Brain Bubble: This Cyber-Yuri Game Hurt My Brain (and My Eyes)
Operation Eventide is a visual novel by Kolulu. It's a queer narrative, a bio-mechanical take on Magical Girl fiction, that goes as hard on the scientific aspect as it does on the gay interactions. It is visually captivating, with a particular, keen (as in, horny) eye on cybernetics. I had a rather enthusiastic first impression on this diegesis based solely on its premise.
The world of Eventide is conceptually large, filled with unknowable eldritch terrors, machine body horrors attacking the planet and magical girls fighting them off; they are referred to as Aberrations and Arbiters, respectively. The plot isn't really about a large-scale conflict for the future of mankind, though. It's about what comes next, to live after the trauma as the world trudges on in whatever passes for the new "Normal." It's about body dysphoria, disability and humanity.
These days, I enjoy science fiction (or, indeed, anything of the fantastical persuasion) when it grounds itself in a more intimate exploration of the human experience. When the cosmic-level stakes are a background, a backstory or a setting informing a more personal story.
Adelle, a former Arbiter, awakens after a five years long coma to discover she didn't die battling The Final Boss. A quirky scientist, Miriam, has rebuilt her with robotic prosthetics in an effort to restore her body.
She seems totally trustworthy, by the way.
The early portions of the game focus on Adelle's distraught feelings on this matter. The alien sensation of the mechanical limbs, the perceived loss of her identity, both as a soldier and as a person, the disdain and fear of machines tied to her traumatic past in the war. All are tackled in excruciating detail as she's forced to adjust to her new life.
It's not all bad, though. She's surrounded by a lovely cast of fun, quirky babes who drive her insane at every interaction. Other than Miriam, there's her ex-girlfriend with whom she had a rough breakup and... a weirdly out-of-place demon girl that looks like a character from a Disgaea game.
On paper, this sounds great. A good time to be had, all around. Well, not quite. I have a few, subjective grievances to air, a not-insignificant criticism in regards to the writing style and pacing. I shall carefully calibrate my words but this may still come across as a backhanded compliment: I do believe the prose is too "smart" for its own good.
Now, let me preface that whole tangent by passionately praising the characters and their interactions. The dialogues have a naturalistic flow to them, making for delightful back-and-forth conversations, enriched by nuanced dynamics.
I enjoy learning about the girls' inner turmoil as they all struggle with self-perception, self-loathing, feeling detached from their own body and the world around them which, in turn, re-contextualizes how they intersect with each other - Adelle is a perennially yet justifiably grumpy jerk, for example.
Miriam's high-minded scientific dissertations feel like natural exchanges, they fit the character and tell us more about her mindset - even if I can't understand most of what she's saying and could have really used a lexicon. Celia is drowning in guilt, unresolved grief and I can't even begin to tell you about Akira, the weird Etna cosplayer.
Generally, this VN excels in the characterization aspect, in giving texture and pathos to its already memorable cast. That is why it's a shame that the prose (as in, the incessant monologues) gets in the way of that natural flow, bogging down the overall pacing as a result.
These characters have a rich inner world, one they tend to express with an inordinate amount of aphorisms, allusions, metaphors, analogies and everything in-between. It's the kind of overwrought text that yearns to be evocative but it's actually exhausting to read.
It's made worse when the game has to inevitably address the setting itself, the backstories and the larger overarching narrative, resulting in prolonged expositions written in that style. It's a classic case of an overly ambitious title caught up in its own momentum.
However, I refuse to be the kind of person who would criticize a small, indie project for being too big for its britches. If anything, I respect and encourage this behaviour. Go big, make mistakes, learn from said mistakes, try again, hone your craft, and always create what you want to create!
Eventide still works best as an intimate character exploration, mind and body, and I seldom have encountered a work of fiction that could offer me a mature take on Transhumanism, phantom pain and internalized ableism. Alas, I cannot bring myself to fully embrace it.
Several hours, 140k words and a pair of egregiously strained eyes later, I must conclude that Operation Eventide is... fine. Once again, I want to applaud the effort on display. The distinct flavour of its world and many moving parts is simultaneously subtle and Larger-Than-Anime. There was a strong vision of hard-nosed science fiction, in open conflict with the decisively unscientific Magical Girl genre, emphasized by the erotic fusion of machinery and flesh. The chimeric understanding of the Soul and the human condition haunting the vistas of its theming.
It's high-end objectum fetish rewired as a means to explore Personhood smack-dabbed in the middle of large beefy brained scientific/spiritual/philosophical queries, and it's a little bit much. Its verbosity on that front is compounded by the aforementioned drawn-out prose.
I would be tempted to say that it's a solid work of fiction that has room for improvement and simply leave it at... Except, I can't leave it at that because there's more Operation Eventide for me to read!
Let me tell you this: if I had legibility issues with the first game, then its prequel (aptly named DOLOROSA) has only made my life significantly worse.
The central premise is about the relationship between Slater and Lucielle (two women barely present in the original work), the doctor tasked to test the limits of an Arbiter's regenerative abilities and the magical girl in her "care." It gets somewhat gory but not too much. By my significantly skewed standards, that is.
What's remarkable about Slater as a character is that she's absolutely insufferable. Her inner thoughts are akin to a mental Venus fly trap, she's got unresolved issues off the wazoo and she has a few worrying tendencies when it comes to flesh bodies and "creative" torture methods. And yet, compared to someone like Lavandula, the one who's in charge of all these girls, the woman who's been grooming every single Arbiter into her ideal sex object to a, frankly, absurd degree of shamelessness, Slater almost seems like a caring, kind person.
On second thought, I cannot even be bothered with the plot summary.
I must force myself to accept that the Operation Eventide games are physically incompatible with me.
The first one already had an issue with the way the unending internal monologues would constantly beat around the bush, trapped within imaginary debates, philosophical and pseudo-scientific quandaries, making the story weirdly difficult to parse.
To be clear, understanding the actual plot of Eventide is not too hard once you realize it's basically Kingdom Hearts - I'm only half-joking and, no, I shan't elaborate. What made the experience difficult for me, specifically, is that both the nature of the prose and the actual formatting of the text were poison to my ocular vision: the long bunched-up paragraphs, the colour-coded character-specific dialogues, the choice of font, the small size of it, all conjoined with the unwieldy writing.
DOLOROSA leans harder in every single category, and it's made worse by completely replacing dialogue boxes with walls of text covering the screen. In short, I read thousands of words ranging from scientific jargon to quasi purple prose in a format that physically hurt me. It is definitely living up to its title, I say!
I truly wanted to like what was presented here. There are brilliant ideas at play, spicy rendezvous of deeply unwell lesbians and tired bisexuals being the most screwed up creatures in existence, an earnest dissertation on trauma and self-loathing, but it all falls apart at the altar of legibility. Even conceptually great scenes such as the Naked Roulette Drilling Pain Scale and the Shotgun Scissoring are over-encumbered by a prose that undermines them by attempting to seem "clever" and distant. Regardless of how painful it is to read, I still would have been disappointed.
It breaks my heart, especially since I think the way this artist draws women is too powerful to be contained, but this literature is too visually taxing for my tastes.
Nevertheless, my accessibility issues are not universal. If magical science fiction, hot neurodivergent girls, objectum shenanigans and beautiful artwork are your morning cereals, and you can stomach the less tasty bits, you may find these titles on kolulu.itch.io for free! Consider tossing a coin to this skilled creator, while you're at it.
Reading these novels, while an unfortunate experience, did lead me down a deep, girl-shaped rabbit hole. Let's just say, I am not done with covering Yuri games, not by a long shot.
Here's a Part 2!
Why you should consider boycotting Microsoft: https://www.bdsmovement.net/microsoft
Also, here’s a helpful website: https://arab.org/
