ARK

People have come up with a variety of interesting scenarios when it comes to the apocalypse, ranging from zombies, to diseases, asteroids of acts of God. The end itself is not the most interesting part, however, since it’s a lot more exciting to describe what happens when the world is destroyed, yet some people manage to survive.

ARK is an interactive visual novel that takes place on a space station after the Earth is shrouded by nuclear fallout. Things have evolved quite a bit in the meantime, and people have left the planet in order to seek shelter in the cold vastness of space. Thus, they live on five different space stations at the edge of the solar system, which is where the story takes place.

You play the role of a scientist who is hired by a powerful organization to work in one of their research labs, which is where most of the action unfolds. Although everything goes pretty well at first, but things start to get weird after a while. Most of the people on board harbor dark and terrible secrets, and you inevitably get involved in them by working there.

Dialog is a very important part of the game, because you can ask the other characters a variety of questions in order to find out more about the story. It would appear that it doesn’t really matter what you ask or what you say most of the time, which is a bit of a bummer, but at least it’s not a boring, self-driving experience like with most other visual novels out there.

As far as the artwork is concerned, there are not too many different environments to admire, given the fact that most of them are sci-fi-looking and quite similar. However, the characters are pretty interesting, especially since almost all of them possess some kind of special ability. On the other hand, sometimes they look pretty flat or out of place, although you can get over this easily enough.

ARK is quite the engaging project, but it’s not as deep as it tries to be, unfortunately. Hence, some of the sci-fi concepts fall flat and do not make too much sense, regardless of how open your mind is.