1997 RELOADED is a weird, human, surprisingly gripping visual novel that made me rethink a genre I usually ignore
Look, I am going to be honest with you. I have never really played visual novels. They never interested me because the idea of playing something where you mostly see images and read text, with almost no real gameplay, never sounded like my thing. So when I got sent a review code for 1997 RELOADED, my first instinct was to send it back.
Then I looked at the screenshots again. The art style was weird. Not conventionally beautiful, not polished in the big budget way, but strange enough that I kept thinking about it. So I installed it on the ROG Xbox Ally X and finished the whole thing in one sitting.
That surprised me more than anything in the game. I enjoyed a visual novel. Who knew that trying something you already decided was not for you could actually work out?
Talking about 1997 RELOADED without spoiling it is tricky, because story is basically the whole thing. The premise is strong though. A group of teenagers buy an old answering machine, play the last message left on it, and realize they have found evidence of murders from decades ago. A forgotten cold case, dismissed as suicides, suddenly opens back up in their hands.
What hooked me was not just the mystery, but how grounded the resolution feels. This is not one of those stories where a couple of teenagers take on powerful people and neatly win because the plot needs them to. Real life does not work like that. Good people do not always get justice. Bad people do not always fall. 1997 RELOADED understands that, and the ending landed harder because of it.
As a game, though, this is very light. Gaigo Studio calls it a kinetic experience, and that is accurate. Most of what you do is press A, watch the next frame appear, read the dialogue, and let the story move forward. There are a few moments where you input answers connected to the investigation, but that is about as interactive as it gets.
On the Ally X, those answer inputs were the only awkward part. Since the game needs text entry, I had to bring up the Windows keyboard, and that covers a big part of the screen. It worked, but it felt clumsy and hid some of the UI. It is not a dealbreaker, but it is worth knowing if you plan to play on a handheld PC.
The visuals are harder to explain. They look neo-retro, slightly unfinished, sometimes even low-effort at first glance, but somehow they work. The frames have this odd comic-book energy that kept me engaged. Over time, the roughness started feeling like part of the identity rather than a flaw.
The original music also does a lot of heavy lifting. Since the story is so tied to a reimagined 90s music scene, the songs are not just background noise. They make the world feel more lived in, and they made me connect more with the people at the center of the case. You are not only reading about these artists and their lives, you are hearing the kind of music that shaped them, and that gives the mystery a stronger emotional pull.
I also liked how the game handles language. English and Italian are mixed directly into the speech balloons, which fits the characters and the summer-abroad setup. Luckily for me, I could also play it in Italian, since the developers are Italian and, well, I had just come back from a week-long trip to Rome, so I wanted to keep the Italian vibe going.
Performance on the ROG Xbox Ally X was exactly what it needed to be. No issues, no crashes, no weird slowdowns. More impressive than that, the battery lasted through my full session, around 4.4 hours, so I one-shot the whole story without plugging in.
1997 RELOADED is not going to convert everyone. If you need mechanics, systems, action, choices, or puzzles, this will feel too passive. But if you like stories, especially human stories about buried truth, moral compromise, and justice that does not arrive cleanly, give it a chance. I never thought I would say this, but I might be a visual novel fan now. Thanks for reading!
