Demo Review: Vincent: The Secret of Myers

Vincent: The Secret of Myers is a sci-fi horror game from dino999z with updates being released episodically. Five years after the “cyborg incident” at the Myers Corporation, the once-prosperous region is in economic decay. You have shown up at suburban mansion with no memories and a business card in your pocket. Who are you? Where did you come from? What will you discover at the “abandoned” Myers Corporation headquarters and factory?

A review for Vincent was requested by the developer through the VN Game Den review request from, but no free keys, games, or review copies were provided.

While in the process of reviewing, the second chapter of the game was released, so this review only covers the first.

Quirky Art with a Cinematic Feel

Vincent starts off strong with a very refined and highly kinetic aesthetic. The lineless style in blues, greens, and pink may strike the player as cartoony at first, but this just makes the impending horror that much more dramatic in contrast. It doesn’t have to rely on sickly, detailed gore or body horror to visually invoke in the player the emotions most closely linked with those themes. The art is minimalist without being simple and is incredibly effective at creating a sense of space and positioning within a scene.

It does this primarily with the level of movement in the scenery and transitions. Very simple things like panning and three-frame animations make the game feel very cinematic. Even with relatively non-complex art, using complex camera angles for establishing shots and CG sequences clips the story along between static scenes and is visually engaging.

This feeling is only heightened by excellent sound design and game score that would be at home in a release from a larger studio.

Well-Appointed Minigames That Could Use Some Tweaking

One of the central features of the game promises to be a robust point-and-click interface, and it starts early in the chapter to give the player a taste. Overall, it’s a pleasantly simple gameplay loop, and so far it’s been elegantly placed within the context of the narrative. It doesn’t have the common problem in visual novels with minigames of feeling tacked on.

The point-and-click segments are a little tricky to interact with, though, in different ways. The first of two in chapter one is great at introducing the concept of “you’ll need to look around in some segments.” It fails, though, at providing a good, easy-to-use clue gathering interface. Yes, you can read the text history, but when one of the clues is art-based and you didn’t realize it was going to be contextually important, suddenly you’re realizing you’re not sure how to find the answer. It would have benefited from a visual clue journal. The second minigame is a lot better about this, but it moves very slowly for how many screens you have to shift between. This was only in the first chapter, and additional investigative segments may be smoother or more robust. But this segment of game does set a generally high expectation for the rest of the minigames.

A Story That Keeps You Reading

The overall story writing is solid, so far. I’m drawn into the plot. I find the characters interesting. There’s some questionable content in some of the backstory exposition, but it’s presented in a way that makes me want to keep playing to get a better understanding. I want to keep playing the game to uncover the mystery.

From line to line, it’s a little inconsistent, however. It’ll switch tenses for a line, for example, and some of the descriptions read a little clunky. A lot of that comes from using words and turns for phrases that are almost perfect but just odd enough to break the flow of the sentence. They are very nuanced and small imperfections that only stand out when in the context of more elegant writing around it.

Vincent: The Secret of Myers is a highly polished game soaked in mystery and highly captivating. Its episodic release format is well-positioned to keep readers constantly hungry for more as long as its excellent quality persists.

Download it now for free from itch.io.