Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog is a sci-fi visual novel that’s meant to evoke the aesthetic of Japanese PC-9800 adventure games. The store page gives the impression that it’s some kind of slow burn mystery that’s also an adventure game, but neither of those is really what you’re getting. Adventure elements are present, but this is a Ren’py game and you’re primarily interacting through dialogue choices like a standard visual novel. Similarly, while the crew does descend into mistrust like the description says, they do it so quickly that it can’t really be called a mystery. So it’s a bit different than the description implies, but is it any good?
Since this is actually a visual novel, the story is likely to be the most important factor in whether or not Gun-Dog works for you. You play as the newly arrived security officer on a scout ship and quickly learn that the small crew includes both your girlfriend and a pilot who strongly dislikes you based on events in the prologue. Events will happen in remarkably short order than require you to jump into action and protect the crew, with the decisions you make along the way determining who will help you and how the mission concludes for most of the characters involved. All the individual scenes are well written in isolation, but the pacing often feels abrupt. You pretty much go from one major development to another with only some brief, almost completely optional exploration sequences along the way, and you’re almost never provided with the information you’d need to have a thinky mystery experience before the solution is revealed. Somewhat ironically, the otherwise excellent ending sequence is actually an exception to this: it sets up a mystery for the sequel without really answering any questions at all. It’s not an entirely original ending and I’ve seen games with similar plots fail to ever deliver a sequel before, so be prepared for that as well.
Although there are an impressive number of branches and you’re clearly intended to play more than once to see what changes, most of the ending sequence is locked in regardless of what you do and the triggers for certain character interactions are obscure enough that you’re likely to need a guide. The good news is that you’re able to resume play from quite a few different automatic save points and there’s a speedy fast forward function, so it doesn’t take long to get past the repeat content on additional playthroughs. You do also get a few minor changes when restarting the game, but don’t expect anything too wild here. It’s really just a few additional lines, not a totally new experience like you’d get from some games. You could probably get a half dozen playthroughs out of it if you really want to see all the different paths, but two or three is enough to hit the major differences at the end.
As for how you’ll be doing all of this, most of the action consists of choosing dialogue options and moving between rooms. There are a couple of sequences in the game where you can freely move around the ship and interact with characters and rooms in whatever order you want, but for the most part these are actually just a bunch of optional scenes that don’t impact anything. I’m only aware of one missable interaction that actually has an impact on what happens later on – in every other instance you will either eventually be forced to make a choice or the impact of whatever you did doesn’t change much about the flow of the story. Similarly, while every room has a bunch of points you can look at or use and there’s an items menu, these interactions are basically all either pointless or mandatory. It all works and there are definitely some fun optional text boxes to find, but this is why I don’t consider Gun-Dog an adventure game. You will not be finding any optional hidden rooms or combining items.
On the other hand, the graphics and music are exactly what you’d expect from taking a glance at the game. I’ve seen some discussions saying that the sound and color quality aren’t quite authentic to what the PC-9800 would have produced, but it’s certainly a convincing enough facsimile for anyone who isn’t deeply familiar with the original hardware. The soundtrack would have benefited from having a little more variety, but otherwise I don’t have anything to criticize here. The game looks and sounds great.
Conclusion
All in all, Gun-Dog is a solid experience that will hopefully lead to an even better sequel. It mostly suffers from a limited scope – the pacing is a bit too fast, the interactions a little too few, and so on. It’s easy enough to recommend given the relatively low sale price and the unique aesthetic, but don’t expect a game of the year contender or a plot you’re likely to remember in five years.
Rating: 80%
Price: $15
Time to beat: 5-6 hours for a first playthrough and 1-2 more for each additional run
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041