1997 RELOADED
Critic Reviews for 1997 RELOADED
1997 RELOADED is a project built around an idea that genuinely deserves to exist. Gaigo Studio imagined an entire alternate decade – the Roxyverse, a version of the 1990s in which grunge never happened and Los Angeles was the beating heart of alt-rock – and populated it with fictional artists complete with careers, feuds, and a credible mythology. The original soundtrack, performed by top-tier professional vocalists, stands as the project’s highest point and one of the most accomplished pieces of musical worldbuilding you will find in an independent video game. The problem is that the rest of the game struggles to match it. 1997 RELOADED is a kinetic visual novel – a format that transfers the entire weight of the experience onto the quality of the prose – and the writing does not always bear that responsibility. The dialogue tends to tell instead of show, the characters reconstruct the cold case with the tone of a police report rather than a conversation between teenagers, and the gap between the sophistication of the concept and the scene-by-scene execution is difficult to ignore. The art, entirely hand-drawn and produced without AI assistance, has moments of genuine personality – especially in compositions set against dark backgrounds – but proves uneven in close-up and suffers from the contrast between the drawn figures and the photographic backgrounds. Players who approach 1997 RELOADED primarily as a musical experience will find something unusual and worthwhile. Those who come to it looking for a story that matches its universe will have to contend with an execution that does not always live up to its ambition.
