Video Game Review: Lily of the Hollow – Resurrection

Lily of the Hollow – Resurrection

Studio: Navila Software Japan

Genre: Romance, Mystery

Platform: Nintendo Switch

There’s an awful lot of visual novels coming onto the Nintendo Switch of late – it’s fast becoming one of the preferred consoles for them to appear on alongside the usual suspects of PC and mobile. As such, however, the sheer volume of visual novels out there can make it difficult to pick out the good ones. Lily of the Hollow – Resurrection is unfortunately not one of the good ones. It comes off as a cheap localisation, meant to cash in on the current surge of popularity of these games on the Switch.

The game follows a young bodyguard called Red who is employed by a young lady to escort her and her maidservant to a frosty outpost on a holiday. It’s immediately obvious that something is not quite right from the get-go, and ultimately it’s up to Red to help unravel the true motives of Lady Claudia and the other inhabitants of the Post, including a mysterious young maid called Ling. Sounds intriguing, right? Well, it may have been if the story itself had any real substance to it, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Mostly we just see the protagonist aimlessly wander around the Post, talking to the various inhabitants and apparently falling for one of the two girls. Ling is perhaps the most interesting of the two, but ultimately the cast feels very bland and unmemorable. There are a bunch of side characters also, but very few really show any depth outside of their relationship to the main girls and have no real impact on the narrative.

It’s worth noting that despite this game having been localised by a Japanese company, this game is actually Chinese originally – still evident by the voices throughout. Perhaps I’m just used to the high quality of other visual novels games I’ve played but everything seemed to be… rather sub-par in this game. The voice acting itself was generally awful, made worse by the fact that everyone either sounded like a robot or extremely muffled. You know it’s a problem when you have to adjust the volume in the sound settings, to turn the voices up to max and you still can only barely hear them. This isn’t the worst sin of this game though which goes to the translation which is honestly abysmal. The game reads like someone just plugged the original text into google translate and left it at that – constant typographical errors, and so often lines just made no sense at all. A few typos here and there are standard in localisations but this was so prevalent throughout the game’s short 4 hour time length that it ultimately made it basically unplayable. I even had a few instances where the text continued on past the bottom of the screen, clearly showing that the game itself wasn’t particularly optimised well for the console it appeared on. The controls were mapped rather frustratingly also, in a different pattern from the standard usually seen in other visual novels which definitely threw me off a little.

It’s honestly a stretch to find anything good to say against the game. The game’s price is very reasonable, sitting at the lower end of the spectrum but that if anything is a red flag for the quality of the game itself. The art isn’t dreadful, if rather average and the music is nice enough when it’s playing in the right scenes. This game is more of a kinetic novel than a real visual novel – I only had two choices throughout the whole game which I assumed was what pushed me towards either Claudia or Ling for the romantic route. (I went with Claudia more by accident than anything, and I really think Ling would have been the more interesting choice).

Ultimately, I found Lily of the Hollow – Resurrection to be a shallow game, hampered even further by the awful localisation. Do yourself a favour if you’re looking for a cheap visual novel and check out something else instead.