As a counter I find the fact that VNs sidestep having to describe all sorts of setting and character related things by just showing you them instead with beautiful art work and at times voice acting.

To me that actually increases the pace instead of slows it down, if you think about what you’re not having to read. I do also dislike reading VNs at a computer, though, so I’ll only get them on portable systems unless it’s REALLY good, like Slay the Princess, and that game would simply not be the same if it were a book, it’s extremely reliant on choice.

I enjoyed Class of 09, one of few VNs designed around English VA and auto-continuation, as well as having very tight comedic timing.

That last one is key that so many games utterly fail at - waiting until the line is completely finished from the VA’s laborious delivery and they’ve completely trailed off before reading the next one.

It depends on the VN and its implementation. The existence of things like Slay the Princess, 999, Raging Loop, Phoenix Wright, AI: The Somnium Files, these are all inextricably linked with player participation and choice, as well as very dense narrative.

Then you have ones like Steins;Gate that don’t have very much choice at all, that’s a lot closer to a book in most respects, but as a blanket VNs are, more often than not, absolutely games.

The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it’s hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.

Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn’t the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it’s largely non-interactive.

Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there’s a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s so much stronger as a game.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people’s fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a bit.

There’s any number of “walking simulators” that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.

These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they’re all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that’s ok. And the semantic debate over what’s a game and what isn’t is just feels vibes based sometimes.

As a German, I don’t mind it at all. I guess it can be a bit confusing when watching German subs/dub. But I always think of it as a neat little easter egg when I come across a German name.

Calling someone “freezing” is stupidly cringe, yes. German verbs generally make for bad and very confusing names. Stroheim is also wrong, it would be Strohheim since it is a compound word of Stroh (straw - as in the dry grass type) and Heim (home, or asylum, depending on the context). In this case here it is even Denglish, as it says “stone gate” but with one word being German - and within German, a space separating a compound word like this, is a “Deppenleerzeichen” (fool’s space). And don’t even get me started on Japanese trying to pronounce German words, especially vocalists in their songs… It’s like little kids singing along to Japanese lyrics. It’s usually not understandable by native speakers. Jäger in Japanese media is often used for Nazi-esque characters btw, like Eren in AoT