The Freak Circus is a really good game.
I wouldn't call it the 'best game ever made' or 'the greatest game of all time'— mostly because we tend to think of more traditional video games with that label (like Skyrim or Pokemon or Minecraft). It still is a game, of course— a visual novel!
In that regard I would call The Freak Circus more like a story, an interactive story that you are part of as the player. Stories can be complex, just as much as the characters within them. You can have really bad stories with hollow themes and one-dimensional characters, a pace that moves too quickly or slowly or plot points that make absolutely no sense.
But you can also have good stories— stories that have characters with their own feelings and perceptions and preferences, a compelling plot or world that immerses you, of conflicts and issues that feel organic and genuine as are the solutions to those issues. Sometimes good stories are messy. Sometimes they're painful. Often times, they bring out emotions from us because we can genuinely empathize with the characters and their pain, their joy, their anger.
And I would call The Freak Circus a really good story at its heart. Neko has done a fantastic job with telling a story about a group of traumatized individuals who have bonded with one another and have tried to make a life for themselves.... but that trauma has not healed. It is still there, still gripping each of them in different ways and severities. Grief is a horrible pain, one that I myself have experienced in many different ways (the loss of a family member, the loss of friendships, the loss of health or connection with people I've known), and it can do a lot of things to a person.
One could even say that grief is a theme of The Freak Circus, grief and autonomy and how they impact us and how we see the world and its peoples. How do you move forward when something horribly traumatic happens to you? When you've lost someone you've cared about? When you've been abused and starved?
All of the circus is grieving in some way or another, and all of them have some trauma with a sense of their own autonomy and their inherent right to it, to make decisions and have their own feelings on something.
And then there's you, the MC, the player character.
Through your actions and decisions, you can decide how this story may end— through the route that you follow, you can decide whether you fall for Pierrot, for Harlequin, for both of them at the same time or not at all. These are all separate routes, and each one handles these themes of grief and autonomy differently because these characters all have their own stories to tell and growth to go through.
If you happen to choose the route where you romance both Pierrot and Harlequin at the same time (a polyamorous route), they may also develop feelings for one another at same time. These feelings may have been there before, they also might not— these feelings may be romantic, but it’s up to the player on how they choose to interpret them.
If you don’t like the possibility that Pierrot and Harlequin could have romantic feelings for eachother AND you as the player character in that polyamorous route, then this game may not be the story for you.
There nothing wrong if that makes you uncomfortable and you choose to avoid it, you don’t need a reason to dislike it— but that possibility will be there in one of the four routes currently planned for the game. You as the MC choose how these character heal from their pain and trauma. How they grow and change as characters together and alone and with the MC.
Because this isn’t a dating game or an otome— it’s a visual novel. It’s a story, and it’s a damn good story at that. And your version of that story might be different from someone else’s and that’s okay. The fact that a possibility exists that two of these traumatized characters might find healing and forgiveness and romance in one another alongside the love and warmth of the MC at the same time in a polyamorous relationship is okay.
But if that possibility, the mere possibility genuinely upsets you, then I say with empathy, honesty and respect to your own mental health that you might need to go find another game that suits what you’re looking for.
pixelskylines
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