Seventh Circle

I really, really wanted to like this game. From the concept and art it seemed right up my alley - schools of magic? Cute LIs? LGBTQ+? But I was seriously disappointed.

Pros:
- Art. The art is great, it's a really good game to look at.
- Charming LIs. I really wish you got more of a chance to spend time with them doing different stuff.
- Intriguing worldbuilding. Original magic systems are so fun and this one seemed like it really had some potential.
- Dialogue. Pretty good!

Cons:
- Wasted worldbuilding. This is my biggest complaint, along with the one below. It is such a letdown to play this game and be so excited about this interesting world and then you just... don't really get the chance to play with or enjoy or dig into the world at all.
- Stories are SO short. Everything feels like it's much shorter than it should be. Just when you feel like you're getting into the swing of things, it's over. Totally unsatisfying.

All in all, though I listed more pros than cons, the cons are huge and I can't recommend this game as it was so disappointing to play.

Im gay and I love urban fantasy so this game was great for me!!
Though there were some glitches and I feel like each route could be longer, I genuinely enjoyed playing this game, and I got attached to the characters much quicker than I would in most other vn's. Definitely worth a play!!
(also i'd let Adrian destroy me holy hell)

It was very promising idea for the game, but product turns out disappointing. Devs seems like dropped this project without any patches and bug fixes.

When I started playing the game I thought it was great but now that ive played through it I i can say it was a waste of my money, The game is full of bugs and glitches and the plot is non existant, would not recommed.

I WANTED to like this game. I spent over a year following it, waiting through multiple delayed release dates, and I kept looking forward to finally getting to play it. Unfortunately, once I was actually able to, I found it unplayable due to bugs - the game freezes at a specific point, and while you can go into the menu and save and such, it won't progress any further, and this has happened in all four routes that I tried.

Now, I liked most of the characters, and the storyline seemed interesting (at least, what I could see of it). If the bugs were fixed, my opinion of the game might go up. But as far as I'm aware, the devs haven't even acknowledged the bugs, let alone made any attempt to fix them, so my recommendation is to not bother with this game. I regret wasting the money on it.

Seventh Circle is a pretty sweet game. I would have said it was definitely worth the price, however, there are a few currently unresolved bugs. Most are pretty standard, however one has stopped me from fully completing two routes - and I've heard from others that it affects even more.

I haven't played through all the endings yet, but my takeaway so far: Very enjoyable game, with wonderful characters, a couple of bugs and not quite enough playing time. I think the current price is worth it for the time, I just wish there was more! Seems like there could be more to explore in the storylines and relationships. Also kind of wish you could save all endings, so that it doesn't all feel like separete timelines, and more like a whole story - considering the different mysteries and friendships that are there it seems like one ending with a certain character shouldn't preclude other developments. I understand that would take more time though. For the kind of smaller game this is I think it's well-made.

What this game really needed was a lot more bug testing before release. I was surprised when I hit my first major bug within the first few minutes of play, one that was bad enough that I had to hard exit the game and restart it. Luckily it has an internal auto save, but it didn't give me great feelings to start with. I'd continue to struggle in different areas but none of them stopped me from getting the endings I wanted, at least, it was just a hassle.

12 dollars is about what I'd say is appropriate for the amount of content. The game itself eventually becomes somewhat like Dream Daddy where you end up in a 'hub' area that lets you pick who you want to talk to. You might want to just keep going to the same character, which is what I did, but I wouldn't suggest it if you decide to play this game. I felt like I only got pieces of the plot and was left a little confused or even got spoiled a bit, I think?

Character dialogue was probably the most solid of the game. The paths I've chosen so far have all shown them to be very enjoyable, which goes a long way when it comes to these indie titles. Though the paths are brief (again, not complaining as some others have - 12 dollars is about right for what I've seen and paid for in the past), you get a good sense of the personalities and the interpersonal relationships if you so choose to go the route of nudging characters together. Even the character I was iffy on grew on me, and it's a rare game I found myself liking all the characters by the end of it. :) While I didn't take the opportunity, it was nice to see aroace options, as I was able to suggest this game to a friend who has often griped about VNs not being her thing because of that.

Art is lovely too, though I think you can see that just from the screenshots showing off the game.

This is one of those games I enjoyed enough to not want to thumbs down it, but also want to make it clear: the game still has bugs, and you may want to wait a month or so for the dev team to iron those out before handing over your money if that's going to detract from your experience. Also, if you were pulled to this more to this because it's a magic-focused story, I wouldn't recommend this game, as the only RPG elements really are what it says on the tin: you get pronouns and a school of magic and that's it, with the latter only coming up briefly in conversations and has no major bearing on the plot that I've seen. I still think there's a lot of heart in this game with a lot of great quality stuff contained within, though, which cannot be understated.

So here is another one of those examples where buying early was a bad idea. Another game broke on release. Seems like almost every VN I've bought in the last few months has been broke on release, and I can honestly say I wasnt shocked in the least when I hit a bug that literally wouldnt let me move forward with the game.
I was calm about it (for a change) and posted it in the discussions, so as not to give a bad image to a new game, and give the developers atleast a chance to respond, if not actually fix what ever was causing the problem. As of this writting they still havnt done either.
A word of advice to this Dev, and all the others that develop their games and following on another Site, and then bring it to Steam looking for the money. Respond to your paying customers. I didnt go to another web site to buy your game, and Im not going to go to one to try and get your attention so that you can fix it.

So I'd recommend passing on this one for at least a month or two, unless they get around to talking to us and letting us know the bugs have been fixed.

This review contains some spoilers to the game.

I wanted to like Seventh Circle so much, I really, really did. I can’t say I did not enjoy some of it, but if asked if I would recommend others to play this game, my answer would be a no.

This is a slice of life game pretending to be more. There is no “fighting people with magic” or uncovering “a mystery stretching back decades”, as is stated in this game’s description. The game has this untouched mine of unique lore that goes to a complete waste - not much would have changed if the whole magic part of it would have been completely cut out. Game throws tons of interesting world-building stuff at players for it to never get applied to anything in the plot, and we, the players, simply proceed to manage our LIs mental health and dating problems. Why does it have to be set in the urban fantasy setting to do that remains unclear.

I came into Seventh Circle expecting some cool fights - I mean, it’s right there, in the very first sentence of the game’s description on the steam page; the promise of RPG-like elements only fueled my expectations. In reality, RPG-like elements turn out to be a simple decoration. It does not matter which class of magic you choose for your character, because your character never gets to use any of their powers. Or to fight. At all . Narration does imply that there are weekly battles going on between characters, but we as a player never get to participate in them - the best we can get is a mention of how we lost one of those fights, which, in turn, leads to a LI scene that has nothing to do with characters’ occupation and powers. The only thing that changes if you decide to try out a different magic class is a couple of lines and, frankly speaking, there’s no point or replay value in restarting the game just to see some characters’ greetings change from “Oh cool, you are also a modification mage!” to “I usually don’t like obliteration mages, but you seem cool!” .

The next thing that bugged me was the art. When you look at screenshots and the trailer, you can see a simplistic but rather pleasant art style and a soft color palette. I dig it. Characters’ art was the first thing that attracted me to this game. Imagine my surprise when I reached my first character ending (it was Bowie, btw) and his first (and only (!)) CG came up... in entirely different art style. So different that I did not even recognize him at first. What’s worse, his CG had a complete change in color palette, it went from soft, pastel in-game colors to bright, strong neon, which put quite a strain on my eyes. Moreover, the art style difference was so immense that it totally broke off the mood of the said good ending. And it’s not just Bowie’s CG, other characters’ art seems to have similar problems, to a different degree, with Bowie and Marius being the biggest offenders. Inconsistencies between in-game art style and CGs art style rarely co-exist well in VNs, and considering that every CG in this game was drawn by a different artist, every new CG caused a significant shock.

The game’s CG gallery deserves a separate mention. As is mentioned above, each character gets only one CG. There are 31 slots in the CG gallery. Those slots are for the game’s background art. Don’t get me wrong, backgrounds in this game are really well-done, but they are not CGs. Considering that my first instinct when starting the game was to check out the CG gallery, I was quite confused and disappointed after actually unlocking the CGs.

Yet another thing that bummed me out was the game’s length. To complete the game and get at least one ending for each character (good or neutral) took me six hours. Six hours for seven characters means less than an hour of content for every character. What makes the situation even worse is the fact that the whole game is basically a common route; there is no characters paths and if you choose wisely you can get all the characters endings in one go - just make right decisions to maximize characters’ relationships and save before the last ‘choice’. This also takes away greatly from the replay value. Sure, you can focus on one character at a time and restart the game every time you want to romance/befriend someone else, but you’ll just be re-reading the same stuff over and over again.

While characters’ relationships in this game are really well-developed, there’s not much to romance aspect of the game, either. You can flirt a little with all the characters during the course of the game, but every - e v e r y - character has some emotional baggage and thus there is nothing romantic about ‘romancing’ them. Every ending goes practically the same way: “I have some stuff to figure out but I also think that I may like you, MC. Could we try dating/going out platonically?” Credits. When I first realized there is nothing to the fighting aspect of the game (both gameplay and story-wise), I had hoped that at least the romance part would manage to deliver. Sadly, it did not.

I also want to separately mention the ‘special’ post-credits scene, that seems to appear only if you manage to gather some clues about the game’s ‘mystery’ during the playthrough. This scene basically has the ‘villain’ of the game (who does not really get any development/screen time) appear before your character to vaguely answer some of their questions - and to have a final boss battle, one may think, but nope. They offer MC a choice of either escaping or staying at the facility and whatever you choose, it does not matter. Because this choice is the game’s finale. No follow-up, no epilogue. What was that, you may ask? I have no idea. And after that ending delivery? I don’t have any desire to find out.

The last thing that cements my negative opinion of the game is its bugs. The game crashes, the game goes in circles (literally, you sometimes have to play the same dialogue a few times to get out of the loop), the game replaces one character’s lines by other character’s lines - in one chat with Marius he literally gets replaced by Adrian at some point, and the game simply goes on. The game has no auto-play option. While the skip option is very fast in this game (this is a pro), the skipping does not stop after you make a choice and you have no option in the settings to change that (this is a con).

Seventh Circle and its characters had some great potential and it’s a shame to see it not getting realized, especially considering that the game had a quite successful Kickstarter campaign.

Do I regret buying this game? I would not say so, I even enjoyed some parts of it - for example, characters banter, which is rather quirky and lively. However, the game and its creators set some specific expectations they do not manage to fulfill and I can’t really recommend others to give Seventh Circle a try.

Ok, I've played through a few endings and messed around for about 6 hours! Overall, still liking it; good VN!

Pros:
Great art
Good writing, esp characterization!
Interesting story, nothing quite like being a competing mage a la WWE lol
$11 is a good price!
You can save all the time!! Any question, any scene, you can save! LIFE SAVER
I like that you have to play through multiple endings for the big picture

Cons:
The skip text feature is a little iffy
You can't use the space bar to advance, only enter key or clicking
A few bugs so far, but none that impede game play
Unsure about the re-playability right now
No actual fighting scenes, which, to be fair, was never advertised- I was just kinda hoping for it haha

Overall definitely something fun for a weekend! Happy playing:)

This is my very preliminary review, but since I have had this game at the top of my steam wishlist for months, I am super excited. The game started strong. I love Aunt Jean and the aesthetics are great! I love the characters so far and I can already tell I'm going to have a bunch of playthroughs. And heck! It is only $12? For a full visual novel? Awesome!

(I'll write a more in-depth review later, after I've played through a few times, but already I would recommend this game!)