Review Visual Novel

Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity – Review

Siren’s Call has been freely available on for some time now as a beta version of the full Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity, which adds a couple hours of story content as well as additional art and music. Escape Velocity is slated for a 2025 full release, but according to the developer is finished minus a few music tracks and Spanish and German translations. This is the version I’m looking at today and the one that has just released in Early Access at the time this review is published.

Siren's Call: Escape Velocity - Standing in the doorway

College Bound

The US is a big place. You could go your whole life never leaving your home state; in fact some people probably do. This is also tied into one of the classic American coming-of-age rituals: going away to college. Freshly minted high school grads scatter far and wide across the country to pursue their dreams. It’s a first chance to live independently away from family and get a taste of adulthood. But it’s also a time of change and perhaps loss. Will those friendships you swore to keep up forever survive thousands of miles of distance? Will you even want them to?

Oliver is about to begin this journey and head off to college after spending the summer of his senior year of high school in the sleepy Florida beach town of Siren’s Call. Oliver is no ordinary high schooler though. He and his friends spent the summer battling otherworldly creatures called sirens in a mysterious underworld they discovered via a portal in a school locker. But with the final boss defeated and peace restored to the town, it’s time for Oliver to say goodbye and move on. But how will his friends feel about that? Siren’s Call is the kind of place where the longer you stay, the harder it is to leave.

Group of friends in Siren's Call: Escape Velocity

The Midnight Guard

Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity opens simply enough. It’s Oliver’s last day in town, and after listening to voicemails from his friends asking to see him off before he flies out that evening, he heads out to visit them and say goodbye. It quickly becomes obvious though that there’s something wrong about Siren’s Call. Random strangers congratulate “college boy” Oliver with unnatural enthusiasm. Oliver’s friends, and even Oliver himself seem to act strangely at times, and foreboding hints–fragments of messages–slip through the cracks.

Oliver’s inner circle includes his friends Ashton, Andi, Emil, and Judith, and his girlfriend Violet. Ashton is a bit of a tough guy–a reformed bully who now takes pride in standing up for his friends and beliefs but still retains the notion that most problems can be solved directly, often by smashing something. Andi is a sporty girl who drives the team to hone themselves to perfection. Every challenge is an opportunity for growth, and if you don’t take it, you won’t be strong enough to survive. It’s a tough world out there. Emil is a self-imagined intellectual. Maybe he’s not a genius, but he does aspire to a life of the mind, and his intellectual curiosity drives him to ask deeper questions and look at things from different angles. Lastly, Judith is infinitely kind and caring, always supporting Oliver and his friends with nary a complaint. But what about her wishes and dreams?

Then there’s Violet. She’s a free spirit above all, despite, or perhaps because she has epilepsy. Her condition might mean she has to live her life differently from everyone else, but that doesn’t stop her from dreaming big. Violet enjoys painting and spirited conversation, where, despite her impishness, she’s often surprisingly insightful. She also likes to watch NASA’s rocket launches from the beach. After all, a rocket launch is the ultimate symbol of escape, so powerful it can leave the very grasp of Earth itself.

Map of Siren's Call: Escape Velocity

As We Go On We Remember

Your task is simple enough. Have Oliver say goodbye to his friends before the day is up. You can choose who to visit in what order on a map, where the current time and ETA to each destination are clearly marked. Oliver can also gain lucidity by witnessing certain scenes or making certain choices. His current lucidity is indicated by a number by a symbol of an open eye. Lucidity represents Oliver’s awareness of the truth of his situation and high lucidity is needed to access certain endgame choices. Lucidity can also be spent to access hints about how to progress the story. You don’t need to worry too much about accumulating lucidity though. Throughout Siren’s Call you have numerous opportunities to visit Violet at the beach, where she and Oliver will chat for a while and he will gain lucidity.

The main story of Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity is divided into several numbered categories, I imagine a reference to Florida’s hurricane season. Each category explores an issue important to Oliver and his relationship with his friends as well as presents a bit of a puzzle to solve. It’s here that you can spend lucidity to get hints, though I never found I needed them, and if you do fail you can simply try again. Siren’s Call also makes excellent use of the visual novel medium, taking advantage of the presentation and mechanics both to build the puzzle aspects and to generally unnerve and disorient you. I don’t want to give things away, but it’s effective and varied so things don’t get repetitive.

There’s also a mechanic where Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity will delete your saves at certain points, which it warns you about on startup. I’m usually wary of such mechanics, but it works well here as a way to keep you moving forward. Plus, you don’t need to worry about missing things. There’s only one small branching into the true and normal ending near the end, and after you finish the story you unlock a scene select in case you want to go back and see small conversation branches or scenes you might have skipped over.

Oliver claiming to be a bookworm

Memento Mori

Alongside the story of Oliver saying goodbye to his friends, you learn the story of how the group spent their summer as you unlock entries in Oliver’s journal. Really there are two stories. One tells how he and his friends, calling themselves the Midnight Guard, conquered the underworld and defeated the sirens. The other talks about Oliver’s experiences during his senior year of high school. Both are worth following as they unlock, as they’re well-written and give important insight into Oliver and his friends that adds depth and context to their on-screen interactions. The journal also serves as an important clue to Siren’s Call’s central secret and is there to connect all the threads once the truth has been revealed.

As you might expect, Siren’s Call has a few twists, and it does an excellent job supporting them with symbolism and foreshadowing. When a reveal finally drops, it fits neatly into the story both narratively and thematically. As a result, the twists are satisfying whether you guess them or not, and I never felt like Siren’s Call used cheap tricks to try and shock me for the sake of shocking me. However, the symbolism and foreshadowing can be a bit unsubtle at times. In particular, I thought characters were occasionally too direct about telling me things that would have been better left for me to read between the lines, and that certain hints about the truth were repeated too many times. It’s a small complaint though, and given that we live in a time when people seem increasingly reluctant to engage with stories beyond the literal, perhaps a choice that will make Siren’s Call work better for some people.

Tough guy in Siren's Call: Escape Velocity

Learning to Live

Besides, what elevates Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity above the many other visual novels that take advantage of the medium’s potential for mind-bending disorientation is that underneath the mystery, there’s a heartfelt coming-of-age story. It’s hard to get into specifics without giving things away, but Oliver deals with some serious issues in his relationships with both his friends and himself, and the answers Siren’s Call arrives at are thoughtful and nuanced. It’s not a simple story of overcoming hardship by believing in yourself or the power of friendship because life is messier than that. The innocent summer of childhood can’t last forever, because people grow and change, sometimes with unexpected results. That doesn’t mean the good and important things must necessarily be lost, but avoiding this takes intention, maturity, and honesty.

A big part of what makes this work is that the writing and dialogue are strong throughout. The characters are mature for teenagers, but this leads to dialogue that helps you engage with the story and themes and allows the characters to be vulnerable. I also felt that despite its slow pace and inherently repetitive structure, Siren’s Call mostly avoids wasting time. While there was one gimmick toward the end that went a bit long for me, scenes generally have a strong sense of place, and the dialogue between characters is meaningful, either because it advances the story or because you learn something about the people involved and their relationship. In a medium inundated with cutesy slice-of-life scenes that spin their wheels going nowhere, Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity is a breath of fresh air.

Andi and Oliver in Siren's Call: Escape Velocity

Art, Sound, and Extras

Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity has a mostly excellent UI that complements the gameplay nicely. You can access the journal from the bottom of the text box at any time–convenient since entries unlock piecemeal as you play. There are a number of gallery images to unlock by taking various actions, some used in the game and some fun extras. And once you complete the main story, you unlock both a scene select and some extra scenes following the cast before the events of the main story. These are fun if you want to spend a little more time with the characters before you put Siren’s Call down.

The character sprites are fine enough. They don’t match the detail of the more extravagant anime-style visual novels I’ve seen, nor is the style particularly distinctive, but they do a nice job expressing the characters’ personalities visually. And it’s nice to see that Oliver has a sprite. The character sprites aren’t always aesthetically consistent with depictions of the characters in CGs though. I found the backgrounds more striking, particularly the watercolor effect that’s used in scene transitions. Plus, interesting background art supports some of Siren’s Call’s visual gimmicks.

Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity is unvoiced, and not all the music is finished yet, so I have to give the audio an incomplete. Still, I liked what I did hear of the music. In particular, the use of guitar rather than piano or classical instruments in the title theme and some of the contemplative scenes gives the music a modern vibe fitting the 2000s setting and helps the soundtrack stand out from the many visual novel soundtracks that rely heavily on piano noodling. I am curious though to see what things are like when the soundtrack is finished, as some of the climactic scenes toward the end had no music in this build, and I imagine that isn’t what’s planned for the final release.

Violet in the wind in Siren's Call: Escape Velocity

Verdict

Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity is a thoughtful coming-of-age story wrapped in a slow-burn mystery that artfully tackles its themes and cleverly takes advantage of the possibilities of the visual novel medium. Come for the thrill and atmosphere and stay for the heart.

SIREN’S CALL: ESCAPE VELOCITY IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Platforms: PC
Purchase: Nutaku

If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy Irotoridori no Sekai – The Colorful World.

Thank you to ThePenSword for providing a Steam review code for Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity.

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