Developer: CASHA GAMES
Publisher: Neverland Entertainment
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Concealed – Review
CASHA GAMES is a Chinese indie studio that specializes in horror visual novels. Their first game was called Ghost in the Pool, a short but impressive visual novel with a unique art style that got decent reviews. After its success, CASHA decided to work together with publisher Neverland Entertainment to start the Parallel series, which will adapt more existing comics into visual novels. The first one is what we’re discussing today, a game called Concealed. While it’s broadly set in the same universe as Ghost in the Pool, you don’t have to play that one to follow this new and creepy tale.
Story
A brief prologue segment shows two unnamed teenagers discovering the corpse of a young girl near their local high school. The police investigate, but can’t come to any conclusions. The game then skips ahead six years. Meng is a female student who has recently returned to China after studying abroad in England as part of an exchange program. Meng is very smart, but socially she sometimes has some issues due to her hot-headed and assertive personality. Despite this, Meng has one childhood friend, Yi, who she relies on most. As Meng adjusts to the changes in her life and gets to know her new classmates, she learns about the ghost stories and strange rumors circulating in the school. This includes the story about the corpse found six years ago when several more students went missing without their bodies ever being found. When a girl from their class suddenly goes missing too, Meng feels compelled to dive into the bizarre happenings around the school and figure out if she can prevent another tragedy.
Like most visual novels, Concealed relies heavily on its story and characters to capture the player’s attention. Choices throughout the game can lead to different endings, with Meng growing closer or not to various of the other students. Overall, there’s a lot of content here for a visual novel, with over ten hours of gameplay.
Graphics
Aside from the story, the most compelling thing about Concealed is the art style. Based on an original horror manga that’s rather obscure to Western audiences, the game mimics this style perfectly and shows panels from the comic at several points to illustrate the cutscenes. The black-and-white art is reminiscent of horror icon Junji Ito and has a more realistic, retro feel to it than modern manga. Pops of color are used cleverly at times combined with visual effects to enhance the creepiness. The result is stunning and manages to capture a very specific atmosphere. Even if the character sprites are a little more static than we’re used to in visual novels things still look amazing.
Sound
Concealed has a good soundtrack with a very ominous feel to it. At certain points, the tracks are so short that they start to loop and this is audibly noticeable. However, we were engrossed enough in the story not to care too much. The game has no voice acting, though sometimes there are vocalizations like gasps or short cries of shock. Sadly, they also sprinkled in strange jump-scare noises here and there. This felt more unnecessary than scary and often ended up breaking the tension somewhat.
Gameplay
As a visual novel, Concealed does not have a ton of actual gameplay. For this reason, not everybody is going to enjoy visual novels as much. The entire game is spent reading text and making the occasional choice in branching dialogue. Sometimes you can also pick where to go from several locations, though the only thing that changes is which characters you talk to once there. Concealed does have several endings and is very long, and generally tries to encourage replayability more than most visual novels.
The game also has a glossary where you can read up on terms and idioms you hear during the game. This is handy, especially when the characters are discussing words or sayings unique to the Chinese culture. Speaking of characters: the characters you meet also have unique profiles that give you more information about them. Little things like that do help flesh out the experience.
One last thing to mention here is the translation work. Concealed was originally developed in Chinese. While they did an admirable job translating the game to English, the translation is not perfect. Here and there, a sentence seems awkward or like it has lost its meaning. Occasionally there are also grammatical mistakes. At no point is it bad enough that it makes the story confusing or really detracts from the experience, but if you’re the type to get annoyed at small mistakes, Concealed could get on your nerves.
Conclusion
Concealed is a promising visual novel from CASHA to show what they can do. The story is intriguing and the horror is well executed. Plus, the unique art style sets it apart from the dozens of other visual novels that get released. We hope the developers can get some native English proofreaders on board, but once that happens there’ll definitely be a lot to look forward to in the Parallel series.
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