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Review of Wanderlust Travel Stories

SubjectWanderlust Travel Stories
ByHelpfulness: 1
Vote: 7
publicnuisance on 2021-04-14
ReviewWanderlust is certainly a different flavor of visual novel as what I am used to. You basically steer various stories that a group of tourists tell each other as they explore and interact with each other on vacation. Through this you learn more about them as well as shape certain parts of the stories. With this many different mini stories some are bound to resonate more with you than others. I really enjoyed the “Sea Fever” story about a father and daughter taking separate trips through the Antarctic at the same time as well as a story about a woman travelling through Africa to get to her daughter in time for the birth of her grandchild. I was not a big fan of the story of that same woman taking her grandchild to Coney Island as I felt it tried to hard to shoehorn politics into the story in a way that felt unnatural. I also felt that Tomek’s story about meeting a woman one day in Barcelona had a very sudden end that left to much unexplored. One thing I will say is that regardless of whether I enjoyed the story or not all of the stories in the game had a crazy amount of detail to them about the locations and journeys. The developers must have done a great deal of research about them because everything from cuisine; language; locations; methods of travel; local politics; etc seemed authentic and made you feel like you were there. The art work featured in game was great but it was only of locations and wildlife. It would have been nice to get some pictures of the characters as well. There were plenty of choices to make in some stories but others had very few. The stories ranged from one to two hours on the high end to fifteen to thirty minutes on the low end. The music was also fairly good and well used.

I played Wanderlust on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any glitches. I did notice one grammar mistake where a sentence said “who was lived in Uganda” where it should have been “who has lived in Uganda”. There were quite a few words in the game so one mistake isn’t a big deal. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game saves every time you exit the game. There is only one save game allowed at a time. I would have preferred a manual save system.

Game Engine: Unity
Save System: On Exit
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: 1.5.10.1911021518

GPU Usage: 9-20 %
VRAM Usage: 435-708 MB
CPU Usage: 3-12 %
RAM Usage: 1.6-2.4 GB

Overall while I enjoyed some stories and not others I would say the game was solid. It had an interesting overarching story mechanic; great detail in the stories; as well as great art and music. I finished the game in six hours and twenty one minutes. I paid $5.99 CAD for the game and felt that was a great value for what I got. The normal price of $17.49 CAD is a tougher sell for me. Overall if you enjoy visual novels I feel there is something here for you.

My Score: 7/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.1 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.0.1 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.11.10-1-MANJARO
1 point