A save file that remembers everything is a rare enough promise in visual novels, and Ad Nauseam – The Wrong Side builds its entire foundation around one. Every choice I made got logged into something the game calls the Dictionary, a running record carried forward into each future installment of what’s planned as a four-part quadrilogy, so nothing I did in Disc 0 or Disc 1 felt disposable even in a story this early into its own runtime. Developed by throwpup with a soundtrack from lolratz, the game drops its protagonist Tsurine, a PsySpec dealing with dissociative amnesia on top of an already high-stress job, into an endless, liminal hospital called the Sanitoria after a mysterious woman offers to help recover her missing memories in exchange for hunting down fragments of an unusual key.
The developers call their own creation an RCN, a Roleplay and Click Novel, and that label undersells how much is actually stitched together here. Traditional visual novel dialogue sits alongside point-and-click exploration and light RPG systems, and the combat woven through it never felt bolted on as a separate minigame the way it easily could have. What struck me most while working through the Sanitoria was how constantly curiosity got rewarded. Small, easy-to-miss actions kept surfacing unique dialogue and interactions that didn’t always move the main plot forward but still made the space feel alive rather than static, and I ended up replaying entire sections just to catch details I knew I’d missed the first time through.
Four major romance routes run through the horror and mystery, all slow-burn yuri relationships, and none of them stay confined to dialogue scenes the way romance in games like this sometimes does. These routes carry real weight in combat support too, so choosing who Tsurine grows close to shapes how she survives the Sanitoria’s threats, not just how her story reads on the page. That mechanical integration is where the game’s whole pitch, blending genres instead of alternating between them, actually clicked for me.
Presentation leans hard into a specific, deliberately unsettling aesthetic pulling from yami kawaii, liminal space imagery, traumacore, and pastel goth influences, a combination built to feel cute and deeply wrong at the same time, which fits a story explicitly framed around coping with trauma rather than escaping it cleanly. The soundtrack backs that up with an unusual blend of breakcore, hyperpop, and witch house, a mix that shouldn’t work for a horror visual novel and somehow does, giving even quiet exploration scenes a nervy, unsettled edge. There’s no voiced dialogue here, everything runs on text, but the writing carries enough personality on its own that I never felt the absence of a voice cast while working through the Sanitoria’s stranger corners.
Only a quarter of the planned story exists right now, Disc 0 and Disc 1 out of a project aiming for around a hundred hours across four full games, and that scale is easy to feel even this early. The horror leans psychological rather than jump-scare driven, and Tsurine’s own amnesia gives every new memory fragment she recovers real emotional stakes, since I never fully trusted what she was being told about her own past by the time either disc wrapped up.
Verdict
Ad Nauseam – The Wrong Side pitches something ambitious, a horror visual novel blending point-and-click exploration, persistent choice tracking across a planned four-game arc, and romance routes that carry mechanical weight rather than existing purely in dialogue. What’s out now, Disc 0 and Disc 1, delivers on that pitch more consistently than I expected from only a quarter of the full story, thanks to a world that rewards curiosity at nearly every turn and a soundtrack unlike anything else in the genre. For anyone drawn to deliberately unsettling, trauma-focused horror with real player agency, this is worth getting in on early, though committing to an unfinished quadrilogy is still a real commitment worth going in with eyes open.
