By 
Sometimes, a game starts out amazing, but gradually peters out in some way the longer you get into it. It may be due to things like design directions, narrative choices, and perhaps even gamebreaking issues that keep it from maintaining a certain level of quality and consistency. Unfortunately, that’s an issue with Lover’s Enigma, a new otome game with thriller elements that ends up feeling more about the mystery at hand than relationship development. It’s absolutely gorgeous with some stylistic choices that help hammer home the unsettling nature. The first few hours and two in-game days can be great! But the longer I played, the more I encountered crashes and routes that ended up feeling more rushed than romantic. At least the bugs can be squashed, and it seems we’re already seeing that from the developer FallenCranberry Studio,
Your fiance died. It was an arranged marriage your mother put together and FallenCranberry Studio established that we didn’t love him, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. Especially since it happened so abruptly. However, everyone claims it was a suicide and now your mom is trying to immediately set you up with your childhood friend Ryota. While trying to work things out and keep yourself together, you also find yourself thrown into situations with your neighbor Ren, an exorcist named Haruki, and an obnoxious cult.
FallenCranberry Studio constantly brings up trauma, grief, and elements of horror when discussing Lover’s Enigma, and it’s incredibly valid. It’s more a game about solving mysteries about why a cult is after us, what happened to our late husband, and why so many things seem uncertain, malleable, and unstable. There are a lot of triggers on the product page for things like suicide, mental health issues, and mental and physical violence, and it’s all incredibly valid and true. Even if you’re making the “right” choices and finding your way to a happy ending, this is an incredibly dark game. I would say there should also be a warning for religious fanaticism and abuse tied to that, as it also plays a major part and comes up in a very negative and traumatizing way for our avatar. If you’ve played games like Doki Doki Literature Club and Mouthwashing without any issue, I think you should be fine with the topics broached here. But if other games in this vein bothered you, trying the demo first would be a wise decision.
As for the relationships, everything seems rather rushed and assumed in Lover’s Enigma, which is a no-no for an otome game or dating sim. There’s some outright minor character development that even happens unseen and offscreen. But it’s worst with the love interests, since it’s sort of assumed that the ties are deeper than what we’ve been shown. (Maybe it’s supposed to be due to trauma bonding? I don’t know.) This isn’t an uncommon issue with otome games that are attempting to do it all like tell an action story or delve into mysteries. I do suspect part of the issue here is that FallenCranberry Studio seems to expect someone to play through multiple times. (I won’t explain why, for the sake of avoiding spoilers.) However, I did go through Haruki and Ryota’s full routes and started the Kazuki one, and sometimes felt like the pay-off for going through the additional storylines didn’t seem like it did fill in the blanks in the way I hoped, so to say. As I mentioned before though, the quality of the writing seems stronger early on in the story and when you first meet individuals, so it makes me wonder if it has to do with how things went as development came to a close. (There’s a heavy reliance on ellipses too, which is a bit weird.)
While Lover’s Enigma sometimes feels like it forces you to assume relationships and feelings are there that we don’t always seem properly develop, the set up and artistic direction behind it all is amazing. It truly gets overwhelming and unsettling in the best ways. The art direction shifts and black and white aesthetics at time are fantastic. The character designs are also quite good. I loved seeing interjections at particularly stressful times, acting as visual indicators of what our avatar is going through. It’s so much all at once in ways that make sense and suit the situations.
However, there are some things that feel not as fleshed out as they could be. Again, I wonder if this is a situation similar to the narrative not always coming together or the fact that there’s more “telling” than “showing” with the assumed feelings and relationships. The sanity-adjusting rhythm game, and mechanic itself, didn’t feel all that meaningful. Like I had no trouble getting good endings for Haruki and Ryota with sanity levels.
But more glaring are issues tied to crashes. Lover’s Enigma is pretty buggy. I played it on both a Lenovo Legion Go with the latest firmware and updates and a Windows 11 Dell Inspiron, and it just kept crashing on the gaming PC handheld and laptop. I did make it through Haruki and Ryota’s routes, though a scene at the temple on the fourth day with Haruki did crash a few times before I was able to get through and for some reason I just had horrible luck with crashes at multiple times on day seven with Ryota. To FallenCranberry Studio’s credit, there have been patches released and improvements. However, while writing this review I did fire it up to try to go through Ren’s story and it crashed on the third day at the station, so there’s still some work that needs to be done.
Lover’s Enigma is a great game for folks who are looking for a dark, unsettling mystery with a touch of romance. Especially since the artistic direction is so memorable and well-suited to the tale being told. However, I found it more thrilling than romantic, with some of the relationships feeling rushed or like they didn’t have the strongest foundation to them. It’s also still a bit buggy, though hopefully that will still be addressed in the next few weeks.
Lover’s Enigma is available for PCs.
