Notch - The Innocent LunA: Eclipsed SinnerS

About Notch - The Innocent LunA: Eclipsed SinnerS

Notch - The Innocent LunA: Eclipsed SinnerS is a visual novel by Angels Blue Digital Entertainment, first released in 2012 and published in English on Steam by DigitalEZ in June 2015. It belongs to the studio's Notch series and its story comes in two parts, the Alpha and Omega episodes.

The story is set in an isolated town, a place of memories its own people have forgotten. That summer the murders begin. Old memories wake, the townsfolk start to escape into dreams of ruin and rebirth, and they wake to find the people they love gone. The narrator, Yuhito, has a dream full of death and then finds that the nightmare has not ended when he opens his eyes.

You read the story in text boxes over painted backgrounds and anime-style character art, with music and sound effects that follow the text. At set moments the game offers a choice, such as whether to deny what a character said, and those choices split the story into branching routes. The store page promises more than ten hours of story and 14 endings. Ten of those are bad endings, one reviewer counted, and many of them end in a sudden death. HowLongToBeat's players put one run through the main story at about seven and a half hours, so the ten hours is closer to what you'd spend chasing the other endings too.

The horror is in the murders, the blood-soaked scenes and the doubt about what is real, more than in jump scares. Its English translation from Chinese is stiff in places, which some reviewers mind and many players do not. It suits readers of murder-mystery visual novels such as Higurashi When They Cry who like a story that keeps turning.

It's sold on Steam and on GOG, for Windows only. Text and voice come in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

How to play Notch - The Innocent LunA: Eclipsed SinnerS

1. Start a new game and click to advance the text.
2. Read each scene; the art and sounds show what the narrator sees.
3. When a choice appears, pick one; it decides which route the story takes.
4. Save before each choice so you can come back to it.
5. After an ending, load an earlier save and choose differently to find the other routes and endings.

Tips

• Save often and in different slots: many choices lead to sudden bad endings.
• Keep notes of which choices led to which ending to find the good ones.
• The two episodes, Alpha and Omega, are told in order; play through rather than skipping ahead.
• Animated sequences can't be skipped, even on a replay, so expect the hunt for every ending to take a while.

Questions