Review: Waiting in the Lime Forest Has Passion But Lacks Substance

Clocking in at under an hour long, Waiting in the Lime Forest is a point-and-click visual novel and adventure game, with minimal input from the player. While I can feel the developers’ love for the project from the amount of research that went into the worldbuilding, as well as the hand-drawn pixel art for the characters, its shallow plot and localization issues left me feeling unsatisfied after I finished.

Waiting in the Lime Forest puts you in control of Edward Whitford, a defense attorney, who holds a house party for his family and old high school friend, Oliver Heathcote. Oliver fought in the Great War, and returned from France a changed man. Diagnosed with shell shock, Oliver is an alcoholic who scrapes by as a writer for pulp magazines, and suffers from dissociation and insomnia. During this party, someone stabs and kills thirteen-year-old Aspen Brown, the son of Edward’s cousin. Oliver, the only witness to the crime, claims it’s the doing of Lawrence, an old war buddy and his savior. The detectives don’t buy that, though. To clear Oliver of suspicion and find the culprit, Edward and Oliver take matters into their own hands. However, the investigation soon takes a supernatural turn, as Edward has to enter Oliver’s past to figure out the mysteries haunting Mornen.

As mentioned in the beginning, this game isn’t very long at all. It only took me an hour and a half to play through it twice. I’d wondered if there was perhaps a third ending I could get if I’d made different dialogue choices. Alas, the game only has the two. It never really bothers to hide the true culprit behind Aspen’s murder, either. You find a major hint to their identity at the beginning, and a detective even straight up says the truth is simple. While the story is rather sad, it’s hard to feel invested in it when the narrative and characters feel so shallow, feeling more like they’re being pushed by the plot rather than driving it themselves. The first thought I had when I finished was, “Um, sorry…it’s hard to put into words” as if Remnan from Gnosia possessed me for a split second.

Before we go on, I’d like to warn for story spoilers. While I won’t divulge everything, the plot is so short that it’s hard to talk about issues with the game without bringing up some revelations you discover in the murder mystery.

Edward is similar to Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird in that he’s a defense attorney who helps the marginalized members of his community. Even though he lives in 1920s America, he’s willing to extend a helping hand to “blacks, and homos, and junkie kids,” which other people disparage him about. While To Kill a Mockingbird critiques social inequality and prejudice through the childish lens of Scout’s perspective, the game doesn’t really say much about the topics it introduces. The “sin” of homosexuality, as well as the persecution they face, is a huge theme in this game, but even after playing through it twice, I’m not quite sure what message the writer wanted to convey. I’m guessing that they wanted to explore the mental burden such persecution can have on these individuals, but that’s only a hypothesis.

The short play time may be why the narrative and themes feel so weak. It didn’t have enough time to explore how homosexuality affected Oliver and Lawrence’s stint in the army, or Aspen and Jake’s life in Mornen. A deeper dive into them might’ve made it easier to sympathize with them, which in turn could have lent more impact to the plot. At first, I thought the game anticipated a level of decency on the player’s end, and that they’d feel sorry for Oliver based on objective knowledge of his PTSD and history. Giving it some more thought, though, I do wonder how the final scenes, especially the last showdown between Oliver and Lawrence, would read to someone who deals with prejudice for their sexual orientation in real life.

Personally, I think if Oliver was the perspective character, it wouldn’t feel so odd. Edward is nice and all, but seeing the game through his point of view made it hard for me to feel invested, because he’s ultimately a third party in all this. Seeing the game through Oliver’s eyes, complete with his dissociative episodes, might give the game some actual suspense, since we would second-guess everything he saw. Maybe the developer wanted us to question Oliver’s innocence in Aspen’s murder, thus placing us in the shoes of someone who trusts him without question. But they never bother to throw us off Oliver’s scent.

Finally, the build I played had some issues with the localization, especially in the latter half of the game. In one scene, the English dialogue cuts out of frame, and I couldn’t read it. Sergeant Escobar’s name tag under his portrait is in Chinese every time he appears, and one line of Oliver’s is in Chinese, though it switches back to English very quickly. After playing the latter half of the game in Chinese, and replaying the whole thing in Japanese, I can say that these issues only appear in the English localization of the game. This is more a pet peeve than anything, but the formatting of the glossary in Waiting in the Lime Forest is bizarre, with a full-width comma that leaves a huge space between it and the next letter. But punctuation in dialogue is perfectly fine, with no formatting problems. 

While the developers obviously put heart and passion into Waiting in the Lime Forest, it’s hard to recommend this game at its price when it doesn’t feel like it offers much in story or gameplay. Maybe in future updates, BARON DU JUVÉNILE will add more mini-games or another ending. In any case, I wish them well on their future endeavors and hope they can bring any lessons they learned from this to their next project. 

Waiting in the Lime Forest is available on Windows PC via Steam.