Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem is a visual novel that’s not technically OUT year. But the demo is really good and shows a lot of promise.
Also just in generally anything by Christine Love is real good.
VA-11 HALL-A may have had the strongest personalities in any game from last year. It’s funny at times, then changing to become beautifully human and even dark.
I’ll second Steins;Gate cause that game takes you for a ride if you see the first hour and think the game’s gonna be like that all the way.
I wish I could recommend Kinoko Nasu’s works, but you’d probably have to pirate some of them if you wanted to play them.
I haven’t finished Steins;Gate, but I’ll echo the recommendations for it based on what I have played of it.
Analogue: A Hate Story is also a good one.
Saya no Uta, as mentioned earlier, totally has problematic parts, especially later on, but it also has some relatively unique horror ideas.
There’s also a series I’d recommend called Fault. It’s a serialized VN, but while it has an ongoing plot, it’s done pretty well introducing and resolving the individual storylines in both of the games released so far.
I want to talk about The House in Fata Morgana, but I feel like it’s difficult to explain without spoiling things.
The art is very pretty, though the backgrounds are… old-school, and the soundtrack is amazing. Most of the songs have vocals and they’re extremely… unique, varied, and impactful.
I’d call it… a tragedy? Mostly? A lot of bad things happen to people. It might even seem like horror at points, but in the end it’s equal parts hopeful and sad.
It’s a story about understanding how and why people hurt each other, and about moving on from it. Not ever about forgiveness, but about ceasing to hate the people who have hurt you.
It’s largely about perspective, and for most of the game your perspective limits or colors what you see in ways you won’t initially understand. It likes to be misleading, but I don’t think it ever* lies to you, like some games do in order to pull off twists.
*With one important exception.
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The creators of Hustle Cat have said they’re working on a prequel featuring Graves in his goth band days so hold on, more’s on its way!
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Now that I’m done blathering about Fata Morgana, which is my favorie VN of all time, I’ll talk more generally 
I’m a big fan of Higurashi and Umineko, of Ever17 and 999 (and progressively less so the rest of the series), and of Liar-soft’s “steampunk” series (especially Sharnoth and Inganock).
Steins;Gate is fantastic and 0 is almost better except for the final ending obviously existing solely to give an excuse for another sequel. Ignore the last couple of hours and it’d be one of the best VNs ever, in my opinion.
On the Western front, I’m a big fan of Chrstine Love. Ladykiller was amazing.
I also like pretty much everything by Ebi-hime and Hanako, though Hanako’s games tend more towards sims than actual VNs, and some of the games she publishes aren’t actually made by her. Also Hustle Cat, as previously mentioned, was a fun little one.
Really, there’s just so many. I’ve been playing VNs for decades now, though pickings were extremely slim in English in the 90s
I actually played some VNs through text hooking and machine translation, which is pretty much inconceivable now.
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Notch: Innocent Luna: Eclipsed Sinners: One of my favorite VN, it bits of Higurashi kind story with a lot of mystery and drama.
Oblivious Garden: Another VN I really love, you are a general which have fallen in disgrace after begin defeated and is stripped of rank and prestige, but you gain a chance to not only recover that but to perform a ritual in honor of you soldiers, if you can help and train the princess of this magical empire to perform a very important ritual.
The Silver Case: This very good one and SUDA51 first game, also this a very old style VN/Adventure game, so its gameplay can be a bit confusing, because is more close to old text/verb based adventure games that modern day VN.
Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters: It is a very clever mixture of light strategy elements and visual novel, where you go around, well… hunting ghosts.
Steins´s Gate: Classic VN, I really recommend it.
Higurashi: Another classic VN, again I do recommend it.
Grisaia: There is a lot of Grisaia VN, and all are very good.
Hatoful Boyfriend: Really fun Vn and a great way to introduce people to VNs.
Cristine Love´s VNs: Very good VN, I haven´t played the latest one, but Analog and Hate Plus are amazing.
I think that I know you are having fun (but I’m still working) is an excellent visual-novel that I happen to be contributor to.
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The comedy in this is on a slow burn, but the payoff it builds to is just … *chef kiss*
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I was just gifted Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness. Has anyone played it and can chime in on it?
Gonna second The House in Fata Morgana, which I loved. It came out back in 2016 and was one of the few things able to distract me from politics going on at the time–I found it that engrossing! It starts off as an over-the-top gothic pastiche, but after a certain point it becomes a powerful love story between two flawed people defying space and time to be together. My one criticism would be that the last chapter delves a bit too far into visual novel cliches, in a way that tarnishes the rest of the work. It ends strong, though. And the music is lovely.
I also have a soft spot for Liarsoft’s What a Beautiful games, the only one of which currently available in English is Gakthun of the Golden Lightning? Hikaru Sakurai has a really distinct style that draws more from Ikuhara anime and Lovecraft than most other authors, using lots of repeated lines and ritual “stock footage” scenes. It’s not for everyone (some would call her reliance on repetition padding) but I love the atmosphere in her work. Hopefully they bring some of her other work over here, like Inganock (Sona-Nyl is in the works.)
One more thing to mention: Gakthun has the requisite uncomfortable porn scenes, being an underground visual novel published in Japan. The House in Fata Morgana is “all ages,” and has no such scenes at all! But it does tackle some difficult, triggery content to varying degrees of success, so keep that in mind while deciding whether or not to check it out.
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Ever 17 is definitely one of my favourites. From the writer of the 999 series, it’s about a group of people who get trapped in an underwater theme park and have to wait to be rescued. You get to play as one of two characters, who each have different storylines to follow during the game period.
Obviously, there’s a bit more to it than that, but it’s best experienced, and much like 999 there’s a true ending to unlock which is completely amazing.
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Resurrecting this very cool thread since since there’s been a lot of cool VN releases since May, and folks have been talking about them quite a bit!
(That said, perhaps it’d be best to keep the now über-popular Doki Doki Literature Club and Dream Daddy to their respective threads? Well, as y’all wish!)
I’m extremely fond of the work of ebi-hime, who’s been mentioned once already! She’s a prolific VN writer (you may have heard of Asphyxia, Sweetest Monster or more recently Blackberry Honey), and there’s always a very cohesive, genuine and stylised direction in her stories. They are often not too long (well, some are), and could be compared to short stories or novellas. It’s kind of rare to see this kind of work in VNs, which tend to spread in length, verbosity, and characters.
It’s hard to summarise her output, because the themes and genres are pretty varied. They often get into dark territory, but there’s a lot of cute love stories too (with all sorts of pairings). Some are set in a Victorian setting and are written with a flowery, elaborate style, but many are very contemporary and realistic, up to the cultural references.
Here are two of my favourites among her free VNs, which tend to be shorter than her commercial ones!
Lucky Me, Lucky You is about the quest of Nanami and her friend Ryo for a porn actress she’d been obsessed with in her youth. The language and subject matter are purposefully crude, it’s kind of bleak underneath, but hear me out, there’s a certain realness and warmth to it! Highly recommended if you’re looking for a queer story with a contemporary/realistic bend to it.
Lynne has just been released, and is extremely bleak, but also very good. It follows the life of a British teenage girl through the stress and anxiety of the weeks preceding her exams. There’s a lot of straight-up surreal horror, and it doesn’t cut around the corners when describing the many normal horrors of teenage life for a girl, so it comes with a lot of warnings for depression, anxiety, violence, but the whole approach is very empathetic. The disquieting sound design is also a great part of the nightmarish nature of the story (this musical part and some coding were done by sleepy agents, who also does a lot of experimental, surreal VNs).
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One thing I’ve found really hard about Visual Novels is the lack of interaction I have with them for long periods of time. Does anyone have any suggestions for more, I guess “active” VNs, or short ones? I started Hatoful Boyfriend but never got to an ending. I enjoyed what I played of Butterfly Soup!
I’m going to revive this thread to because I have just finished The House in Fata Morgana and would like to share my thoughts. (And if you’re reading this and haven’t played it yet it’s currently 45% off in the Steam Sale! What a great time to cry about doomed romance in a gothic mansion!)
Overall, I loved the game. It has lovely, atmospheric music, great art and an engaging, tragic story with plenty of twists. It is also quite long (about 20hrs at my reading speed, but I saw some reviews say 40hrs). I was pretty satisfied by the time I got to the first ending, but I was only about half way through. The story has more graphic descriptions of violence and abuse than I was expecting though, so I’ll highlight that for anyone considering it.
Some mild, very spoilery criticisms:
Summary
The only criticism I have is that I wished the game had a more consistent register, and had a few more historical details. There’s the odd clanger of a line like, “Father won’t let me attend the Globe Theatre! Jeez, what a jerk!” or instances of people baking cookies in Dark Ages France, which dragged me out of the setting. These are small things, but when the rest of the localisation is such high quality, they stood out.
The game really starts to soar in second half once the main characters are introduced, but then slows down again in the witch’s chapter and the final chapter. The witch’s chapter is so relentlessly violent it feels unreal, while the final chapter feels a bit bloated, even if there are some great moments in it and it’s nice to see the main pair interact again.
I go back and forth on how the game treats Michel- the “He’s actually reborn as Michelle!” fake-out was an uncomfortable few minutes, but other that it treats him pretty respectfully (when he’s not being abused by other characters as part of his own tragic story - that’s all pretty horrible).
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It’s nice to hear so much praise for Fata Morgana, it really sounds like something I’d enjoy, but I haven’t had time to delve into it yet… Maybe in a few weeks. 
Recently, I read Soundless, a short horror VN that I really enjoyed.
It’s a mystery set in a village seemingly withdrawn from the entire world, and the narration purposefully leaves everything about it very vague. The only thing at the core of the village life is its peculiar religion. The protagonist is a teenager affected by some kind of “curse”, and completely isolated because of it.
I cannot tell much more, except that this a story with a very vivid imagery, an unsettling atmosphere, and good pacing on top.
A couple warnings: it gets into difficult territory, including bullying, poor mental health, and abusive relationships, and its brand of religious-psychological horror is at the very least disturbing, but also crude, and kind of veers to gore. (There are in-game warnings at the very beginning.)
But it is also very respectful of all its themes and characters!
I’d really recommend it to those who read DDLC and enjoyed the intention but felt eventually underwhelmed by the way it treated its own characters. In comparison, Soundless goes a bit further, but I found it more cohesive overall, and ultimately more meaningful!
Also recommended to those who enjoyed Higurashi, it’s almost the same brand of horror, and Soundless purposefully emulates the early 2000s aesthetic of denpa horror VNs.
Small addition: extra files appear in the game folder after the ending. Nothing particular is required to access them, just reaching the ending. I promise they are worth a read if you enjoyed the story!
Also @vehemently, this is a very belated reply but if you’re still interested, maybe the VNs from Hanako Games mentioned in this thread could fit? Long Live the Queen and A Little Lily Princess could be great if stat-raising with many choices sounds like your thing!
As very short VNs, I would again recommend something like Lynne.
I just finished playing VA11 HALL-A and…what a disappointment. The premise is great, the music’s great, the aesthetic is fantastic and… the writing is crass and most of the characters are awful people in a way that isn’t used to say anything interesting. I played through it hoping there’d be a stunning final act to make it worth the praise it gets, but no, you reminisce about your dead girlfriend with her younger sister and recall a graphic sexual experience you had, hugely undercutting the tone . And y’know, 4chan stuff, but I’d bought it before I knew it was that compromised.
There’s a good discussion on a podcast about it that’s probably relevant to anyone reading this, called Novel Not New, that basically ends with "I guess early 2016 me was willing to overlook a lot more than I am now, " which probably explains the praise for this game.
They did recommend ROM:2064 though, which I’m playing now, and I already like it for being the only game that’s ever asked me about my dietary preferences. Fingers crossed I can scratch the cyberpunk/sci-fi itch that way!
If you like Ace Attorney or Hotel Dusk you might also enjoy Jake Hunter. There’s a collection remaking a bunch of the early NES games for DS, and there’s a new entry coming in this year for 3DS. It’s got a lot of adventure game style detective work and a very very noir tone.
Speed Dating for Ghosts is a pretty new one that i really enjoyed, and I’ve been having a good time with Tusks though I haven’t finished it yet. Also Butterfly Soup is wonderful and fun.
