Blackberry Honey is one of those visual novels where, the more you talk about it, the more the potential audience for it shrinks. This is a kinetic visual novel, which means that there is no branching or agency: you are strapped in for a purely prose-based game (be ready to press A a lot). It’s a lesbian love story set in Victorian-era Shropshire, focusing on the ‘Below Stairs’ of an aristocratic family home. And it’s been significantly edited down for console audiences, with steamier visuals removed. There’s a lot of cutting away as the clothes come off.
We tend to play most, if not all, of the visual novels that arrive in our offices, so we like to think that we’re eclectic in our tastes. But even Blackberry Honey pushes at the edges of our personal preferences. It’s aggressively niche, and we will do some minor calibration so that you can better understand whether it’s for you.
First of all, it’s got an approach to sexualisation that might be a turn off. Take Lorina Waugh, the main character and object of affection for so many of Blackberry Honey’s characters. She is perpetually in her maid’s outfit, which – as it happens – isn’t particularly great at concealing her absurdly large breasts. Just in case we missed them, she’s ALWAYS posed in a way that has her arms gallumphing them up to her chin, getting maximum cleavage.
But Blackberry Honey keeps catapulting her into queasy situations. A twelve-year old girl makes a play at Lorina and we can’t help feeling that it’s meant to be titillating. Another young girl – younger than the nineteen year-old main character – gets upskirted by some local boys and the camera dives low to get a good look. Characters are all lusty and on-heat. It’s probably not the game to play in front of parents or partners, and we found the odd moment distasteful.
What surprised us most was how unrelentingly grim the story was. A game called ‘Blackberry Honey’ with its bright visuals and jolly soundtrack might imply that this is a cheerful game, but by golly it isn’t. This is several shades darker than your average Downton Abbey episode, with a main character who is bullied both Above Stairs and Below Stairs, who has a Scarlet-Letter-style shame that she has to carry around, and who lacks pretty much anyone that she can call on as a friend.
It can be unrelenting. Certainly in the opening few hours, she has a shrewish maid friend that she sometimes confides in, but the rest of the cast range from indifferent to her, all the way up to abject hatred, tripping her up and trying to get her fired. Lorina Waugh doesn’t help herself in many ways – she tests the reader’s sympathy by lashing out at those few people who are friendly – and the overall effect is to make reading it through a bit grim. As with most tales of this kind, a fairytale ending is waiting, but you have to wade through the tar to get there.
And, lest we forget, there is no interaction here. There are no choices, no multiple endings. You will play it through once and have a full 1000G. Considering the infuriating choices that Lorina constantly makes, you might be itching for a voice in proceedings. But you have none, and that will be too much (or too little) for a lot of players.
If you’ve made it through the many, many caveats that we’ve placed in front of you, then Blackberry Honey does have some redeeming features. It doesn’t shirk from the big topics, and tackles lesbianism, social mobility and the patriarchy with a deftness that you wouldn’t expect from a game that makes so many dubious decisions elsewhere. It was only at the end that we realised that not a single man was visualised in the game – they’re offscreen but still powerful – and that absence had a strong effect.
There’s a well-executed moment where one of the main characters revealed their past, touching on what it was like to be the daughter of an immigrant in Victorian London. It has a lightness of touch and big old heart – something that the rest of the game seems to lack. This segue into other territories also has the outlines of a plot, with significant moments happening that shine a light on the characters. It serves to show what the rest of the game is missing.
Blackberry’s biggest problem is that, by being a ‘state of the nation’ game, packed with social commentary (when it’s not leering at the main character’s boobs), it doesn’t actually have a huge amount of plotting or moments of interest. There’s a subplot about a violin that might have a great deal of value, but otherwise Blackberry Honey doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s a kind of Victorian survival sim, with a young girl just trying to get from day to day, and – to our tastes – it was a little too far from an engaging story. We were holding out for something to happen.
Blackberry Honey is a lot of things, and many of them are contradictory. It’s a Victorian-era visual novel that is uninteractive, sleazy, grim, hopeful, dumb and clever. There is undoubtedly an audience for its contrary charms, but we wouldn’t include ourselves in it. The negatives defeated the positives, and the overriding feeling was that Blackberry Honey needed a touch more sweetness, and a little less bitterness.
You can buy Blackberry Honey from the Xbox Store for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S
