Eye of Saccharine is a short visual novel made by Russian developer SasDeRider. The fact that it’s their first attempt shows, because Eye of Saccharine is downright terrible. I took a brief look at what other people who have played this obscure game have said, and I’m genuinely surprised that this game is not universally scorned. I want to clarify that I am referring to Eye of Saccharine’s English script, which is a strong contender for the worst visual novel localization I’ve ever seen, and the only reason I can’t just say that it’s the worst, is because the Steam page promises “6 dozens of minutes of confusing plot.” This indicates that Eye of Saccharine was intended to be abstract and surreal to begin with, but this is still no excuse.
Want to know how bad the English Script for Eye of Sacharine is? It’s so bad, that I did not even realize that the main character was a woman until I read the Steam page, after I already completed the game. The script is not even your standard “broken English” levels of poor. Being “broken English” would imply that there’s at least a legible message underneath it. Eye of Saccharine’s script is downright incomprehensible. Some of this game’s gems include “The Girl moved from the hero to the edge of the bed,” or “We can fix you, but first we need to find a leak in your roof. To do this, you will need to pass a number of stress tests.” I would not even be able to tell you what the plot is if it weren’t for the fact that the premise is described on the store page. Just to demonstrate, I’ll do my best to describe it from memory. Keep in mind, I beat this game two days before writing this review.
So the basic story is that the protagonist has nightmares and/or hallucinations, and she goes to a doctor named Dr. Akula (no seriously). The doctor then uses the GLAZA watchamchallit on her, which takes the MC to some maze like place just like in her dreams, and… that’s about as much as I can say from memory without spoilers, aside from the game repeatedly telling you “you can’t talk to the dead” as if it’s some profound statement, when it instead comes across as pretentious. I can only really make assumptions on the quality of the original Russian script based on what I was shown here, but I cannot see this game being any good even if its English script wasn’t butchered beyond belief. The reason I say this is because I’ve played games with poor English scripts before and I normally can at least feel a vague semblance of what the game wanted me to feel.
Meanwhile, Eye of Saccharine quite literally advertises confusion on its Steam page and how am I supposed to think of this game as anything other than a pretentious, incoherent mess, if being incoherent and incomprehensible is literally a selling point? And yes, I do think it is fair to make this assumption based on the butchered English script. If a developer is willing to sell something for profit with an English script this poor, then what makes you think they showed any better care to the base product? This is not even taking into account the fact that there’s so little time to develop any of these characters, or the inclusion of tonally awkward anime references that have nothing to do with the setting or characters. For fucks sake, they didn’t even bother to change the character names in the text box to English.
The only positives I can muster about Eyes of Saccharine are that the artwork is good, and the music is serviceable. That’s it. And even then, the music is stock shit that I’ve literally heard in Youtube videos. It’s sad how much I need to scrounge for positives, and can barely find anything. This game is garbage, there’s really nothing else to it.
