Posts Tagged Visual Novel


Girls Made Pudding

April 16th, 2025

A view of a winding highway, surrounded by green hills, A girl with long silver hair in a long black tee shirt leans on an old military motorcycle, a cat-girl with purple hair wearing a maid's uniform, holding a pot with a leek in it, stands in the foreground looking at us over her shoulder.By Christian LeBlanc, Staff Writer

Girls Made Pudding is an adventure game and visual novel from Kazuhide Oka and KAMITSUBAKI STUDIO, which just came out on April 10th for $9.99 US (but is currently 17% off until April 23rd). It is available on both Steam and on the Nintendo Switch Virtual Store; this review is of the Nintendo Switch version.

Joining the ranks of Japanese Yuri-adjacent media featuring girls riding around on bikes together (Super Cub) at the end of the world (Girls’ Last Tour), Girls Made Pudding is a soft, gentle game about the end of the world and the last few remaining humans in it. Also, it’s an exploration of intersubjectivity and shared realities. Also, it’s about pudding, made by girls.

Aside from briefly showing you how to use the camera and move the characters, the game tells you little about how the game works (aside from some tips on loading screens), so for the first little while, you’ll be figuring out the mechanics as you go (muscle power and brain power both deplete as you accomplish certain tasks, while your hunger meter constantly ticks down, and you also have a time meter that marks morning to night).

Cooking two-or-three-ingredient meals not only replenishes your meters, but is also the way to unlock certain conversation topics. Girls Made Pudding is a visual novel, you see, but instead of passively clicking a button to advance the story, you’re riding around on a motorbike exploring deserted towns, collecting recipes and ingredients, finding places to spend the night, and dealing with obstacles in the road (including groups of cats you can pet to restore your brainpower). Zooming forward is what advances the conversation, so you’re always on the move.

When I first started playing I was worried about getting lost and whether I should be making maps, but it turns out you’re always in one of several types of locale (forest, countryside, city, seascape, factory area) that repeat. Houses with items replenish their stock when you return to an area later, so it is impossible to get lost or miss something important.

You can change the difficulty so that your meters don’t deplete, but it’s so low-stakes you may as well leave them on, just to make the game feel a little more like a game. One time I used up all my brainpower and the girls just decided to finish their day early, which meant I had to re-start a conversation I’d been in the middle of. No game over screens. I did reach a game over scenario once from a conversation path I wasn’t supposed to go down, but I was able to continue from a better spot and not lose any progress. I didn’t even have to worry about branching storylines or alternate endings; again, low stakes.

To accompany these low stake adventures and conversations had while zooming through deserted neighbourhoods, there’s a beautiful guitar score (with the odd math rock flourish) by Daijiro Nakagawa that, along with the lovely art and character models by Zumochi, gives the entire game a pleasantly cozy feel.

Which brings us to our characters: Nikomi is a cat-girl in a maid outfit who drives the motorcycle, cooks, and goes with the flow, and she is riding with no-nonsense, white-haired Sumibi. Very early into the game, Nikomi expresses how she thought the two of them were dating to marry, which Sumibi immediately shuts down; an exploration of what these two mean to each other takes place concurrently with the exploration of deserted locales and what happened to humanity.

And just what has happened to humanity? You’ll have fun puzzling this out as you go along, but all you’re given up front is that people just started disappearing. You do meet a couple of other characters during your travels who both shed light on what happened, and while the science behind the fiction may not always feel right, I recommend just going with it so as to catch the right feels from the social commentary that’s being made.

So, is this a Yuri game, you rightly ask? Yes, and no. But also yes. The game gives details about Nikomi and Sumibi and how they interact with each other, and I don’t wish to spoil any of that. I will say that the game definitely wants you to consider these two as a potential couple, and that a lot of cliches are refreshingly avoided as we observe how two people can be important to each other.

 

 

 

Girls Made Pudding does have a few rough spots: it can feel a little exposition-heavy near the end, and while the game does a decent job of giving you the right ingredients at the right time, you’ll occasionally find yourself driving longer than you should looking for an egg so you can cook some buchimgae on the side of the road so you can ask someone about a photograph (a common theme in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, probably…I still haven’t read it). I’ve included instructions in the comments on how to beat one particular mini-game, because it is not at all intuitive. The translation also gets a little rough in places, especially in one late-game sequence where it labels the wrong character as talking, but for $10 you’re getting six to seven hours of entertainment, a mystery, some science fiction, some deep thoughts, delightful music and scenery, and some cozy Yuri content. And, a liminally wonderful lack of crowds.

There’s also a very cute and funny post-game sequence; be sure to play some more after you’ve beaten the game and then check through your inventory for something that wasn’t there previously, and that will trigger a hilariously self-aware conversation.

Art – 8
Graphics – 7
Story – 8
Sound – 9
Control – 7
Characters – 7
Service – none, unless just seeing a maid outfit does it for you. And/or cat ears.
Yuri – 6

Overall – 7

Get on the same wavelength as Girls Made Pudding, and you will find a fun Yuri game that gets you thinking about relationships and shared realities long after all the pudding has been finished.





LGBTQ Visual Novel: Heaven Will be Mine, Guest Review by Louise P

January 16th, 2019

It’s our first Guest Review Wednesday of 2019! Please welcome back Guest Reviewer Louise P for a look at a new Yuri Visual Novel for us. Take it away, Louise!

Heaven Will be Mine is a visual novel that starts right at what would be the climax for any other super robot story. The three factions have all their players, two super prototypes are finally operational and everyone is headed to the moon for the big final confrontation. There the future of humanity in space will be decided; or rather the future of humans who already live in space will be decided. Do they ‘return’ to Earth, live in space or cease to be human at all? These conflicts will be solved both with giant robots (called Ship Selves) and sexting in equal measure.

Heaven Will be Mine ditches a great deal of unnecessary visual novel tropes. There are no ‘heroine’ characters instead we have three protagonists, all equally important. There’s Pluto: the idealistic leader of Cradles Graces who finally has a ship self that matches her own overwhelming power. Luna-Terra: the jaded veteran of Memorial Foundation who has now broken so many hearts in space that it is finally catching up with her and finally Saturn, a pilot who totally gets this is a game about relationships and space robot battles and jumps into merging fighting and flirting so naturally it’s a surprise to hear that it is her first time in the pilot seat.

The story follows all three in their journey from the outer solar system to the showdown at the moon from the perspectives of Pluto, Luna-Terra or Saturn. While we begin right in the thick of things and there’s a lot of back story hanging over the characters and we are given enough credit to piece it together ourselves, as we see events from the perspectives of each leading character and their supporting cast. Emails often fill us in on the back-story, while the pilots live-chatting with their comrades provide some of the biggest laughs in the story.

But center stage is taken up by the confrontations between Luna-Terra, Saturn and Pluto. I do mean confrontations, because each character is an ace pilot for one of the three factions warring for the future of space; they’re supposed to be enemies. Like many other giant robot stories, this is fantastic ground for romantic tension and unlike many other giant robot stories, Heaven Will be Mine is doing this deliberately and it all pays off in the end.

What Heaven Will be Mine manages to create is a genuine sense of chemistry with the three main characters. Luna-Terra and Saturn slowly open up and learn to be vulnerable with each other. Pluto and Saturn learn about each other beyond their status as psychic celebrities and see each other as people. Luna-Terra and Pluto start with a tonne of baggage from the beginning but gradually work and fight through it. It’s a real delight to read as each scene is a blend of two of these unique voices that give a face to some very real queer experiences.

But while we may see these characters move from fighting with each other to falling for each other, that is not what we as the reader get to influence. Instead we decide what faction gains an advantage from the protagonist’s confrontations. What this really means is that we don’t decide who falls in love with whom but who makes the best case for what society that love has to live within.

Because, what everyone is fighting for in Heaven Will be Mine is whether or not they return to an Earth that sees them as something alien. Every character already knows what is at stake, but eventually it becomes clear that aside from the cool robots and space colonies, space is a place where it is easier to be a queer person. It is a place unencumbered by the history and preconceptions on what it is to be human, which allowed the people in space to have the bodies they have, the relationships they have and, most importantly, the power to shape their own destiny and make political decisions.

In space a queer trans woman can be accepted not just as a the woman she is, but as a leader of an entire movement. This looks alien to the majority on Earth, and so terrifying that Pluto and everyone like her are thought to be worth purging, either through exile or extermination. No one will care if the alien dies.

We look for lesbian characters with society and agency here and Heaven Will be Mine not only has those but makes the formation of a LGBTQ friendly society and what shape that will take, the climax of the story. Even though there doesn’t exist a route where everyone gets everything they want, everyone does agree to work to make it the best it can be.

 As Pluto says: “We don’t need a true ending. Whatever it is, we’ll make it the true ending.”

 

Ratings:

Art – 10
Story – 9
Characters – 10
Yuri – 10
Service – 3 (but also kinda 10)

Overall – 10

 

I am not saying that Heaven Will be Mine is perfect, it is exactly what I needed to read at exactly the point I needed to read it. Thinking about this story and its characters makes me a happier person and that’s why the score is so high. It is available on itch.io, Steam and iTunes.

Erica here: Wow, this sounds appealing, if this kind of thing ever appealed to me. ^_^ Thanks for the review!