Plain

It’s not easy to write a time travel story and avoid paradoxes at the same time, but as long as the action is interesting and the characters intriguing, people are more than willing to turn a blind eye. There’s usually a bigger storyline than the time travel bit, and you can concentrate on it instead, especially if the game in question allows you to make choices.

Plain is a visual novel that allows you to take the role of a young girl by the name of Riley, a sous chef who is tired of her job and wants to move up in the world. The game looks and feels like a regular visual novel at first, but there’s quite a bit of interaction involved, as well some decision-making. On the other hand, don’t expect an awful lot either.

To begin with, Riley is on her way to a glamorous job interview for a spot as a head chef at a fancy restaurant. The job is in a different state, on the other hand, so she has to take a plane there. Unfortunately, everything takes a wrong turn when the plane crashes, but even wronger when a time traveler enters the picture and starts making inquiries about the state of the world.

As mentioned before, you can make many choices along the way, and all of them affect the way the story ends. Every decision has an impact on the plot, and you can change everything if you decide to go through the game multiple times. On the other hand, things are not as complex as in a true adventure game, and the gameplay is fairly simple too.

Even so, it’s worth mentioning that the artwork is very colorful and nicely designed, which helps a lot with the overall atmosphere. Every background is unique, although some of the details are sketchy at best, so you are never really sure what the locations signify. The soundtrack is not bad either, but don’t expect anything too wild in this regard.

When it’s all said and done, Plain could have achieved more with the elements at its disposal, but it falls a bit flat in terms of story and characters. Even so, it has enough interesting ideas to keep you invested until the end at least once.