As part of my backlog project, I am to play all the games in my Steam library. This includes a variety of visual novels, a couple of my favorite games being from this genre – such as Va-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action and Virtue’s Last Reward. Today’s review is about a visual novel that is more on the “novel” side, that being Saintmaker.
Revisiting Horror: Expectations Set by YangYang Mobile
I’m not a huge fan of horror, but this isn’t even the first “horror” visual novel I’ve played from this studio: YangYang Mobile’s debut game, The Letter, released in 2017, caught my attention with its ambitious narrative spanning seven points of view, significant variation based on player choices, and over 50 endings. Despite its flaws, The Letter remains worth playing for its sheer ambition – few visual novels, if any, have matched the ambitious branching narrative of this indie title.
Naturally, I came to Saintmaker with expectations. While I knew it wasn’t a branching narrative, The Letter had great production value even outside of its narrative – the voice acting seems too good for a small indie studio, constant, high-quality CGs, and distinctive character designs especially with its diverse cast. How does Saintmaker fare, with its more limited story scope, and with its being YangYang’s fourth release?
Themes of Faith and Trauma: A Mixed Portrayal of Catholicism
Saintmaker follows Holly Beltram, a teenager who goes into a convent after an undisclosed event at home. There, she meets Gabriella, a rebellious girl forced into the convent by her parents, and Adira, the head nun at the convent. Holly’s sister, Liana, is visited retrospectively through Holly’s memories. The game explores religion’s impact on family dynamics, abuse, trauma, and personal growth.
This theme should resonate with me—I grew up Catholic and remained so until my early 20s. Like Holly, I’ve experienced religious retreats and understand the desire to submit to such environments.
However, the game’s handling of religion is uneven – while it is no doubt critical of how religion justifies abuse for the sake of morals, and how much people will forget even their own children due to their beliefs, it seems overly committed to portraying religion solely as harmful. While I’m not a fan of religion myself, such one-dimensional depictions don’t always make for compelling narratives. Some scenes feel raw and harrowing (including a few dealing with corporal punishment), while others render religion incidental to the plot. Some scenes really hit home how bad religion can be, while some others portray it as almost overly malevolent, to the point of caricature.
Holly struggles with lots of things throughout the whole story, but it’s pretty much left ambiguous what she thinks of her own religion at every point in the story. This is a pain point for me, since I believe that the internalization of guilt, and how much it should sprawl throughout all your existence, is one of the more insidious aspect of Catholicism – and Holly’s struggle with guilt never gets properly framed as religious. Holly’s arc—where she learns to be honest about her needs—is engaging but feels disconnected from the religious context. It’s as if she belongs in a different story, which diminishes the narrative’s potential impact.
There are shades of this – Holly’s favorite fantasy books are demonized by her family, and Adira often frames her attempts to submit Gabriella and Holly as religious. With that said, the game doesn’t consistently draw from these elements, resulting in a portrayal that feels fragmented.
A Drama Disguised as Horror
If you look at The Letter reviews, you will find a common criticism that, well, The Letter is not really a horror story, but rather a drama with occasional ghostly interruptions. I’d say this is also largely true of Saintmaker – while the supernatural aspects are more central and are more connected to the main draw of the story, this is still mostly a character drama story that sometimes has tense, supernatural scenes. If you’re seeking to get scared, you should look elsewhere.
Personally, I don’t mind this focus on character drama. However, Saintmaker’s character arcs lack the same depth. Gabriella’s character feels underdeveloped, contributing little to the story’s themes or plot. Her relationship with Holly feels stilted and artificial. Adira’s arc has potential, but it isn’t explored until the final act.
The horror aspects, however, are left unresolved – there are a few scenes where something scary or supernatural happens, but they are abandoned without explanation, making me question their relevance. The narrative feels like two disconnected stories, with the second one emerging in the last hour.
Uneven Production and Pacing Issues
Much like The Letter, Saintmaker boasts beautiful CGs and a talented cast of voice actors. Holly’s actress delivers a standout performance with emotional depth. However, Adira’s voice work is inconsistent, and Gabriella’s performance suffers from poor audio quality and uninspired delivery.
Still, even Holly suffers from a very botched script. Characters seem to grunt and groan with a demeanor of self-importance that seems unfit for this type of story, making a lot of the dialogue feel slow and hard to listen through. Some conversations feel like bad early 2000s anime dubs instead of a story about overcoming religious abuse.
Visually, the game struggles with pacing: For most of the story, you will see the exact same 3-5 backgrounds of the convent.Whether intentional or not, this repetitive imagery diminishes immersion and heightens a sense of monotony. While the numerous CGs at the end are stunning, and there are a lot of them, but their sudden influx highlights the earlier visual monotony even mor starkly.
As to why almost all the CGs are at the end? Well…
The Climax that Almost Redeems it
Ending spoilers! Skip to the next section to avoid them.
I was extremely impressed with the climax of Saintmaker. For the whole game, we see Holly’s memories with her sister Liana, who is heavily implied to have committed suicide despite the support Holly gave her in her family’s harsh abusive environment. They bond about the love of a fantasy novel series, called Kylie Taylor, and there are several scenes where Holly tends to her needs, even one scene where Holly brings out a first aid kit that she always had handy for her parent’s corporal punishment.
But then the narrative reframes everything: why would a 15-year-old have a first aid kit in their room? Holly was never supportive of her sister and was passively allowing her parents to get away with the horrible treatment that they were both receiving, except Holly was much better at coping through it – leaving her sister alone, which eventually leads her to commit suicide. All of the previous scenes where Holly remembers her sister are suddenly reframed as Holly being complicit in her parent’s abuse and her dealing with the weight of Liana’s suicide.
I can’t overstate how genius this is. This is precisely what I would want of the story, and I was suddenly super invested in this game I was only going to complete out of obligation.
Oh, but it doesn’t end there! As it turns out, Adira herself was complicit in the death of someone close to her due to passivity – a small girl, called Cornelia, is revealed to be killed by the head nun of the convent, and while Cornelia has been trying to call to Adira, she has only been able to call to Holly.
Several dramatic moments later, Holly is now inside of a coffin with Cornelia, and Holly, the passive girl who let her sister kill herself due to inaction, is now alone with the girl who got killed because of inaction by the person who trapped them there. Holly then delivers one impactful line after another, taking responsibility for Liana’s death and promising to never forget Cornelia, just like she will never forget Liana. In the picture above I put one of my favorite lines of the novel – “Real life is full of people who can hurt you. It’s full of bad things and it doesn’t make sense”, which is Holly finally being honest – directly confronting the person in front of her. She extends her company to a spirit that was suffering alone, mirroring Liana, and they can both start to move on because of this.
This scene genuinely led me to tears. I was so shocked to see a spirit that was wandering alone, trying to contact her old friend, get to Holly instead, and then have Holly her realization of how she should be honest and admit things are simply not good for now. It’s all great in the way that all of the visual novel should have been – denial is, of course, a pillar of how religious fervor can work, and finally letting go of the idea that everything has to be good can be of great relief to anyone who has grown up religious. The way Holly describes their parents afterwards is not necessarily religious, but it’s very reminiscent of how an abusive household would not try to help her with processing everything emotionally, and well, I should probably move on to the next part because I could talk ages about how significant this specific moment felt for me.
So why don’t I recommend the novel, despite it’s clearly great finale?
Well, despite this scene being everything it needed to be and more, there are still a few problems in the ending.
The first one is how Holly is characterized after it. I can’t fully show it to you, of course, but take the following CG as an example:
After this, Holly is portrayed with an air of wisdom she really shouldn’t have. The whole game is spend acting melodramatically, but as soon as Holly needs to actually be broody because she is finally starting to process her trauma, she starts acting super wise. It’s off-putting.
There is also not enough build-up to this scene. We have a few scenes of supernatural happenings at the convent, but even after the ending, we have no idea of what they actually were, and Cornelia is just revealed as something completely unrelated at the last act of the story. Instead of constantly having Adira and Holly foil each other with the ways they are passively contributing to an abusive system, we instead have a last-minute plot point that drops all the build up we have had.
The reveal of Holly being part of the abusive system that made Liana kill herself is genius, but we never actually got any indication that Holly is an unreliable narrator, so it almost feels like the writers are cheating. If we had learned to slowly distrust Holly throughout the game, this might have been much more powerful than it was.
It’s what makes this game so frustrating – just like The Letter, is has all the potential and all the good ideas to be a masterpiece, but it’s execution feels horribly short of what it could be.
Why is this even a visual novel?
In case you’re unaware, there’s a subgenre of visual novels called kinetic novel – basically a visual novel that has no choices, presenting a linear story. Saintmaker is very close to being one in this regard, and I’d have no issue with that – I think it’s fine to give a couple of different dialogue choices that don’t amount to much if it’s to make the player think about the situation and/or give slightly different dialogues based on that.
However, Saintmaker doesn’t seem to bother with that at all – there are a lot of constant prompts asked the player (while some being red for an inexplicable reason) with the only payoff being an extra scene at the end if you pick all the positive options with Gabriela throughout the story. It feels like there could be a lot more to this, given how this game deals with beliefs, so while I would never demand something like The Letter gets made again – I shudder to think of the poor soul who programmed the branching tree, let alone the people writing the story itself – I really have to wonder why the developers here made us have choices in this game at all. I would have drastically reduced the choices, just to have the player empathize with Holly at certain points, or put a couple more extra scenes based on player choice. The end result that we got feels misleading instead.
Final Thoughts: A Flawed Experience
Saintmaker has all the makings of a good story. It has good themes, it has something to say and it has the budget to say it. Unfortunately, I think it ends up being less than the sum of its parts – for all of the good religious representation, there’s other parts of religious abuse that feel like they should be in here but are ignored. There are good actresses for this game, but they were given a mixed script and were directed too melodramatically. There is a killer ending with a potential ton of weight to the plot, but there is not the adequate buildup for it.
If, despite all of this, this seems like something you’d try out, I still think it’s a worthwhile purchase – it’s available here on Steam, and goes on sale frequently, and I can totally see why someone would enjoy this one. For me, however, the negatives ultimately outweigh the positives, making it difficult to recommend.
What about you, though? Do you think Saintmaker actually delivers on its themes better than I think it did? Do you think there’s more subtle foreshadowing that I might have missed? Please let me know down in the comments!
