A beautiful horror game where your choices matter | Review - Paper Lily - Chapter 1

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✨Overview

Paper Lily - Chapter 1 is a narrative-driven psychological horror RPG developed by Leef 6010. It is the sequel to the highly rated standalone prologue game known as Project Kat released last 2021. Finally fully released as a free-to-play game a few days ago, Paper Lily - Chapter 1, much like its predecessor Project Kat, presents a unique blend of storytelling, a horror atmosphere, and puzzle RPG elements. As indicated by the Chapter 1 subtitle, it marks only the beginning of a larger series of Paper Lily chapters and effectively serves as its demo

🟩Pros +Compelling Narrative +Beautiful art style; from anime art design to the chibi character sprites +Varied and interesting puzzles with multiple solutions +Player freedom and multiple endings +Free-to-Play 🟥Cons -Jump scares that feels unnecessary -Some puzzles can be frustrating and unforgiving

⭐️Score: 8/10

📖Story and Premise

The narrative centers around Lacie, a character grappling with a traumatic event, suffering from depression and bullying. As players delve into the game, they uncover Lacie's quest for answers about her peculiar condition. The main character Lacie is solidly written, realistically flawed, and well believable. Perhaps also relatable to many people, resonating with players who can connect with her struggles. The storytelling feels like a visual novel experience — full of text-based dialogue and great still artwork — while presenting choices that impact the narrative and can lead to multiple endings. The game anticipates players making mistakes and thus by design there are narrative dead-ends and 'untimely endings’ in the story. Its like these story-rich rogue-like games where the endless loop of runs are integrated into the narrative. Chapter 1 is standalone and is around four to five hours long, but there are minor connections to the aforementioned Prologue game Project Kat. 🎨Visuals and Art

The game seamlessly transitions between highly detailed and beautiful anime-style artwork for ‘Big picture’ scenes like character dialogues or pivotal story scenes, pixel art characters in menus, and chibi character sprites during gameplay. This visual variety is great and creates a visually engaging environment that complements the game's psychological horror theme, especially with the juxtaposition of the seemingly innocent and cheerful anime-style artwork with the horror elements during unsettling and surreal set pieces. 🎮Gameplay Paper Lily adopts a top-down retro-style with chibi-like characters and a pixelated world view. The core gameplay revolves around decision-making, puzzle-solving, and exploration. The controls are intuitive and easy to grasp — and it mostly centers on moving around, interacting with key items, and navigating the menus to view objectives and use items, this allows players to focus on the task at hand and uncover the story, or die trying, again and again. The game starts off very cozy feeling — almost like a slice of life game focused on telling a depressing story about a girl, but a few minutes in, you could tell the game is headed for an eerie psychological horror direction — even without knowing anything about the game beforehand. Paper Lily is filled with interesting and varied puzzles. Not every puzzle was a hit for me, but the majority of them are solid; from simple instructions and checklists to riddles and audiovisual utilization. The game encourages the player to pay attention to be able to find the supposed solution to all of the puzzles, although sometimes I find pure trial and error working for me just fine, and the game has no problem with you doing that as well. The solutions can become a bit unforgiving and might require you to redo a section again and again, but the does game give you a lot of freedom on how to solve puzzles, and with this freedom of choice also comes multiple possible endings. However, as is usual with these horror titles, jumpscares are one of my most hated elements, and unfortunately, Paper Lily wasn’t spared. There are a few cheap jumpscares in the game that I did not like, and the experience would have been much better for me if they were not included. There is also a presence of a relentless monster that you cannot fight back (another element that I hate) in some sections causing jump scares and instant deaths could create a sense of frustration and disrupt the overall enjoyment. 📊Technical Performance Chapter 1 ran without any issues for me although I would have loved some nice quality-of-life features such as the ability to totally skip or fast forward texts when replaying a section after dying or during subsequent playthroughs, although the game does include a skip accessibility option for many parts and does feature a checkpoint system on top of a save-point system. ⚖️Conclusion

Paper Lily - Chapter 1 showcases an impressive fusion of narrative richness, atmospheric horror, and liberating puzzle-solving gameplay. Beyond these compelling elements, the game boasts a visually stunning art style that permeates every aspect of its design from the anime-style stills to the Chibi sprites. But that's not all - it’s completely Free of charge. Definitely a must-try if the idea of this game even slightly interests you.

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