A mindfuck horror visual novel that’s both kind of disappointing and oddly compelling.

Release: 2017 (No Brand)
Writers: Sakuraba Maruo (Dasaku)
Japanese difficulty: Easy
English: None
Ratings: VNDB (7.06), EGS (7.87)

I originally got interested in ChronoBox because I thought it was a death game, and I have a soft spot for those kind of stories. Well, turns out, I was completely off the mark, and I’m still not sure whether I should be happy or disappointed about it.

ChronoBox is a weird mindfucky story where a small group of kind of weird characters attend a school in an island with seemingly no people while refusing to acknowledge there’s anything unusual about the situation.

Then you go through this poorly written school romance episode which barely takes a few hours and reads more like a satire (I’m still not sure if it was supposed to be taken seriously) and then… the protagonist finds this weird box with an eye inside, the game resets back to the first day, the character you romanced disappears, and another character is now maimed and wears an eyepatch.

…This is basically the setup you’ll go through multiple times, with characters disappearing and others getting maimed in really freaky fashion with no explanation whatsoever, and while the romance parts are so awful they’re best skimmed, the whole thing is so creepy you simply have to keep on reading to figure out just what the fuck is going on.

Fairly titillating sex scenes (the author is mainly a nukige writer) and lots of well-drawn gore also help to stick with it.

The further it goes, the more batshit crazy it becomes, and I was totally prepared for some really lame reveal as I had no idea how any of that shit could have ever been explained, but… the reveal actually turned out to be better than I thought, though still a bit disappointing and forced.

It could have been better, but there was actual thought put behind all the madness that transpires, and that was already more than I’d expected.

In any case, Chronobox is a strange specimen. I actually enjoyed reading it for the mystery and the dark, tense atmosphere, but the story wasn’t really that good in retrospect, and the romance was just awful.

It’s kind of like if Chrono†Channel was written by someone not very smart and actually had good porn.