By Jim Rossignol on June 21st, 2012 at 5:00 pm.
Arty indie types MoaCube – whose lovely Co-Op is worth a look – have just released the beautiful and ominous-sounding visual novel Cinders, which is a lavishly illustrated retelling of the Cinderella story. They reckon it’s a “serious” approach to the famous story, which ditches the original protagonist in favour of a “story about balancing freedom and dreams with circumstance and harsh reality; about growing up and finding out the true meaning of independence.” Yes, you know the sort of thing, I suspect.
It’s got a demo, so you can play a sample of the thing. And a trailer, which you can look at below.
Thanks to Cliff for the tip.
21/06/2012 at 17:12 drakkheim says:
not to be confused with the recently released (and very good) novel Cinder, which retells Cinderella with a sci-fi twist including cyborgs, robots & moon princesses.
I wonder if Cinders will be released on a tablet version, the whole sitting at a desk and reading from the monitor never seems to have caught on.
21/06/2012 at 18:02 yhancik says:
or with the C++ library http://libcinder.org/ (which is precisely what I thought about when reading the title)
21/06/2012 at 17:13 AmateurScience says:
Beginning with ‘A story you thought you know well’ does not bode well for the rest of the game.
Positive: looks lovely.
Edit: Fears assuaged, thanks!
21/06/2012 at 17:17 Vinraith says:
Exactly my thought. A game dependent entirely on the quality of its writing that can’t keep tense straight in the first line of its trailer? Not promising.
21/06/2012 at 17:55 TeeGee says:
Hi, Tom from MoaCube here.
Yeah, sorry about that. I’m not a native English speaker and I’ve made that stupid mistake in the trailer. The in-game text is written by professional writers and not me however. Now I feel embarrassed as hell :P.
21/06/2012 at 18:00 Vinraith says:
Mostly we’re just poking fun. :)
21/06/2012 at 18:08 TeeGee says:
You still have a point. And I still feel stupid about that.
Anyway, lots of work went into the game and we tried to make it so that it also appeals to people who wouldn’t normally touch a visual novel. Try it out :).
23/06/2012 at 02:20 BubuIIC says:
I’m sorry, but can someone explain the mistake in that sentence? (Also non-native speaker here :-))
23/06/2012 at 10:44 Shadowcat says:
Past tense: “A story you thought you knew well”
Present tense: “A story you think you know well”
21/06/2012 at 17:18 Dana says:
Visual Novels always seemed like an inbreed baby of Comic (Im sorry, Graphic Novel) and PowerPoint presentation to me.
21/06/2012 at 17:48 wavedash says:
Combining two things doesn’t always result in half of one and half of the other.
21/06/2012 at 17:56 dE says:
The combination thing makes up for some really odd moments though.
Having roleplayers explain their “quarter dragon, quarter demon, quarter elf, rest whatever was present at the time” characters ends up weird enough.
21/06/2012 at 18:03 yhancik says:
Too rarely do trailers feature item selection in main menus.
21/06/2012 at 18:15 Shazbut says:
Dear developers,
It looks lovely, but I wonder if it would be possible to get the artist to draw character figures in different poses. It brings some much needed dynamism to a medium that can otherwise feel very static.
21/06/2012 at 18:27 TeeGee says:
Characters do have different poses in the final game.
21/06/2012 at 19:14 Petethegoat says:
The demo was rather enjoyable. It’s pretty expensive, though, so I’ll probably hold off on this for now.
21/06/2012 at 20:27 niuyys says:
http://is.gd/PFQQs4