VN Talk: Gnosia

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2021

After I got out of the hospital from my stomach cancer surgery, I was in pretty poor shape, and that included my ability to game. My left hand was painful to use for more than the occasion button press and my stamina required something I could pick up and put down at a moment's notice. Which meant: visual novel, which is very playable using a single hand.

Additionally, I wanted something that by its nature I wouldn't use a walkthrough for (so I wouldn't need to juggle an additional device), which meant a mystery game. I chose Gnosia which had just come out a couple weeks before my surgery.

It takes place on a spaceship carrying refugees from Liu-An, which was attacked by Gnosia; humans who have been infected by Gnos. At the outset, no one knows what Gnos is, or what the Gnosia want, but it's clear that the Gnosia are enemies and they cause people to disappear. Their victims unravel from existence as though they never were. Gnosia are indistinguishable from the people they used to be aside from their new malevolence towards humanity, so discovering one is a game of suspicion and catching them in a lie.

I quite enjoyed it, but be aware this game came out this past March and I'll be discussing spoilers in the rest of this post.

When the game begins the circumstances are simple enough. Gnosia have been detected on board, and there are five crew members. One of them is infected and needs to be put into cold sleep before they can disappear members of the crew, which they will do at a rate of one a night (when the ship enters warp). It's essentially a game of Werewolf or Mafia, where all the other players are NPCs with predefined personalities that make it easier to raise suspicion against them, easier to earn their trust, or make them a formidable pain in the ass if they happen to be your enemy.

Since the nameable main character is stuck in a time loop (which crosses parallel dimensions), most of the game involves playing dozens of games of Werewolf that tend to last around 10-15 minutes (assuming the player isn't taken out early). Sometimes the MC is human, sometimes they're Gnosia, and eventually the player is able to command their looping enough to pick out which role they want (human characters can also have specialized roles like "engineer" which allows them to scan one crew member a night to see if they are human or Gnosia) as well as how many crew members and Gnosia are on board.

Though that is the bulk of the gameplay, the meat of the story consists of discovering what the Gnosia are, what they want, and why the protagonist is looping in the first place.

The answers are doled out in a haphazard manner. I'm not sure if there's a specific loop number requirement for some scenes, but there are certainly crew member requirements. The entire potential of fifteen (sixteen including the MC) might not need to be present, but there can be requirements like the player has to be crew/Gnosia and other characters might need to be one or the other as well. In one case, I had to win with me and one other character as the sole survivors, but I don't know what prompted her to present that win condition to me since she had been in many games with me prior to that one.

As a result, it can be a little hard to get a sense of progress. For me, the game slogged the most around the 60s and 70s (out of what ended up being 134 loops for me personally). At that point, it felt like the easy to trigger events had already shown up, and there were too many remaining events for the event search function to help me narrow down what I was missing.

The thing is, at one point it becomes apparent that you need to fill in all the background notes about your fellow crew members, and you learn more about them through events. The event search unlocked around the 50-60 loop range for me and what it does is set the crew/Gnosia numbers and the roles to conditions that can potentially trigger an event, but you don't know who the event will involve. Additionally, events in the loop itself can thwart you. Maybe the character you need will become a Gnosia victim before the event can trigger, or maybe they need to be Gnosia but this run didn't set them in that role.

A few dud rounds that are "just" a game of Werewolf isn't too bad, but sometimes I'd have more than five in a row, which got tiring. But as I had fewer and fewer events left, it became clearer which characters I needed to focus on and protect, to the point that when the end finally came, it felt like an incredible rush given the prior pacing.

Fortunately, not everything in the game is about Gnosia, so when events do trigger, you can be rewarded with moments of levity rather than one more scene in pursuit of the dire truth. And Gnosia the game leverages these scenes well.

One of my favorites involves Setsu, who is the only crew member besides the protagonist who is looping. After several dozen loops, they start getting tired of all the looping and the struggle to progress, and you have the option of either encouraging them to continue, or telling them to play. If you select play, the MC and Setsu essentially take a loop to goof off and go fishing in the ship's water tanks (or go watch a movie).

It's just the break the characters need, and I needed as a player. They know they're going to loop again, so taking a little time off doesn't hurt, and they have some fun before they're put in cold sleep by the rest of their non-looping crewmates (who understandably find their behavior suspicious).

The events I remember most are things like that; the shenanigans, like the time Comet's symbiotic slime went out of control and Sha-Ming noped out into indefinite cold sleep even though he was Gnosia, or the time Shigemichi was iced in the very first round when he was the only Gnosia, causing the game to end without any casualties.

So what about the main plot?

I found I didn't quite like it as much as I liked unraveling it, and that if I poked at it too much it starts to fall apart. While we do learn what Gnos is and why the Gnosia do what they do, there's no solving the problem of their existence. It turns out to be a much bigger issue than the crew of a single ship can handle. So the fact that Gnos is basically a hive mind of all humans who have uploaded their consciousness to a digital church is just a data point. We don't know how infection occurs, but Gnosia disappear people to send them to the hive mind, which is hungry for more knowledge, which requires more people.

Since stopping Gnos is too big of a job, what Setsu hopes for is a chance for everyone on the ship to survive as themselves, and after looping enough that universe is possible to find. You can actually set the game settings to zero Gnosia on board. But the protagonist and Setsu are unable to stay in that reality because they discover there is already an MC on board there, currently sleeping in a medical pod, and when they wake up from their injuries and see the player-controlled MC, that universe is annihilated.

It's made apparent before this point that there's something wrong with the player character. Yuriko calls the MC a distortion and says that they are the reason the Gnosia are on board. Raqio, after being enlightened by Yuriko, notes that the player shouldn't be there. In the game's best twist, we're asked to think about how the ship's AI knew there was Gnosia on board in the first place, to kick off each loop's game of Werewolf. Gnosia presence is detected by someone disappearing, making the MC a first hidden victim just before the start of every loop, but this went unnoticed because the looping version of the MC would loop in right after their disappearance.

Finishing the game involves closing the loop so that the protagonist has a Gnosia-free reality to exist in while not being annihilated by another self, which actually brings the game full circle. Looping is possible because of the Silver Key, an organism that thrives on knowledge (which is why the player needs to learn everything about their crewmates) and once it's full, it can open a portal to another dimension while also disconnecting itself from its host. Setsu is the person who originally gives it to the MC.

To solve the double existence problem, the protagonist (who has finished their Key) opens a portal and Setsu (who has an earlier version of the Key still bonded to them) takes the version of the MC still in recovery through the portal with them, taking the pair to the very first scene of the game. This closes the loop for the protag and also for Setsu who eventually gives their now-finished version of the Silver Key to the protagonist for their very first loop.

It's a bittersweet ending though, since it separates the protag and Setsu, so there is another hidden ending. I don't quite like it as much as a writer, since it breaks continuity, but it was fun as a player. If you start a new game without changing your name and gender from the previous playthrough, the MC wakes up as they usually do at the start of a new game, but instead of the usual answers you can mention something like "Otome fishing," referring to the loop where the MC and Setsu goofed off. Somehow the MC's consciousness jumped dimensions to be with Setsu.

Then Setsu comes up with a plan to save everyone in the first loop, which involves a mind transfer to a doll body and then chucking the Gnosia-now-in-a-doll through a portal with the Silver Key to get rid of her.

While I liked being reunited with Setsu and that this explained the crazy version of Kukrushka in some loops, I didn't buy the protagonist's consciousness crossing dimensions unaided, and that Setsu's Silver Key goes to Manan/Kukrushka since that means it wouldn't have gone to the protagonist to kick off the story. Given all the loops and alternate universes I suppose it's possible that another Setsu gave it to the MC, but the story doesn't seem to work that way. It's pretty clear that it's the same Setsu that the MC encounters each loop, even if they are experiencing the loops in a different order.

Also, there are some questions I had that just never got answers for. For instance, Yuriko says the Gnosia are on board because of the MC, but we never find out how they're connected. Also, the protagonist has/had a version of themselves on board that was erased at the start of each loop, preventing doubling up, but Setsu never has a doubling issue. Why? LeVi, the ship's AI is able to confirm that someone disappeared (the hidden first victim), but not who it was thanks to a memory error/deletion. Who did that and why? It's a little too convenient.

On a final note, this is the first Japanese visual novel I've played with non-binary representation, with not only two nb crew members, but the possibility for the player to be non-binary themselves. I don't know if I experienced any non-binary exclusive content, but the game does recognize genders as I'm aware of male and female-exclusive dialogue around Sha-Ming (who likes women). It's also worth mentioning that Setsu is the most prominent character in the game, including being the protagonist's love interest, and they are non-binary.