This review is written by someone whose only prior experience with the genre of Visual Novels is the Ace Attorney series. For people unfamiliar with Ace Attorney, most of the gameplay there consists of seeing the characters interact with each other via textboxes with your only input being in which order the various dialogue occur and what to ask various characters of via dialogue trees. The most gamplay in Ace Attorney is in the court scenes where witnesses provide various statements as testimony and you get to present evidence to counter them, feeling like Sherlock Holmes deducing a logic puzzle.
In Steins;Gate you don't even have that level of player interaction. Most of the "gameplay" consists of reading the scenes playing out in the textboxes and then pressing the "continue game" button. The things you do have control over is when the game wants an interaction via the in-game cell phone, some of the times you are in charge of it.
I bring this up so that anyone interested in this game is aware what level of gameplay they are to expect. The genre contains the word "novel", and that is an abt descriptor. The characters and the plot is largely set and you have little influence over it.
With that in mind, do I recommend the game? Yes, I do. The characters are fully realized and the plot is interesting. Since there is not much in the way of gameplay I am judging the game on the plot alone.
It involves a bunch of teenagers in Akihabara, Tokyo's Nerd Mecca, making a time-machine. Since time-travel stories are ones where it can turn out that the friendly background character in act one is actually the protagonist from the future in act three, it's a bit hard to discuss the plot without getting into spoiler territory, but I'll do my best to be vague.
The plot stars Okabe Rintaro, self-proclaimed Mad Scientist, and the members of his future gadget lab. He insists his true name is Houoin Kyouma and occasionally talks into his(turned off) cell phone about The Organization that is out to get him. For the first half of the game my reaction to him was mirrored by his friends of the gadget lab in that I found the routine ridiculous and annoying, in particular since their discoveries in time travel would warrant a more serious tone. Were I younger I might have found it charming but I mostly rolled my eyes at his routine.
The rest of the initial cast are Mayuri, childhood friend of Okabe who I suspect have some diagnosis, and Daru, best friend of Okabe and Super Hacker. Mayuri never seems to get everything that goes on in the rest of the lab's conversations but always means well. Daru is a massive pervert but really good with computers. As the plot goes along more and more characters get involved with the plot , how I prefer not to spoil, but the thing I want to emphasize is that ALL the characters feel fully realized and ALL feel three-dimensional. I could totally see these people being friends and hanging out in the way portrayed by the plot.
Well almost. Maybe it's because Okabe(or "Houoin Kyouma")'s routine didn't endear me but the way Okabe acquires new friends struck me as somewhat improbable.
Something that impressed me was that the developers actually gave thought to how time travel hypothetically could work, and you get to take that in.
The first half of the story is more or less the cast hanging out while experimenting with time travel and during this half it is a relatively chill game.
Then... something happens. In a single scene between two and five plot twists happen and the way the plot is experienced changes. It remains a visual Novel and remains in the same setting but everything is fundamentally changed. You WILL realize when it has occured because it's one of those third act twists that kicks the plot into high gear. In conjunction with this Okabe takes the plot and the time travel experiments more seriously, thereby eliminating my main complaint and I got really into it at this point.
After this point there are plenty of more to explore and more plot twists to encounter and it's well worth finishing but the nature of plot twists is that they must reveal something about characters and/or setting, and knowing more leaves fewer surprises, which led to the plot being a lot more predictable. At least in terms of where the plot was heading, the twists along the way there was, as stated, well worth experiencing. Though some of the things that were revealed after this point felt like they were more for the plot to be able to function than they were fitting in with the science the lead characters had discovered in their time travel experiments, but these complaints are mere niggles in what is otherwise an excellent story that mostly fits together.
The game has several endings. I accidentally got one because I was given two options, one that felt directed as the "continue the story"-option, but I took the other since from a strategic point of view I considered it the more viable option. I was mistaken, because Okabe did not at all act the way I intended with that option. At first I was annoyed, but then I realized that, no, the game had given me ample opportunity to realize that it was an ending, and I am not really the protagonist of the story, Okabe is. He choosing that option might not lead to what I wanted, but it was how Okabe would act if doing that option.
Regarding the endings: there are several, two of which are harder to reach. To get them I consulted a strategy guide and if you have a hard time I recommend you do the same. It is the story that makes me recommend this game, not the challenge of the gameplay, little as there is, and taking the short-cut that allows seeing the best endings is worthwhile.
