真・竹取物語 / Shin Taketori Monogatari

Everyone knows The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.

—But somewhere in the retelling, it was twisted. This was once a record of something that really happened.

On the far side of the moon, a woman lay sleeping.

She woke without words, her memory broken.

You will trace what she lost, one fragment at a time.

With each memory restored, the true ending hidden beneath the old story quietly comes into view—

■ A Story About Restoring Memory

What you do is gather the broken pieces of a memory and put them back together.

Each fragment you recover brings a scene to light — a scene from a story everyone thought they already knew.

Solving the mystery becomes, in itself, the process of one person remembering who she was.

■ A Face You Never Knew, Behind a Tale Everyone Does

The story you heard as a child — what really happened in it?

Piece by piece, you uncover what someone cut away, twisted, and made the world forget.

"I thought I knew this story" quietly gives way to something else.

■ Your Choices, and the Endings They Lead To

Throughout the story, you'll make small choices.

None of them is the "right" one — each is a way of choosing how to stand beside her.

Where they lead is one of several different endings.

Only after seeing them all does the whole truth come into view.

■ Pixel Art, Every Frame

A world drawn pixel by pixel, by Byte.

A quiet story unfolds inside screens that feel nostalgic, and somehow warm.

■ How It Plays

This is a sound novel: you read the story and advance it with a click, or the Space or Enter key.

At key moments you are given a choice about how to stand beside her. There are five of them, each with two options. What you choose gathers her memories as "fragments" in a picture book, which you can reread any time from Records. The side you didn't pick can be seen by playing again.

In the middle and late parts of the story, there are puzzles where you drag fragments into the right order. There is no time limit, and a piece lights up when it's in the right place.

There are three endings. At the final choice, the more fragments you've gathered, the more paths open to you. And beyond them all, one more story is waiting.

Includes skip for already-read text (hold Ctrl), auto-advance, a backlog, a hide-UI button, save and load at any time (with an automatic save before each choice), and text speed and volume settings. Playable in Japanese and English.

—Precious, because it ends.

There was something she wanted to give you, while it was still warm.

This is a story about a single farewell.