Laid-back road trip
(Played on OneXPlayer Windows gaming tablet through Steam in English)
The Steam Deck might have appeared as the first handheld device that runs Steam games, but as this PC Gamer article point out, there are at least 3 Windows gaming tablets allow us to take Steam games on the go. Personally, I think such devices would benefit Kinetic visual novels exclusive to Steam a lot. I cannot see myself reading through the base story of Highway Blossoms without owning one of those tablets anyway.
Highway Blossoms is a story about road trip in America and it is quite anime. Not just with big eyes on the 2 girls who falling love with each other but their character architypes as well. The point-of-view character Amber was driving in the RV she inherited from her recently deceased grandfather before she picked up the ever-cheerful Marina stranded on the side of road. The latter was on a treasure hunt so the next a dozen or so of hours in game is about they looked for gold but eventually found each other.
If you took the advice of Jeff Grestmann and watched Laid-back Camp, then Highway Blossoms would read like the 18 and above fan fiction (With the patch on Steam and the developers’ website of course.) for that comic adaption to you. Amber and Rin are both people prefer to be alone yet not minding some company they can keep, while Marina and Nadeshiko are just constant rays of sunshine.
Even with the in-game English voice acting, I can almost hear Nao Toyama and Yumiri Hanamori, the Japanese voices behind Rin and Nadeshiko respectively, when Amber and Marina talk. Maybe more so with Nao Toyama, as highly internalized Rin was a new challenge to her back in 2018, while Amber being a tsuntere firecracker is more in line with characters she played earlier in her career.
Highways Blossoms is overall a romantic comedy, especially compared to 2020’s melodramatic A Summer’s End, another well-written visual novel about queer romance between pretty girls. But it does have the inherent vice of romcom: the overtly dramatic home stretch.
After the first time the girls went down on each other (Again, one needs the patch to actually see it happening. The girls in game is above 18, so don’t about being accused of accessing child pornography.), the issue of the point-of-view character would surface and it had to be dealt with in dramatic way rather than brushed off comedically. In case of Highway Blossoms, the way it’s handled does lift it out of happy-go-lucky-do anime bullshit and into the realm of serious literature. And it wraps around nicely by the end. Still about 10 hours of hearing “crap” and “screw”, it’s jarring to suddenly to hear “shit” and “fuck” said.
Kinetic visual novel is a type of visual novel with no player choices in them. Think them as e-book with pictures. Cannot see too many people wants to sit in front of their expensive gaming rig just to read words and watch pictures move. Some of them from bigger developers would have more of a cinematic flourish to them, but Highway Blossoms is humble and indie as it gets without struck in the pixel land. Reading 2 girls slowly but surely falling in love each in a busy train cart is a mediating and laid-back experience that people should not deny themselves to.