ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS for Mac

Get that A+ in your faith studies

ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS is a free role-playing video game that lets you experience the struggles of a sheltered teenaged girl. Developed by team★CPU and published by MAVERSSOFT, this is a horror visual novel indie game wherein you play as a girl who’s reluctantly trying to aim for prestigious boarding school because of her parents. The game has an interesting choice on visuals and text style but doesn’t give out warnings for photosensitivity and loud noises.

Your family legacy

The story of ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS follows the low self-esteem life of Twigs, a 13-year-old girl who comes from a family heavily involved with LoveCorp—the organization their Church of Mother religion relies on. All her life, she’s had to follow their religious teachings despite her lack of enthusiasm. Even for her education, she’s being pushed to have the best theology grade just to get a secure spot at WhistleToe Academy. 

This VN game has a strange style for its visuals and text. The narration and dialogue play over the screen, obscuring all cheap-looking background art and 3D character models. It also looks like it’s been written by an actual 13-year-old with the typos, SMS language, and abundance of ellipsis—although the story and dialogue are actually well-crafted and interesting. Thus, while the overall look of the game appears awkward, it actually makes it stand out.

The controls just involve clicking through the text and choosing actions to take whenever you’re prompted. However, there are no settings available and you can only save and load your progress. This can be annoying as the game doesn’t even warn you that it actually contains flashing lights and images, as well as sudden loud noises, for its horror elements. The dialogue can also be confusing since you can’t tell who’s currently talking.

A sneaky horror game

All in all, ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS is a unique episodic horror visual novel that offers an immersive POV. The art design can take some time to get used to, but it works out well with the text style and the contents of the plot, as well as Twig’s characterization. It could really use some settings, though, and photosensitivity and loud noise warnings for players since you can’t adjust the in-game volume and visuals.