Thoughts on 'The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass'
Note: Spoilers in this post are hidden by default.
Sekimeiya is a 2021 mystery visual novel about eight people trapped inside a tower as part of an emergency response to an apparent attack, and their attempt to figure out what happened to make it through the lockdown period.
I have complicated feelings on this game. It's exactly my kind of premise on paper and I came out of it very impressed, excited enough to read all the bonus content and the development book. On the other hand, I really had to push through to get there, and I dropped the game for a few weeks during the first chapter. There's always a point where the initial lows outweigh the eventual highs, and I'm not sure on which side of the line Sekimeiya would fall.
There's an audience of diehard mystery fans out there who this game was clearly made for. My assumption is that this game is obscure enough that people who seek it out have a good chance of enjoying it.
Overview
Appeal
When it comes down to it, there are two standout areas that this game handles incredibly well. I've seen people say they consider these to be minor spoilers, but I'd consider them to be the selling points of the game and so am not personally worried about including them. If I didn't know that these things were coming when playing then I likely wouldn't have continued to the end.
Minor Spoilers - Premise
- This is a game about time travel. There is a lot (perhaps too much) going on, but the author has a clear understanding of the timeline and everything has a coherent and logical explanation.
- This game wants you to try to solve it yourself, and provides you with the ideal tools to do so. The final chapter of this game is effectively a quiz; the narrator walks through the deduction process and repeatedly checks in to ask you multiple-choice questions. It's typically rare for me to stop reading to think about the solution in other media, so this was a welcome experience.
There's a sprawling puzzle to solve, and I'm not the first to sing the praises of the note system. I rarely made my own notes in-game, but the enhanced search functionality and pre-made scene summary notes were both lifesavers.
I'll also draw attention to the music selection, which was consistently fantastic.
Flaws
There are a number of criticisms floating around the internet about this work, and I would second the majority of them. It's no exaggeration to say that this game prioritizes the intricacy of the plot at the expense of everything else.
In general the characters are glorified pieces on a game board, moving as the plot demands. I had multiple instances of being baffled by their unnatural actions or their passivity, and I was never particularly invested in whether they would achieve their goals.
There's a lot of very dry dialogue and prose where characters discuss hypothetical scenarios. In some cases it's fun to see them actively try to understand what is going on as it happens and think critically, but in many instances these conversations were unrealistic or about topics that weren't at all important.
The puzzle itself isn't without issues either. The first chapter raised a lot of interesting questions to answer, but the sheer quantity of mysteries (many of which were variations on the same thing or of trivial subject) diluted the intrigue and wore on me.
With the knowledge of the solutions, I also wonder if deductions were too dependent on specific facts that weren't revealed until very late in the game. While there was a great sequence of solving mysteries in the final chapter, I can't imagine readers have much ability to solve many of them before reaching that point. There's also so much going on that there's an element of tedium to piecing the timeline together and tracking the location of everyone/everything.
Chapter Breakdown (Spoilers)
Major Spoilers - All Chapters
Chapter 1
AKA "The one where they lock the Sekimeiya in the cabinet again."
This is the one that dragged for me and caused me to drop the game. While I love a 'people locked in a building' premise, we don't really do enough that's exciting with it beyond setting the stage for the puzzle.
I was really feeling the repetition as characters would search every room, and then go up the stairs, and then search the attic, and then go down the elevator, and then lock up the Sekimeiya, and then find that it was missing, and then repeat this process forever.
There's a lot to appreciate here though in the way things are framed: the way we never see Naomi feels a bit clunky but certainly opens the door to a lot of possibilities to consider, and I appreciate the back and forth between Sai and Katei.
Chapter 2
AKA "The one where they wait in the lobby and everything is fine."
I'd started to speed through the game going into this chapter, which is a shame as this is the point where the game won me back.
This is the chapter setting up two of my favorite reveals - the name of the viewpoint character and the time skip which hides the scene with Miiya and Erina. I'm a huge fan of narrative tricks like this, and they didn't feel tricky or forced. I've seen similar stories get into awkward phrasing to avoid having to reveal information (like the name of the protagonist in this case), but I didn't notice any issues with this one.
It was also fun to see the events while in Miiya's head; I particularly appreciated her being annoyed by Atsuki when he was talking about changing the future and leaving her behind, and her mixed feelings about Shiroya. The reveal of her suspicions around the circumstances of surviving the explosion does a great job of bringing her motivations into focus.
Chapter 3
AKA "The one where they time travel only to waste all the time at home."
We start off on a strong note here - I love the scene where Sai escapes the room twice in a row, and it's great to see some characterization.
After spending so much time in the tower I initially found it fresh to follow Shiroya after the time travel. There's a promising twist here with the past/future mixup, but I think overall it's pushing it too much to be plausible. There were so many missed possibilities for her to realize what had really happened that require us to suspend our disbelief.
Even without this it's a rough series of events where we're just seeing her pass the time without taking any action. In my opinion there should have been more to do, or less time to do it.
It ends strong again though when we're back in the tower as the insight we gain here is a lot of fuel to start thinking about what is really happening. The reveal that travel to the future is possible (and following that, the existence of multiple Sekimeiya) is a big key to the mystery, and I was fully on board.
Chapter 4
AKA "The one where they reveal it was all a dream."
This one is a solid short chapter which I didn't have any strong options about. It was good that this chapter had reveals for several characters who were previously underutilized, but of course we still needed more character definition throughout this story. I didn't get much from the Katei backstory reveal though, so maybe that wouldn't have been a good idea.
In retrospect Katei's plan here was pretty baffling, and digging into it here really draws attention to the implausibility of the 12 hour confinement premise.
Chapter 5
AKA "The one which requires tracking Atsuki's water consumption."
For me this was absolutely the best part of the game. The quiz sections were propulsive, and I even enjoyed watching long sequences of Atsuki experimenting with how looping works and filling in the blanks between his meeting with Shiroya at the end of Chapter 3.
The failure mode here would be to expect the reader to have a full picture of the events before they answer any questions, but with maybe one or two exceptions they did a great job of laying out the mystery in bite-size chunks for you to solve. (Yes, I'm still bitter about the water glass question. Even if I had a perfect understanding of the timeline at that point, I wouldn't have thought to map that onto the rate of water evaporation at room temperature.)
I didn't mind the mysteries which were left to the reader as they weren't especially plot critical. It's interesting that we never put numbers on the Sekimeiya formula though, given this game's excitement to share excessive detail in other areas.
I often see comments from people describing the ending as abrupt, but personally I found it to be well executed - I would have felt differently if the game had induced more investment in the character relationships from me. What really mattered was an epilogue to the puzzle, and they nailed that with the timeline view and the tips on a replay.
Closing Thoughts
Although my current feelings on the game are very positive, it's a tricky game to endorse to other people. I'd say the group of people who should play the game is the group of people who hear about the premise and are instantly sold on that alone.