about the meal analogy. You can divide the visual novel into three kinds of meals, at least from my vantage. First, you have your five-course ordeals where you need to put aside your entire evening to eat them. They’ll be divine and sumptuous, but they’re not an everyday event in which you partake. Then, you’ve got your medium meals, be they restaurant or homemade. These might not be as luxurious, but they can have some excellent qualities to them and, yes, can be quite cozy when evocative of your childhood. And then you’ve got your fast food VNs, ones that come out swiftly and are gone just as quickly, maybe being a tasty morsel but nothing more. Chemically Bonded is a prime example of this, as is my constant reference point The Way We All Go. 

But I didn’t realize there was a fourth category: truck stop potato salad. It’s a questionable thing to begin with, as you rarely, if ever, decide that potato salad is something you need on a long road trip. It’s going to be overpriced, and the expiration date is either a weird format or nonexistent. You pay too much to buy it, and even the cashier raises an eyebrow after she just sold steel wool and three fake roses in glass vials to the twitchy guy ahead of you. Trying to eat it while driving is somewhere between a chore and a punishment, as you should never steer with your knees for anything, let alone five dollar potato salad. The consistency is weird: somehow watery and thick at the same time. There’s a fruit mixed in there but it’s maybe a date or a desiccated mango. This looks…bad.

But you already paid for it, so here we go. You shovel it down with the grim determination of someone who thinks Sisyphus gave up too easily. Your throat actually begins to congeal by the third scoop, but you powerwash your esophagus with an energy drink containing either the word “Demon” or “Acid” and then soldier on. By the time you see the bottom of the container, you also start to see tracers on the tail lights of the cars in front of you. God has personally reached down to contort your stomach and whisper “Bad call, dawg” into your mind. You quickly jerk the wheel to the right and you assume you’ve gotten your Chevy Taho into a rest area, but it’s really a weigh station and those are always closed. There’s no time for semantics: you’ve got to drop weight NOW.

Exploding out of the driver’s side door, you barely make it to the sparse grass and the one confused squirrel watching as you collapse to your knees. For the first time in your life, you aren’t vomiting so much as creating a pathway for a torrent to leave, unbidden and confident, like the most horrendous Valkyries charging into a foul Ragnarök. The potato salad, the paint thinner/energy drink, your breakfast, your past, your future, and your hopes and dreams all exit in a deluge that takes but a moment and a lifetime. Unlike every other dietary reversal you’ve ever had, you somehow feel WORSE when it’s all said and done. Because you put that into you. For the first time ever, you can accurately say no one hates you more than you do. You need to take a moment before continuing your drive, and maybe call your pastor or therapist.

Sunlight Scream has some decent potential, but it always goes the wrong way. For one, the format, while a bit well-trodden, is still fun: guy loses parents, guy goes to live with his brother, enrolls in a new school, everyone is interested in him, and then murders. Lots of murders. Dressed in costume, Matthew Lillard adjacent murders, which, again, is cool. I can get behind some cookie-cutter slasher ideas. I mean, I’m a little confused that anyone seems shocked that murders happen simply because “our town is so great.” Literally every town is great until a murder happens, and hint: every murder ends up happening SOMEWHERE. Do you think killings only happen in NEW YORK CITY?

Also, the devs added a battery meter to the decisions the protagonist makes, which is a double-edged sword. The battery allows you to know the importance of when you’re making a choice, allowing you to know what is incidental, what changes the course of the romantic routes, and which one could end the game. It’s great for people like me trying to just get to the end and figure out what’s next, but it’s a bit of an antithesis for a lot of VN players. You eliminate the wonder of what was the right or wrong thing to say. Granted, a lot of the major moments have choices like “SCREAM FOR HELP” or “MAKE A PLAN TO AMBUSH THE KILLER WHO IS RIGHT UPSTAIRS AND WILL HEAR YOU SCREAM BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DOES, SERIOUSLY, MAKE A PLAN” so you can usually figure these things out.

I can excuse the weird translation and menu issues of Sunlight Scream just because they’re the least of my concerns. There’s clearly some translation issues that happened, and I think that it suffers from lack of QA, but it’s not completely indecipherable. You have a handful of characters who speak smoothly and have good sentences, and then a couple of people who sound like that Family Guy bit about the two non-native speakers. While it can be clunky and jarring at times, there wasn’t a point where it became incoherent, so I guess it’s a pass. I mean, I also managed to write my name on my first-grade spelling test and got three down before I crapped my pants and that counted as a pass, so take your victories how you will.

Like a lot of oddball visual novels, Sunlight Scream has the recurring issue of soundtrack mismatch, where either the music doesn’t transition on time for certain moments or is just wildly inappropriate. When the protagonist wakes up in a hospital to find out he barely survived a car crash but the driver didn’t, the music is downright jaunty. When the killer murders the nerd with glasses, it doesn’t shift to ominous music until the dude is already down. None of the music is horribly screechy or offensive, but it just feels, at best, generic and, at worst, tonally wrong. It feels like the music was added as an afterthought and lands awkwardly, getting maybe a three from the judges.

But the main component of Sunlight Scream is the story itself, and the story just turns out bad. Everyone wants to be your friend or be your girlfriend EXCEPT muscle-headed dude who you fight at one point and you totally win. The girls fluctuate from shy bookworm to spunky techno chick and tsundere popular girl, and you can end up dating and sleeping with all of them. After titles like Qualia get fairly censored and edited, I was shocked with how graphically descriptive Sunlight Scream got with its sex scenes. Naturally, because there’s no visuals, Nintendo took no umbrage, but it’s still a bit wild to behold. Plus, was just everyone who wasn’t me sleeping around in high school? I don’t think I lost my virginity after my second child was born.

The characters are, ultimately, just unlikable. Everyone is a flat stereotype that fills one role or another, and does so like someone finishing a shapes puzzle with Silly Putty. Jock like sports, bookish girl is shy until she stands up for herself, techno girl can hack every PC on the planet, etc. Hell, even the twist of revealing who the killer is isn’t really surprising because, guess what, they tick every other box from every other horror movie about why they’re actually murdering teachers and classmates. I got so bored scrolling through text and finding out the rather mundane reasons WHY that I just started to tune out. Great, this is revenge or something. Why not just move and have a better life? Instead you’re going to jail, dumbass.

Lastly, this is 2024. I know, I’m just as shocked as you are. But Sunlight Scream seems to think this is still the 90s, and it’s cool to just throw out casual homophobia. I can’t believe we’ve come so far in the world that we have computers everywhere we go, I can stream every song I’ve ever come across from the comfort of my home for a single price, but we still decide that attacking someone’s sexuality is how you get them to like you. Seriously, if you ask out a person, they say no, and you then respond with “Oh, are you GAY?” and that changes their mind? The are either planning to murder you as well or they’re deeply unwell and insecure, and neither is a great starting point to a date. It’s so antiquated I’m surprised they didn’t ask about if the school had segregated drinking fountains.

Sunlight Scream is a boring, flat and almost criminally protracted title with multiple endings that all feel the same. The art is alright but nothing special, the soundtrack is dull and the entire thing is cast with rejects from Pretty Little Liars. I didn’t enjoy playing it, but there’s probably a market out there for people who love to be disappointed and frustrated, so I’m sure it’ll sell alright. Don’t take my word for it if you feel doubt, but remember this: there’s so much good food out there. Why in hell would you choose the potato salad? 

 

Graphics: 4.0 Amateurish anime inspired drawings aren’t bad but certainly unrefined. Characters have distinctive traits and appearances that make it easy to not mix up everyone. A decent number of settings and locales. The “killer” mask feels very hackney but at least is slightly different.	Gameplay: 3.0 Attempts to reinvent the VN wheel runs Sunlight Scream over. Limited number of choices now loaded with indicators of importance de-fangs the curiousity that comes into moments. Relatively short playthrough time equates to quickly grinding out good and bad endings with obvious signposting.
Sound: 3.0 Wonky and a bit disonnant, the music is either cliche at best or clashingly off at worst. Can easily be played without the music on to deliver more of the novel and less of the visual, which was somewhat an improvement.	Fun Factor: 1.0 Super basic slasher story implemented as a visual novel could have worked, but odd translations, cheesy lines and just unnecessary homophobia left this game to rot on my doorstop. The price is low but you can find anyone to punch you in the sack for a dollar.
Final Verdict: 2.5

Sunlight Scream is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Sunlight Scream was provided by the publisher.