I've been making a conscious effort not only to play more visual novels but to understand precisely what their definitional parameters are and whether a game can still qualify as a "true" visual novel even with a few interactive indulgences. Dating sims and traditional Japanese adventure games, for instance, have certain aesthetic similarities but are generally treated as their own separate enterprises. Meanwhile, you have a wide variety of possibilities regarding continuity and choice - the branching paths, "Choose Your Own Adventure" approach - that won't compromise a game's status as a visual novel, despite my perception that VNs are purely passive affairs in which the player's interactivity essentially boils down to virtually turning pages with a mouse click or button press. I feel like trying to properly delineate a VN is as much a folly as trying to define a roguelike by whether or not it persists with ASCII graphics and permadeath, so it's really just another one of those cases where video game genres are effectively useless as precise descriptors.

Anyway, what all this means is that I'm playing more VNs - the better rated ones, for the most part, though this week's game kinda fell in my lap due to a recent Fanatical bundle - to better clarify my own subjective criteria of what a visual novel is. Visual novels as a whole have been picking up steam as of late which has resulted in even more localizations and more consideration by the original developers to have an English version in the works before the original even releases, and as a proponent of adventure games in a broader sense they've always felt like something I should have an educated opinion about.

Synergia is - like VA-11 Hall-A (with which it shares more than just a cyberpunk vibe, said similarities are what intrigued me to Synergia in the first place) and Analogue: A Hate Story - an LGBTQ+-themed, non-Japanese interpretation of the format from Indie developers clearly more versed in the VN genre than I am. It concerns Cila, a skilled if saturnine cyber security and weapons expert whose speciality is neutralizing wayward androids, and Mara, a highly sophisticated android nigh indistinguishable from a human being with an insatiable curiosity about the world. The two wind up in each other's orbits apparently by chance, causing Cila some consternation as she was originally demoted and vilified by the media for daring to fall in love with a mechanical person: once considered taboo by the wider populace and later made formally illegal. The plot then meanders for a while as it develops this central forbidden relationship as well as a huge amount of exposition regarding the world they inhabit - it's one of those slow-burn narratives that drops you in the deep end of this sci-fi setting and then fills in the gaps as it goes along - before rushing into an action-packed climax that diverges into two separate conclusions, as determined by the player's responses to a few early dilemmas.

Synergia is a very by-the-numbers piece of cyberpunk fiction, perhaps deliberately so as it seems most of the developers' energy went towards establishing that distinctive atmosphere of cyberpunk noir where it's often raining, the streets are glowing with neon, and the unstoppable forward progress of mechanical transhumanism has rendered the future into this cold and dispassionate world where social connections and human warmth are usually either fleeting or illusionary. While the character designs are whatever, I loved the filters for the various static shots and backdrops the game employs, with some striking use of shadows, darker red and blue color profiles, and camera angles that collectively ooze with an appropriately bleak ambience. The game wears its influences on its sleeve, often in a literal context: each of the game's chapters features an interstitial quote from thinkers and authors often associated with technologically unrecognizable futures which blur the lines between human and machine, from Phillip K. Dick to Jean-Paul Sartre to William Gibson to Albert Camus. A little on the nose, perhaps, but then this game feels more like a love letter to the game's thematic genre than an attempt to carve out some unique perspective in same. What it loses in imagination it makes up for in fidelity, I suppose. (I feel like I should probably address the pink elephant in the room: Yes, the game is labelled as for mature audiences only and features the nudity tag on Steam, but it's not particularly salacious. The nudity is non-gratuitous and is mostly used as it is in something like Ghost in the Shell: androids typically appear naked when inactive or being repaired, despite looking human. Its central romantic relationship is treated very sweetly and does not involve a sexual element, at least not explicitly.)

It's also a bit... well, I can't quite put my finger on why the prose isn't quite as engaging as I'd like, despite the decent worldbuilding. The main cast of characters don't really jump off the page, with most of them drily delivering exposition with little trace of emotion, though in some cases that's to be expected from the type of world they inhabit. You could certainly draw some conclusions by how the android characters come off as less robotic than the humans; as if to punctuate how, in a future of corporate interests and mandated medications that grind our spirits down into compliant wageslaves, an android given a child's sense of wonder or a high level of emotional intelligence would come off far more human than anyone else. Synergia also spends so much of its brief running time setting up the dominoes for its world-shattering conclusion that it leaves little time to luxuriate in said pre-shattered world. There's also the fact that the text appears to be localized into English - there's some discrepancies from the way English sentences are traditionally formed and certain turns of phrases aren't quite replicated correctly (a tangential example is how days of the week are never capitalized, which might be the norm in the developer's native language). The script is certainly not incoherent and important aspects like character motivations shine through just fine, but given how integral the story and dialogue is in a genre that is traditionally nothing but story and dialogue it can be noticeably "off" in spots.

Overall, I think Synergia is a credible attempt at a bite-sized Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell type of "are androids people?" story with a tremendous sense of style, if nothing else. (The soundtrack is excellent too.) The narrative branch felt a little unnecessary - you could feasibly have one ending lead into the other, and both introduce characters I would've liked to see in whatever the "canonical" ending might be - and I don't think I warmed to its stiff characterization, but sometimes it's fun to be transported into a slightly different type of dystopia than the one happening to us right now. Style and atmosphere can count for a lot when it comes to escapism, it turns out.

Rating: 3 out of 5.