The stories which really hit with impact are those that push social boundaries to their very limits and strike out boldly into the untamed wilds of storytelling. Romance, in the context of mental instability, is sensitive ground, with huge potential for inaccuracy and offence. To tackle it is an audacious move, and for six years Somnova Studios has been working on Missing Stars to rise to that challenge. Their first demo, released January 2018, suggests that they may fall short.

Missing Stars began life as a Katawa-Shoujo inspired VN back in 2012. The general story structure is almost identical – an otherwise healthy young male student is afflicted with a disability, and sent to a school for those with similar problems. Katawa centred around physical disability, while MS purports to examine the mental side. KS was well noted for tackling sensitive material with grace, thoughtfulness, and humanity. Missing Stars has emerged feeling inoffensive, but at the same time, kind of… bland.

To put it shortly, Missing Stars suffers from critical errors in story structure, pacing, and the shape of each scene. Considering that Katawa Shoujo managed to avoid virtually every problem present in MS, this is disappointing. A side to side comparison of the two reveals exactly where MS goes wrong.

KS opens strikingly with its protagonist suffering a heart attack. It’s a violently dramatic scene that swiftly establishes its protagonist’s life in normalcy, then shatters it, grabbing interest and allowing for an immediate and understandable contrast in the scenes that follow, as we see him grappling with his new life and condition. By contrast, MS opens with its protagonist already grappling with his newly acquired condition, in the midst of a PTSD-induced nightmare. While it also makes for an immediately impactful opening, it leaves us ignorant of what the protagonist has lost by developing PTSD, and so when he begins crying, it’s impossible to sympathise with him. His feelings when his mother enters are well written and believable, and it feels as if the writers did some research on PTSD (or, perhaps, might have some first-hand knowledge). Considering that this scene was competently written, it’s a shame that from here the story takes a nose-dive in quality.

Katawa had an understanding of exactly what it’s story was about – disabilities, and romance. It jettisoned everything that was superfluous to those themes, and so went straight from the “character grappling with his condition” scene, to placing him inside the school. By contrast, MS makes the maddening decision to dither about in two or three utterly inane scenes dedicated to introducing Erik’s family. These scenes are, at least in the context of the demo, horrible. They’re full of comments telling us about Erik’s family, rather than letting us discover what they’re like for ourselves. What we do discover is that they’re uninteresting, and contribute nothing to the momentum of the plot, or the rest of the demo. We rehash several points about Erik’s condition, and then explore Vienna. The thing is, MS isn’t ABOUT Vienna, or Erik’s family. It’s about mental disabilities in the context of romance. They drag the story to a halt (in scene TWO), and the payoff is nothing. Vienna is an interesting place, I’m sure – it would doubtless provide a great setting for dates with the characters later on. But we’re not there yet, and we don’t yet give a damn about the city. Furthermore, what’s revealed about it here is inane.

Unfortunately, MS continues to fail to match Katawa’s pacing when we do finally get to the school. KS handled its school introduction swiftly – it allowed its protagonist to be nervous very briefly, then dragged the reader into a classroom with great rapidity, whereupon we were immediately SHOWN the physically disabled students, in one of the earliest CGs. Again, this not only kept up the momentum of the story, but frontloaded the theme of the story (physical disability) in an immediate and visual way. By contrast, MS again wastes a ton of time having an (extremely boring) character TELL the reader about St Dymphna’s school, rattling off uninteresting trivia as she does without a shred of humour or personality. In addition to being boring and dragging the story to a crawl, none of this information has any bearing on what follows. What we’re interested in is mental disability and romance, and it’s infuriating the story takes so long to get us to them. Finally, when we are bought into a classroom, we’re barely even told what the students looks like. Damningly, the CG here is of ERIK, not the class. While Erik’s grapples with PTSD are interesting and thematic, the director here has utterly misunderstood the priorities of the story, and it kills this scene dead.

These starting sections are the worst part of the story, which is unfortunate. Once the girls are introduced, it manages to pick up a little, though I frequently found myself skimming the remainder of the demo. The girls, the core of the story, are mildly interesting, and it was absolutely the wrong decision not to bring the reader to them faster. One girl, wearing earphones, is introduced first, and given a couple of scenes where Erik tries to get a response from her. Neither is particularly strong, and there is no payoff by the end of the demo.

We’re next introduced to Katja, who I found the most fleshed out and generally best written character of the demo (although I believe she may also have gotten the most lines). She’s described as having a square of white guaze on one wrist, and the writer has enough restraint to not comment on the obvious implication that she’s been cutting herself. She hails from Linz, where Adolf Hitler attended elementary school with legendary homosexual philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, but I suppose that’s not the point. There’s some good ideas buried in the conversation here, as Katja describes how she handles meeting new and potentially bizarre schoolmates, but it drags, and the back-end feels sterile and formulaic. Like most of the MS demo, it needed someone to cut out a lot of unnecessary garbage to focus on what’s actually been done well.

Subsequent characters are actually interesting on a surface level – Fran, a person of ambiguous gender, whose jokes add some colour to the next few scenes. These still drag, but s/he feels like a character with potential. S/he accompanies Erik to meet a pair of Russian twins, who possess only a tenuous grasp of English. The scene is drenched in pun-comedy which, generally, ranged from wrily amusing to heartwarming. Again, while the scene itself felt monotonous, I came away from it feeling like there was potential here for something good, buried under a mountain of flat and colourless dialogue which an editor really should have excised.

We’re next introduced to Lena, a girl wearing a face-mask reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter. Her introduction is jarring, both due to the absolute ridiculousness of her design, and the shockingly loud rock music that accompanies it. The music of MS is generally uninspired, but this track crossed the line into being outright bad, and is a powerful example of what low-key, unobtrusive music dominates VN scores, as the alternative makes it very hard to read. I found myself skipping almost all of Lena’s conversation, although she offered some perspective on the school’s doctor which I found interesting.

The final scene is a night time discussion between Erik and Katja, which feels like one of the better written conversation of the demo – we naturally discover more about Erik and Katja, and they part seeming like they have naturally and believably grown closer. There’s still some dry moments of conversation, but the gist is fine.

And that’s how the demo feels as a whole – like there’s some core points and ideas which could be polished up and let fly to build up and rise into something good. But it’s all weighed down by a lack of polish, stilted writing, and poor structure. That lack of polish extends to the limited sprites and direction which, for a demo in development for six years, elicit an eyebrow raise. There is one moment of direction which I thought deserved mention – as Erik finds his panic growing in one scene, the BG grows almost imperceptibly darker with each line, until it’s finally almost black. Speaking of BGs, they’re all filtered photos. I give far fewer shits about that than some people, and honestly think it’s a good choice for an indie VN, especially one grounded in a real-world setting. Still, while they’re unobtrusive, they don’t really shine, either.

Back in 2012, while I was still dreaming of being a VN dev, I would have chewed off my left arm to be an MS dev. But it’s left me feeling hollow. Do I expect it will do for mental disabilities what KS did for the physical? Maybe. But the demo suggests that it isn’t heading that way now. And that’s a damn shame.