Missing Stars (2018 Demo) – A Review

Romance visual novels (often conflated with dating sims) tend to have a particular structure. In it, a white bread definitely-18 year-old boy is whisked away to a new setting because of some unusual circumstance; usually a high school of some description. Once there, he meets a harem of pretty girls—each emblematic of some archetypal trope—one or more of whom falls in love with him. He usually has few personality traits to maximise the reader’s ability to self-insert—although he is often sarcastic and prone to longwinded introspection. He is also bafflingly averse to the idea of a relationship (as if to say “we’re not just doing this so you can fuck the girls, we swear”) while invariably reducing the girls to their physical assets and the puzzle the reader must solve to get at them (as if to say “just kidding, we are”). Missing Stars is no different.