9 Most Accessible Visual Novels

2 hours ago 1

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Despite their relative obscurity in the mainstream, visual novels are one of the oldest and most prominent genres of modern video game, dating as far back as the early 80s. They were particularly huge in Japan, serving as an interesting way for developers to tell stories and tinker with puzzles and gameplay. Despite their prominence in the back annals of gaming history, visual novels are still somewhat niche, due in part to the prevalence of even more niche subject matters like dating sims.

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Niche though they may be, I think it’s important for everyone to try at least one visual novel or similar type of game. Yeah, maybe reading or listening to a story isn’t what you play a game for, but getting into visual novels can help tune you into all kinds of fascinating stories and settings. To help you get your foot in the door, these are some visual novels that have received a noteworthy amount of acclaim, tell stories that are fairly easy to wrap your head around, and are less likely to get you any sideways looks from your friends.

For the purposes of this list, we’re broadening the scope of “visual novel” to include narrative-centric, cinematic games and walking simulators. If the point is to experience the story, it’s the same basic idea.

9 Venba

Cooking Links Generations

The concept of “family recipes” is about more than just having an easy reference to make something for dinner on Wednesdays. It’s a tangible link to your family and heritage, a sensation from the past you can create in the present to rekindle fond memories. This is why cooking is the central thematic element behind Venba.

Venba is the tale of an Indian family who immigrates to Canada circa-1980, and their struggles to both adapt to a new culture and make ends meet. Most of the game shows Venba sharing her hopes and struggles with her husband Paavalan and son Kavin, dotted with her attempts to restore her mother’s old recipes in the kitchen. These segments are technically puzzles, requiring you to intuit steps and ingredients on damaged pages, though the game will help you along if you’re having trouble.

Venba is a very concise demonstration of the immigrant experience, including the difficulties of changing cultures and the fear of losing your own cultural roots. It’s the kind of cozy, quiet story that might make you hungry for something a parent made you when you were very little.

8 Her Story

Watch, Listen, Learn

A critical weakness of the Sega CD-era FMV games is that they tried to keep to established gameplay norms while integrating unchanging camera footage. Obviously, you can’t do that, or at least not well, as traditional gameplay will almost certainly deviate from the footage. As Her Story demonstrates, the best way to make an FMV game work is to let the footage speak for itself, then build a game around it.

Her Story is an interactive film in which you sift through a police database, watching recorded interviews of a woman named Hannah Smith in an effort to solve the mystery of her missing husband. The interviews are cut short and out of order, so you need to use the database’s sorting tools to piece together context clues and apply identifying tags in order to bring the big picture in line.

The appeal of Her Story, as with any mystery visual novel, is in the “a-ha” moment. You feel like you’re just watching clips, not quite getting the full scope of what the game is putting down, then all of a sudden, you stumble upon a critical detail, and everything snaps into place. The performance of Hannah’s actress, Viva Seifert, certainly goes a long way toward giving the completed picture its true weight.

7 The Beginner’s Guide

A Game About Making Games

Any act of creation, gaming or otherwise, can be both miniscule and monumental, depending on the scope of the undertaking and your personal experience with it. Making games, for some people, is a deeply personal process, one that may be difficult to understand from an outside perspective. A game that attempts to illustrate this process is The Beginner’s Guide.

The Beginner’s Guide stars a fictionalized version of Davey Wredon, the creator of The Stanley Parable, as he introduces you to the works of his developer friend Coda. Davey guides you through several of Coda’s independent games, trying to piece together their developmental process and personal feelings as they go, while bringing some mildly uncomfortable truths to light in the process.

The Beginner’s Guide is a game that’ll really make you think. In fact, it’s made so many people think so many different things, the real Wredon has gone on record that the game has no singular interpretation. However you parse this story, it might just say more about you than it does Wredon.

6 The Walking Dead

An Apocalypse Makes Monsters of Us All

Prior to 2012, Telltale Games dealt primarily in traditional point-and-click adventure games with established licenses like Sam & Max and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. It was the release of the company’s episodic Walking Dead game that shifted its overall direction toward interactive narratives, which would remain its primary offerings until the company’s shuttering in 2018.

While based on the comic and television series of the same name, The Walking Dead tells an original story in the same setting, revolving around an escaped convict named Lee and his efforts to care for a little girl, Clementine, in the midst of the worsening zombie apocalypse. The game’s primary feature is that it regularly asks you to choose between several dialogue choices or actions, which can have rippling consequences later down the line.

While not a visual novel in the traditional sense, The Walking Dead has all the same ingredients that make one up, more or less, and is a memorable, heartbreaking story to boot. The first season’s last major setpiece still has the power to rattle players all these years later.

5 Dispatch

Telltale’s choices-matter games had a real impact on the narrative-focused sphere of the industry, arguably one larger than the company itself. It was this same basic framework that inspired a team of former Telltale staff to go into business for themselves, though unlike with Telltale’s games, their subsequent creation, Dispatch, is an entirely new IP.

Dispatch is an interactive narrative about Robert, better known as the superhero Mecha Man, who goes to work as a superhero dispatching agent when his mecha suit is totaled. His team is made up of former supervillains, so he’ll need to wrangle and inspire them toward being their best selves, all while trying to get his suit repaired on the side.

10 Best Games Like Dispatch

Our picks for the best narrative games similar in style to Dispatch.

Dispatch is of comparable or greater quality to most current television series, with a take on superhero media equal parts sardonic and optimistic, backed by some excellent performances from a variety of top-shelf voice actors. While not the main focus, the game’s primary dispatching gameplay mode is also surprisingly addicting, to the point that my fellow writer Elena Chapella sincerely wished it had an endless mode.

4 VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action

Time to Mix Drinks and Change Lives

You always hear about bartenders being great listeners, though I’ve never actually spoken at length with one. Maybe if I lived in a cyberpunk dystopia like the one in VA-11 Hall-A, I’d have more to talk about over an elaborate cocktail.

VA-11 Hall-A, as its subtitle implies, is set in a small back-alley bar in the midst of a sprawling neo-futuristic city. The water’s full of nanomachines, the cops are armed with deadly force, and everyone could use a stiff drink. That’s the job of bartender Jill Stingray, who endeavors to make exactly what her customers order, then listen quietly while they talk about what’s getting them down about this less-than-lovely future they live in.

VA-11 Hall-A’s gameplay element, that being mixing drinks, is very subtle, yet the whole story pivots on its success. You need to not only guess what your patrons want based on context clues in their dialogue, but occasionally intuit when you should give them something they specifically didn’t ask for in the interest of their health, physical or emotional. It’s got a fun cast of regular faces, kind of like if the cast of Cheers was a little younger and more cybernetically-enhanced.

3 Coffee Talk

Time to Blend Coffee and Change Lives

Booze isn’t the only kind of drink someone stops into a place of business for. The modern world runs on coffee, after all, and everyone could use a fresh cup at any given hour of the day. Apparently, this also goes for the creatures of myth and folklore in Coffee Talk.

Coffee Talk is set in a contemporary fantasy world where elves, orcs, fairies, and other mythological folk intermingle with humanity on the streets of San Francisco, everyone just trying their hardest to go about their lives. You’re an unnamed barista, sole owner and proprietor of the titular late-night café, providing steamy caffeine to those who need it and serving as a quiet sounding board for their current troubles.

Coffee Talk has a very similar energy to VA-11 Hall-A, what with the emphasis on making drinks based on context clues. The difference in setting and tone, however, makes it a much lower-key, chiller experience. It’s less “I need booze because the world is horrible” and more “I need coffee to help me finish a project for work,” with an equally lovable cast of fae folk and monster hybrids.

2 Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

If Only Real Trials Were This Interesting

I’m not sure that I would call any visual novel “mainstream,” but if there were any series to ever get within spitting distance of the opportunity, it would probably be Ace Attorney. Originally debuting in 2001 as a Japan-exclusive Game Boy Advance title, it made the leap to the west in 2005 for the Nintendo DS, and has become one of Capcom’s most surprisingly stalwart IPs in the years since.

The very first game in the series, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, follows the career of the titular lawyer, a rookie in the field with not a lot of confidence and a whole lot to prove. With a dedication to his clients, a fierce hunger for the truth, and quite a pair of shouting lungs, he dismantles tricky murder mysteries, meeting a variety of odd characters along the way.

I have no particular interest in legal dramas, but there’s something about Ace Attorney that makes court proceedings far more interesting and engaging. It’s probably the consistently weird circumstances surrounding nearly every case and the shocking turnabouts that flip the whole thing on its head, not to mention some very memorable characters. It’s certainly not accurate to real-life legal procedures, as many YouTube lawyers can attest, but as long as that doesn’t bother you, there’s plenty of fun to be had.

1 Of the Devil

Next-Gen Murder Mysteries

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

nth Circle Studios

February 2025

As certain visual novel franchises like the aforementioned Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, and Umineko have accrued retroactive interest in the west, newer indie developers have started taking their shots at their respective tropes and frameworks. One of the most interesting attempts at a new visual novel to come out in recent memory is Of the Devil.

Like Ace Attorney, Of the Devil follows a criminal defense attorney, Morgan. The difference is that the game is set in the year 2086, a full-on dystopian cyberpunk surveillance state where around 98% of criminals are immediately caught in the act by cameras or modded eyes. As a state-sponsored lawyer, Morgan takes on those remaining few cases that even hi-tech solutions can’t crack, treating the courtroom like her own personal high-stakes casino.

Of the Devil has, and I say this with no intended hyperbole, some of the best character writing I have seen in any piece of fiction, visual novel or otherwise. The setting is much more grounded in actual legal procedure, while the mystery-solving portions follow strong, consistent logic that necessitate careful consideration of the evidence at hand. At the time of writing, it’s technically not finished, with only two of its five planned episodes released, but even in this state, it is absolutely worth playing.