Game: The Cherry Orchard
Genre: Visual Novel
System: PC (Steam)
Developer|Publisher: Team Dogpit
Price: UK £5.19 | US $6.29| EU $ 5,12
Release Date: November 20th, 2020
Review code provided with many thanks to Team Dogpit
A Night at the Theatre
The Cherry Orchard is a visual novel adaptation of a classic play by Anton Chekhov. The story follows an aristocrat who is having some debt troubles who seeks the assistance of a gentleman to help find a way out of debt. The story revolves around a small cast of characters and mildly touches on themes of serfdom, elitism and a changing society. All of which are crammed into a run time of about 1 hour.
Does it get its points across? I guess it does but I feel this is a play some will watch and feel pretty bored while others may going away thinking about the themes until they get their hands on a good cup of coffee. It certainly made me more interested to learn about the actual play this title was based on that’s for sure. From that research I have to say I was much more interested in the original play than the developers interpretation here.Â
No Gameplay Just Watch
Once you press play in the main menu you simply watch and potentially enjoy. The majority of the experience plays as a long cutscene The art style feels similar to a comic book surrounded by this pinky-purple colour palette. For the most part it works and I liked what the developers were attempting to create. Its just a bit odd to see such a short game have graphical glitches. Sometimes the textures of characters didn’t appear smooth or render correctly. The game often tries to throw in these odd artistic moments where a character might morph into a different persona or the background might have a odd light display. But a lot of the time these felt very out of place and didn’t flow with the story. At times the game will randomly just jump to static images with dialogue running along the bottom of the screen like many visual novel style games. It just feels as if the game should have played out fully as a cutscene rather than randomly switching between these styles. Especially since the player really has no control but to watch the experience play out. Though the game does allow you to skip between each bit of dialogue back and forth as well as fast-forwarding making capturing screenshots easy for me.
Speak up
For the most part the acting is pretty good. The voice actors do a decent job reading their lines. The developers advertise that the dialogue was recorded as if the actors were in a theatre together. This didn’t appear to come across in-game. The audio levels for each character didn’t sync well with the random background music which just seemed to cut in randomly for no reason and was far too loud. By playing with the audio settings I managed to balance it better.
Curtain Call
The Cherry Orchard is an interesting attempt to bring the theatre experience to video games. Audio issues, graphical glitches and art design that just didn’t seem to come together as well as it should make this hard to recommend to anyone but the most die hard of theatre lovers.
The credit I will give the title is it did remind me of the good times I had going to the theatre when I was younger. But in those moments of reminiscing I was reminded how much I would rather just watch the theatre production of the title this is based on. I actually feel one day the theatre experience will come to video games effectively. But as the Cherry Orchard shows we’re not quite there yet.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure
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