Grace's Diary

Hello!
Welcome players and visual novel readers, I think that this is the game for you. Grace's Diary is in fact an interactive visual novel made by Hima, author of a pretty cool arcade shooter game I reviewed years ago, Hello Panda but also of a dating sim with dinosaurs called Jurassic Heart!
Errrm, ok!

Anyway Grace's Diary was created in flash in 2010 and won the grand prize from 2010 Life.Love.Game Design Challenge (made by Jennifer Ann's Group, a charity against teen dating violence). The theme was creating a game about teen violence... but without any violence in the game. Interesting! In any case this game is pretty short, it will take about 30-40 minutes to be completed, depending on your reading speed anyway less than one hour. If you want you can play the game online clicking HERE!


Decisions, decisions, ... just like in real life! This is an important part so save first!

The game is, ad you can guess, about a teenager called Grace. She's a cheerful girl that can also be serious and misses her friend Natalie, a girl that unlike Grace is more nervous, reclusive and timid. For this reason Grace believes that Natalie's boyfriend Ken is the reason why they now are apart.

Gameplay is pretty simple and divided into two parts: in the first we'll examine Grace's bedroom interacting with various items using a point-and-click system. Sometimes interacting more times with the same item will provoke different effects, and this will recall the memories of Natalie. At any point we'll be able to call Natalie, anyway if you won't interact with enough items you will later have less dialogue options available due to recalling less memories. So remember to save before making the phone call!
This marks the second part of the game, where you will have to choose between various dialogue choices to make Natalie reflect about her relationship with her boyfriend, and the real effects of Ken's abuse. Making the right choices (available if you unlocked enough memories in the first phase) will lead to the good ending, otherwise you will get a bad ending. All will take about 30 minutes, as explained before.

Visually the game is really excellent, art was made by Piti, an illustrator that worked with Hima also in other games. All is very stylish, simply animated but very good. Music is also very good and on par with the visuals and story.

The only problem with this game is that english is not Hima's native language, and for this reason the writing is ok, even if most errors and typos were corrected, butt that's the only a minor issue I have with the game since it's pretty good, and for the rest there are no errors or bugs... aside for these minor errors of course.


Wait what's happening? Is Grace morphing into Natalie? Nah it's just an error, that's Natalie!

Final Verdict
Grace's Diary is an excellent short visual nove with a good and powerful message, obviously this is not a game if you want hi-octane action or intriguing puzzles, anyway I believe it's perfectly successful for what concerns the original aim of the 2010 challenge. It's also very stylish and pretty well done, so what can I say? It's good, very good!