Abyssal Rhapsody
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
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Welcome Astrumite!
I'm Gremory Astraeum, and I’m sole creator of Abyssal Rhapsody, a choice-based visual novel with a blend of dark fantasy, action, romance, and mystery—all set in a grief stricken world forever changed by magic and ambition.
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Plot
Centuries ago, the Great Cataclysm shattered the world, unleashing a flood of wild magic that reshaped humanity, nature, and even the laws of reality itself. Now, magic flows through all living beings, granting great power—but at a dangerous price.
You are Lucerus, a young man with a mysterious gift—your magic defies all logic, shaping itself based on your imagination. It’s a power few understand, and even fewer trust. You are thrust into the sprawling city of Noctis Arce, a hub of magical innovation and political intrigue, determined to unravel the truth behind your strange abilities, protect the ones you love and attain peace with the family you never had.
However, beneath the surface lies an even darker reality, one closely intertwined with your own fate, future and past. Shadowy factions vie for control of the Cataclysm’s lingering energy, and whispers of an ancient, otherworldly entity grow louder. As you delve deeper into the secrets of this fractured world, you’ll confront choices that will test your morality, loyalty, and resolve
Will you become a savior, uniting a broken world, or will the abyss claim you as its own?
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About Me
Abyssal Rhapsody is my labor of love, featuring rich storytelling, captivating characters, and stunning visuals. Even though the game is still in development, there’s already a world of content to experience—and so much more I have planned for you on the horizon! Expect thrilling adventures, deep relationships, more morally grey characters and moments that will tug at your heartstrings.
I enjoy writing, reading, singing, playing music, programming... Well, there's quite a few things. I hope to bring you more amazing stories, renders, games and music for free(for as long as I can).
There is music which I made for the game. This will be free to use and made available at a later time.
If you’d like to support the development of this project, I would love it if you could interact with the game and share it more! I plan to set up a patreon in the near future. Here you will get early access to updates, exclusive content, behind-the-scenes insights, sneak peeks of the game, my music, writing and more!
Let’s all get along and create a wonderful adventure together!
Thank you for for embarking on this quest with me traveler :)
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Download
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Comments
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Android version is absent
Hey there! I'll be uploading the android version soon, along with newer file hosts and butler(for the itch desktop app).
I just have quite a bit to set up before releasing, such as game fixes, text correction and the music uploads(Plus a little extra stuff).
I appreciate your patience and look forward to it soon ^^
Honestly amazing game and I can't wait for the next update
Im really glad you enjoyed! Its become a passion of mine and I hope to bring way more. ^^
Dear Astraeum,
for you, i will post my very first comment on itch.first of all i have to agree with some of the former commentators, for example:
Simulacrum29: i badly "hate" it when i had to re-read the text, it absolultety disturbed the "scenery/ atmosphere".
i found some typing mistake here and there (you even once wrote Ceecline) but its alright, nothing that disturbed the flow or reading.
but i found kind of... "unnormal" (i played quite a lot of games in this genre and made with ren'py) if the style you made some action-scenes, for example the first real "action" scene: it had like 10 or 12 pictures without any text in it. my recommendation is making either an animation out of it or make it automatically go to the next picture after 0,25 seconds. but pressing a button for every picture was kind of... disturbing for me, since it "broke" the action (btw: at this point sorry for my bad english) xD
never the less: you mentioned the first chapter can be kind of "confusing" but after a while you can get the hang of it. i already ahve quite some theories you "mentioned indirectly" (like time traveling or seeing past, present and future at the same time etc.) i like that you dont want to spoiler anything, but i think the mentioning that i "can be confusing" made it more confusing xD
Last big "mistake" i found (and i found it really bad) was the first... "xxx-scene" the last animation was too fast and the text too long. even if some people like it that way, the whole screen shaking is making the reading harder.
btw: sometimes a "leg gets through a skirt" (graphic error) but on short scenes, it doesnt matter (actually my wife saw it before me xD)
all in all : your story so far has potential and i like to see some updates in the future, im sure to try it again when some updates are coming.
Best regards, a new follower tagteufel
Thank you for your comment! I really appreciate all the feedback. This is my first visual novel game. The process from learning renpy, maming music, audio editing and koikatsu studio(including the animations and cloth tearing), has all been new to me. Ive been enjoying learning it and getting better at it slowly and i hope to bring all of you some much better content at a higher quality soon! For the text effects, i plan to heavily cut down on them and use thwm only when really necessary.
As for the fight scenes i did want to animate them but slowly found i lacked the experience, time and know how to do them properly(taking a whole week to attempt to animate a single fight). However i am slowly getting faster and better at using the tools and timeline.
Thank you again for playing and despite all the inexperience im really glad you enjoyed it! I always appreciate any feedback. Happy holidays! ^^
Any chance you'll add an option to change the protagonist's name?
There will be a feature in the future. His name will still be Lucerus, however you will get a chance to name the alias most other characters would use.(other than main heroines who will call him Lu). I am also considering using a nickname/petname for spicier relationships. Let me know your thoughts! ^^
It's kind of an immersion thing for me that I vastly prefer my character to have a name I set for them. A nickname is a start, but I'm guessing the dialog box will still have it say "Lucerus" and the main heroines not using the customizable nickname to me kind of defeats the point for me.
I completely understand. Im not explaining it fully in hopes of avoiding spoilers, but the name you chose will be used quite a lot, especially during h scenes. Ill see if theres some way to incorporate your chosen name with the main heroines, maybe in more intimate scenes. However in normal scenes theyd usually refer to you as Lu, unless the context suits it. Thanks for your feedback,it gave me food for thought! ^^
Thanks for being understanding! Great to see this kind of dev response to feedback. Many others would have dismissed this is whining about a small detail.
Great start, good story. Thanks :)
Im really glad you enjoyed it!
I find the Story interesting and want to know more. you did go overboard with the text effects. Im a fast reader and this stuff distracts me from the story massively. When you make text gradually appear like the Speech from the Headmaster it renders the Text from the beginning every time you click so i reread text trice because i thought it would be something new.
To be honest the moment you talked about Sandbox mechanics i nearly deleted the game. Sandbox only breaks the flow and brings nothing to the game. I really hope you make a VN mode it would be a shame to drop this game.
also your free roam nightmare is bugged when you first explore the ground floor before you enter the room you can go back and if you go forward again the same event gets triggered you can repeat this indefinitely.
Edit: also major gripe that you cant rename the main Character that's something the overwhelming majority of AVN players feel strongly about
Ill make sure to take another look at the headmasters text effects. I did try to tone it down after realising how buggy they are xD
As for the sandbox, it wont be a large part of the game. The story will be mostly linear, with a large string of events in the middle. The sandbox is mainly for people to choose which characters they wish to spend more time with. However i plan to set it up very linear(such as talk to Iriella, then the story progresses), so that the objective is always clear. The games branching stories largely relies on your choices in certain scenes, not character affection or events. Id love to hear your thoughts or reccomendations on it, as its a system im currently developing.
The free roam nightmare is a testing variable i forgot to change so ill go ahead and change it now for the mext update xD
And as for the name, that was a huge gripe for me as well, while developing the game. There is a way for you to insert a name or rather nickname, for lucerus in the next update. It wont replace his name but works more like a title that everyone will call him, without spoiling too much.
Im glad you enjoyed the story so far!
sorry for coming back to you so late was occupied with Christmas,
Im obviously biased because i hate sandbox, but like i say it just prolongs the game unnecessarily, its a shit ton of work to program and to make fool proof so it doesn't break the game or the story continuity. The vast amount of harem players hate missable stuff and decisions between girls in the same time slot that's why we play harem games, because we want them all we dont want to decide between them.
If the branching happens in the story segments anyway cut the sandbox out. all it does is that it fragments the story in pieces so it loses overall cohesion and flow. Players don't know if the saw everything and will click around for minutes searching for stuff that isnt there wich only leads to frustration. Or you have a questlog/guide menu, then the game loop is like this
->play story event -> click open questlock -> look up next place to be -> click around till you get there -> play story event ->... repeat
at the same time you could have
-> play story
No worries! I hope you had a good christmas!
Thats honestly completely fair. I dont plan to have any collectibles in the game. I had fathomed the idea of missable events, however as you say that can get annoying in the sandbox environment. I am currently implementing the quest log, as it would give a much more linear experience to the story.
It is a bit difficult to do, but i want to make the sandbox experience as simple as possible(no missable events, no hidden collectibles, no missable events in the sandbox environment). The story will stay as linear as possible to allow a more immersive experience.
If thats not possible ill just drop the idea for the sandbox mode entirely, however that remains to be seen until i complete the writing and mapping of the next arc of the story(which is one of the parts I've been excited about writing for this story)
Christmas was nice hope the same for you.
That's fair its your game after all but to be honest other than a coding exercise most Sandboxes don't offer much that couldn't be done with a simple menu to the players, The story and pictures are far more important. The longer you keep the sandbox going the more technological debt you are accumulating, tho. Meaning the longer you wait the worse gets the work you need to do for a switch to VN.
Really enjoyed what I played but I noticed one of the previews on this page wasn't in the game but it's in an event in the files that didn't happen in game? I'm assuming it will be in the next version?
Quite a keen eye. Yes it is in the next update. I really liked the cg and wanted to tease the next upcoming event ^^
Can you please have the downloads on Mediafire or other platforms. MEGA is greedy and wont let me download past 5gigs unless i pay for it
I plan to host it on google drive soon, i was just having a small issue with the upload. Ill try and get more file hosts soon
Would it be possible to host on a website compatible with the itch.io launcher? It would make downloading updates to the game much easier.
Funnily enough I was actually reading up on itch's butler. It seems i would be able to if everything works out xD
Ill definitely try it in the next update
Any chance of a android version in the future
I did plan to take a look into it and see if renpy supports mobile on a game of this size. It it is possible Id definitely add it in the next update :)
Looks Interesting let's give a try
Hope you enjoy ^^
Any feedback or reccomendations are always greatly appreciated :)
looking forward to more :3 <3
Glad you enjoyed :3
Are there custom animations or plans to add them?
Ive actually been working on some for the next update. Since im quite new to animating ive been taking my time to learn it. Hope to give all of you some great animations soon!
Nice start, will follow for now, best of luck with the progress of this project.
Thank you! Im glad you enjoyed it.