In my experience of reviewing, I find visual novels to be the hardest to review. In the case of Pechka, there is no gameplay to review, just a story. However, since this is a game review, I will be reviewing it as a game rather than a story. Pechka, developed and published by Growing Seeds, is a visual novel game with an engaging narrative, fantastic visual themes, and an immersive soundtrack. Unfortunately, due to its narrative focus, it suffers from a lack of gameplay. It also suffers from awful pacing thanks to its episode format.
War never changes
Pechka’s has a very gripping narrative, however, to avoid spoiling the game, I will be as vague as possible. This story follows a young man named Pyotr. Pyotr has lived a very troubled life in three separate countries. However, he considers none of them his homeland. As such, he must carefully navigate his way through a war between the three countries. The story is very well written, and for the most part, I was entertained throughout my time with this title. Furthermore, it takes inspiration from historical events and even features people from historical events adding to the immersion of the story.
While the narrative is solid, the pacing of said narrative is awful. This is most likely due to the way the game was originally released. The game features both episodes and chapters, where episodes would come out once every week until the game was eventually completed. Due to this, the game’s story rarely feels like it’s advancing, leading to an overall long plot. While it is still entertaining, I often felt fatigued getting through all the mindless dialogue. Overall, The story is great, however, the pacing of the story is quite poor.
Choices
As stated earlier, Pechka has very little in terms of gameplay. You will move to the designated area and talk to the correct person to advance the story. Sometimes you will be given dialogue options, which impact the ending of the game. You can affect your bond with each character to get a different ending through these dialogue options. Furthering this, these options happen fairly infrequently, so the amount of gameplay on offer is minimal. This hurts the game a lot as it makes the long stretches of mindless dialogue even more draining. Furthermore, a lot of important decisions within the game are made for the player. There were multiple points in the game where there could have been interesting branching story paths, however, they fail to take that opportunity, which is disappointing.
Black and White
Pechka’s visual themes are fantastic. It uses a black-and-white color scheme throughout the story. This works well with the story’s theme, which is the horrors of war. Furthermore, characters important to Pyotr are given a little bit of color, to show the player that these characters are important to both the story and Pyotr, as they are his light in the darkness. Despite the simple design the character models and faces are very expressive, which makes for fantastic emotional moments in the story. I found myself very immersed in the game world thanks to its graphical style.
Pechka’s soundtrack was also fantastic. The atmospheric soundtrack makes you feel what Pyotr is feeling at the moment. Even the lack of music is used to give the player the feeling that something is off. Unfortunately, while the music does a great job of setting the tone, it can be very repetitive at times. Especially since the same tracks are used throughout the whole game. Pechka could have used some more songs or some unique themes for the characters. Overall, the soundtrack is still great, as is the visuals.
Great story but not much else
Pechka is a hard game to recommend. If you are looking for a great story, with an immersive soundtrack and great visual themes, then Pechka has you covered. However, if you are looking for a visual novel game with plenty of story-impacting choices, or any gameplay at all, you would be better off looking elsewhere. For those who want to try this game out, you can find it here.
