Sunlight Scream is a visual novel developed by indie creator Faithy Games, a predominantly one-man studio based out of Russia.
Taking inspiration from the likes of R. L. Stein’s Goosebumps series and the Scream franchise, we follow Max Hardy as he returns to his hometown of Sunlight City to reconnect with his remaining family. However, things in this city are not as peaceful as they appear on the surface. Having recently been ported to Switch, let’s see how this game goes.
Sunlight Scream takes an interesting approach to the decision-based nature of the visual novel genre by introducing a battery in the top right of the screen, indicating how impactful a decision will be. The more full the battery, the greater the impact your choice will be, perhaps even leading directly to your death or that of another.
My first major question was, how much do these decisions actually affect the story? There are numerous visual novels that I’ve played where your choices matter very little and so for this game to advertise so heavily the importance of these choices, I played through the game twice fully and have started a third run to test this. The results are a little mixed, as your decisions generally set you on a certain romantic path once you choose somebody a certain number of times, and general events play out the same with some characters surviving until different points in the story. Overall though, the story is largely unchanged until the final chapter.
The music and sound effects in the game work quite well, though as noted from the credits the music used is under license from a royalty-free library so you may have heard it before. Being that this is a predominantly solo-developed game at a very reasonable price, I see no reason why this should be held against it. This is a developer quite new to the industry and custom music would be a big ask of them, though if they were to take on a more ambitious project in the future at a higher price point, I may expect at least a few custom tracks. Likewise, there is no voice acting in the game but this doesn’t hold it back.
One thing that does let the experience down is the English translation. Frankly, it’s abysmal. While you do still generally get the gist of what’s being talked about the whole time, there are so many grammatical and translation errors that it kept drawing me out of the experience. Faithy Games is quite active in responding to feedback and bug reports so while I don’t expect this to be something they patch with a new translation, I hope they take this on board for their future titles.
The art in the game is quite good for a solo developer. While not outstanding by any means, the fact that there are sprites for all the characters with multiple facial expressions and outfits helps to set the scene each time and shows higher a level of care than some bigger-budget games put in. The background art is nice and each character has a few pieces of higher detail art for their “route” that feel like a nice reward. The UI I feel could do with a little work however as it looks a little clunky and basic compared to the rest of the game, making it feel more like an afterthought.
In conclusion, Sunlight Scream is a very good experience for both its price point and the fact it has predominantly one developer. There is indeed some good replay value in the game where your choices do matter to an extent though I would like it if this was built upon further. While the English translation does drag down the experience some, it’s not to an extent where it’s unplayable and shouldn’t affect your enjoyment of the game too much. I hope Faithy Games takes on board the feedback they’ve been receiving and I’m interested to see where they take things in their next title.
Plaftorms: PC/Switch
Developer: Faithy Games
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