Pale Carnations

If you have ever been enrolled in higher education or happens to be close to someone that was. You’ll know that it’s all about balance. Sure, you want to let loose, discover yourself, open yourself up to new experiences and ultimately, get your dick wet. However, you also pay a lot of money for the pleasure and you also need to graduate and learn something along the way. Well, this is amplified by one-hundred for medical students as one rough night bar hopping and you could be putting someone’s life at risk. In Pale Carnations, it’s up to you to find this balance or face the consequences.

This game plays like other visual novels such as Depraved Awakening, City Of Broken Dreamers, Desert Stalker and Mist. This game aims to lead you down a dark and dirty path of debauchery. Can you resist the temptation or will you succumb to the vices of the big city? We find out in our review of Pale Carnations.

Bright Lights, Big City

Let’s begin with the story for this title. It would be very easy for this game to lean on its core premise to prop up the rest of the narrative experience. However, this is not the case and the game has quite a well written story with plenty of avenues for the player to walk down freely. You can choose the romantic interest which beat fits your preferred tastes. Then you’ll have to woo them in some sort of way to progress their personal story arc and this will be down to your natural charm if you can pull it off. However, all that flirting better not get in the way of your studying.

Aside from making choices in terms of dialogue, the game also uses a mechanic where you will have to exercise time management to stay in school but equally get your end away. In a way, it’s like a dirtier version of the Persona series. So picture more sex and less anthropomorphized dream monsters.

Then as for the visuals. We would have to say that this is where the game let’s the side down a touch. The visuals are clearly trying to depict a photo realism that the developer is simply not up to. So instead of a hyper-realistic 4K character roster, you get characters that are about as well rendered as a PS3 launch title. We are talking the original Mass Effect at their absolute peak, which in modern day eroge games, simply isn’t good enough to get fans excited and invested.

The Verdict

Overall, we have to say that Pale Carnations is a rather underwhelming and predictable visual novel in truth. The story has some high points for sure and the core concept certainly had legs. However, the end result isn’t anything to get excited about, the characters seem a little disingenuous and lifeless at times. The visuals are far from what they should be and there is a distinct lack of gameplay aside from time management.

Pros

• Story is good in parts
• Core concept is solid
• Fun time management mechanics.

Cons

• Visuals are behind the times
• The story as a whole fails to live up to it’s potential.

As I write this, the third chapter of Pale Carnations has dropped, and this is a game that just keeps getting better and better as more content is added to it. This is a lewd visual novel, and while there is more content to come, what is here is pretty complete, and you can still get a full experience. As far as lewd visual novels go, this does most things right, and the first time I played it, I was hooked. So hooked that each time something new has been added, no matter how small it may be, I have found myself coming back to check it out again.

A Normal Guy….

The setup for the game is very well done. Pale Carnations tells the story of a young man who is a pre-med student, and his life seems pretty laid out in front of him. However, a chance encounter with a childhood friend causes him to go to this rather interesting club. A club that lets people fully embrace their sexual desires, in some cases, their darkest sexual desires, as some of the content here can certainly be “dark” if you get what I am saying. The writing is very well done, and I found myself actually caring about our MC and the ladies that he meets along the way, speaking of which.

In Da Club

The way that the story happens in Pale Carnations is that we, the player, get to make some important choices. As you would expect from a lewd visual novel, there are a handful of love interests for our MC to get to know better. What I liked was that it was not just a case of finding a woman to have sex with. You can actually build a real connection with her. However, the twist here is that we can also decide what kind of person our MC will be. Will you make him a respectable guy, getting his life back on track? Or, will you go the other way and fully embrace this hedonistic and sexual lifestyle?

Scoring Points

As Pale Carnations is a lewd visual novel, you probably have the right idea of what to expect when it comes to the gameplay. The game gives you choices to make at a decent rate; there are never too many, but at the same time, you do feel like you are in control of the story. I do wish that some paths had a few more choices, but I guess more could be added at a later date. While making choices is the main aspect of the gameplay, by doing this, you score points with the ladies, and this is, of course, how you make a relationship develop with them. This is fun stuff, and it means that you will probably have to play the game more than once if you want to see all of the girls, as I found that once you make a choice, you're pretty much committed to that.

An Interesting Club For Sure!

There is something about the visuals of Pale Carnations that is very appealing to me. I am not just talking about the hot chicks with the great bodies or the very lewd acts that happen in the club; I am talking about the way the game looks in general. It is almost like they went for a realistic-looking game and then put a kind of filter over the characters; whatever they did, I really like it. There are some darker themes with the XXX content, but for the most part, the game looks fantastic, and as you do have to build a relationship in the game, even the darker scenes can have more weight to them as a result. The sex scenes are very well done, and while there are plenty of them, they are spaced out enough so that the game is not just purely about watching people have sex.

Pros:

• The MC we played as is interesting
• The whole story of this erotic club was cool
• There are different love interests
• I felt like my choices actually mattered

Cons:

• As of writing, no word on when the next chapter will be
• This has been in the works for a very long time