ALT: From left to right, Atlas, a strong red-haired fairy and dressed in a brown and dark green attire, and Nord, a slim fairy dressed in a blue attire. Characters by LadyIcepaw on itch.io (probably the only illustration I’ll put here for a while.)

Long story short, these two guys, Nord and Atlas, are the reason why I’m writing this article :3.

I was afraid I’ve forgotten how I’ve discovered the small gem of a game that we’ll talk today about, but luckily my memory has come to the rescue. I remember playing one game by Visual Novel author NomNomNami, on itch.io, for then discover her guide on making VN graphical interfaces (or UI, as I’ll refer to them from now on). She mentioned another guide, on accessibility for VNs, made by LadyIcepaw, who recounted her experience with her games (both of them on itch.io), mainly Lovewood, the object of this article, and Invisible Seams, that I’ll leave for another one (For now I’ll just tell you to go buy it because it’s another gem :3).

Well, where do I start?

From the fact that I haven’t uploaded my own comic in this site yet despite my promises? Yeeeeeaaaah, but that’ll be a topic for another time… perhaps for when I’ll feel like talking about my poor site-making skills (You gotta thank Scudo if stuff works here, in a nutshell).

But for now, let’s stay in topic.

I remember trying Lovewood in a period that wasn’t good for me. I was facing problem after problem, related both to my gender identity and my political positions, and being part of a fandom made of supposedly queer people who didn’t care at all about queer media or even our shared fight for human rights didn’t help either. I needed to relax. Bonus points, Lovewood has a fantasy setting, which I LOVE (one of the kids grown up with Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies and stuff), has queer characters (including a non binary one, which is not as frequent as I would like even in queer VNs, especially in furry ones (one day I’m gonna talk about bara furry VNs… it won’t be beautiful.)). I had to try it.

Well, I’ve been left with a great, GREAT, impression! The setting was fascinating, the characters were amazing, the simple story was well written, short but sweet, the emotions were all in the right place, the Creative Commons soundtrack was well chosen in almost every moment. It’s not an hyperbole if I say that, at the time, I missed having so much fun reading a Visual Novel.

Bear in mind, this won’t be a review, or a true essay, or anything special. Just a… ya know, I wanna talk about it.

But still, I think a bit of a premise would be useful for all of you, both if you haven’t played this game yet or have done it only a while ago, and forgotten some stuff. In this visual novel, you take the role of a fairy healer (of which you can choose name and pronouns), who has been called to the Northen Fairy site by their Lord Oberon to replace the old healer, who has passed away. In the process, you’ll get to know the locals, choosing every day who do you want to spend time with (save for the prologue, in which of course you get to know everyone of them), all leading to the final day, in which there will be a local festivity in which you can have a date with your favourite one, or just decide to spend time with everyone of them as friends.

So, it’s a fairly simple and competent dating sim, right? What else to say?

By having tried other dating sims in the meantime – okay just Monster Prom and Date Everything –, I can easily say how the lack of any complex mechanics or statistics to achieve for a perfect date, leaving everything to a few choice to make (Classic Visual Novel style), serve easily to this game, giving enough space to me as a highly anxious reader to just focus on the characters, how are they living in these seven days I get to know them, their desires, their struggles, even their character arcs, and choose when given the opportunity basing myself on how I feel about a character or a moment, and not the desire to raise a certain statistic. If anything, it made the experience very natural for me.

Of course, none of this would be captivating enough if the characters in first place weren’t interesting. And oh boy where do I start? From the shepherd Blossom to the cook Atlas, above shown with Nord, I had struggle to get bored for a single moment, even when I was in scenes without the character(s) I wanna bring to the date. A combination of naturalistic writing, cozy vibes and a great attention to the characterization of every character, making them unique without playing on stereotypes or exaggerating their traits (two things that Date Everything does excellently, mind you, and I love it, but hear me out), made for a lovely and sweet experience in every single moment. It made seeing the character arcs of each character so satisfying.

AND YES THERE IS A FIGHT SCENE TOO, and it’s awesome!

The only, apparent, flaw is the limited number of events for each characters. Practically two for character, one of them shared with another one. Given that we have seven days to the local festivity, this also makes for an opportunity to get to know even the characters we don’t want to date. Perhaps we wanna date them in our second, or third, or fourth run. This makes for good replayability :3.

That said, it would make this look like a dating sim like many others, just with a cozier vibe, right? What make this queer? Lemme get straight to it!

Despite even the artbook of LadyIcepaw herself focuses on other aspects while talking about her own game, how the world presents itself to us plays a bit part. Not with big ultra-detailed world building, mind you, although we still have many interesting details to discover, that I won’t spoil here, but rather how the characters live here. We are in a small town of fairies, secluded from the human world, and everyone is here, accepted and included. Everyone helps each other. They have the chance of being able to live their queerness without any problem, like Nature wants (and nature can be very queer!)

ALSO TWO OF THE CHARACTERS ARE DATEABLE TOGETHER AND THAT MAKES FOR A POLY RELATIONSHIP AND IT’S SUPER COOL!

I’ve played two or three times, and each of them I felt safe, I felt at home, even with characters I’ve got to know only for a bunch of hours every time (Each playthrough is something like three hours, depending on your read speed of course). I felt loved. This is what every dating sim, or every visual novel with romance options should achieve (of course, even when we have set protagonists. In that case what would make us feel loved would be a great chemistry between the MC and the love interests, but you got the drill).

I remember I felt burn out at the time, due to my personal experience (the one thing I told you before I’ll talk about another time) and struggling to find Furry Visual Novels, with a few expections (such as the wonderful Dawn Chorus, which will have an article about :3), that were queer, that were full of love, rather of bodies to jerk at and toxic and heinous stuff sold as romantic or hot (my main grudge against bara VNs).

Okay, I’ve talked too much, and this article has only one illustration (or two, whenever I’ll decide to update this article.) I think we can finish it here! See yaaaa!