Clicking through every choice the game marks as wrong, watching crossed-out lines resolve themselves as the actual path forward one at a time, delivers a payoff branching visual novels rarely risk offering. Free will gets treated here as something to interrogate rather than assume, and choosing wrong on purpose turns out to be exactly how someone gets free. It revives a choice-tracking structure familiar from otome and dating games and complicates it into something considerably more interesting, making for a thoughtful, unsettling experience worth far more than its free price tag suggests.
Background and technical art come from NOIR, who also handled general programming duties. An anonymous CG artist contributed the game’s more polished illustrated scenes, sixteen of them across the full playthrough, alongside an optional gore toggle for anyone who wants the darker version of certain moments. That division shows on screen. Sprite work leans deliberately loose and organic rather than clean, warm colors doing a lot of the work establishing each character’s personality at a glance. The dedicated CG illustrations lean more classical and polished by comparison, giving key story beats a visual weight ordinary dialogue scenes don’t carry.
Ezekiel has moved into the slum, a decaying, liminal stretch of space that exists somewhere between fallen grace and whatever comes after it, and she’s grown enamored with three of its inhabitants along the way. You play as Ezekiel yourself, working to help Macy, Salxire, and Oriel each push past their own self-suppression and finally give in to what they actually want, effectively pulling them toward the same kind of fall Ezekiel herself already went through.
The branching structure here carries a specific formal trick worth calling out directly. Choices the game treats as wrong don’t just quietly vanish once you’ve passed them. They stay visible in the interface with a line struck right through them, nudging you toward one particular critical route while making that manipulation plainly visible rather than hiding it. The real twist is structural rather than narrative. Working your way through every one of those crossed out, supposedly wrong choices across a full playthrough turns out to be exactly what’s required to eventually free Ezekiel, not avoiding them.
Each of the three love interests draws heavily on specific figures and stories out of Christian tradition, giving the cast real thematic weight rather than generic angel-and-demon dressing borrowed for atmosphere alone. Macy carries herself as a tormented figure yearning for release, a sharp contrast to Salxire’s more enigmatic pull, mystery and desire wrapped around each other so closely that neither reads as the whole picture. Oriel comes across as the most fragile of the three, teetering visibly on the edge of her own corruption from the moment she’s introduced. One recurring visual motif gives Ezekiel’s own arc particular weight early on. Her body periodically opens up to expel flowers, vines, and even apples throughout the story, visually echoing the hanahaki trope familiar from yuri fiction, where flowers signal unrequited love. The game deliberately sets up that association before complicating it later, and I won’t spoil what the actual explanation turns out to be, only that it isn’t quite what it looks like on the surface.
One specific issue worth naming directly. Red colored dialogue text can be hard to read against certain backgrounds, a small but real legibility flaw in an otherwise carefully considered presentation.
Composers Eli Orcutt and Lorraine Wong split scoring duties on the Definitive Edition’s soundtrack, with Orcutt also handling sound design, dialogue editing, and voice implementation. A bonus track stays hidden unless you actually reach the game’s ideal ending, tying the score’s own small reward structure directly into how the branching narrative plays out. Full voice acting now covers the entire release as part of this Definitive Edition, a real step up from the original jam build, which shipped without any voice work at all.
Director and writer rosesrot led a team of twenty in building this for the Spooktober 2023 fifth annual visual novel jam, self-publishing the finished game and later a Definitive Edition on Steam in July 2024. A full playthrough covering the main branches runs five to six hours, extended further by a bonus Free Roam route that opens up once you’ve finished, letting you keep exploring the slum’s depths afterward. Four distinct endings exist across that structure, and the whole thing stays free throughout. A separate, optional companion book called A Seraphim’s Guide To The Slum is sold apart from the game itself, containing a complete walkthrough of all four endings alongside developer commentary on the story’s underlying themes.
The same continuity extends into a separate later game called Edenfall, told from the perspective of Eden, an eldritch entity in love with Ezekiel from the other side of their relationship. Josh Carlat returns to lead development, Lorraine Wong returns for the soundtrack, and Lauren Kong reprises her role voicing Ezekiel, with the same anonymous artist behind the base game’s CG work carrying that visual identity forward into the follow-up.
Verdict
Seraphim Slum treats its choice-based structure as part of the actual argument it’s making about free will, not just a delivery mechanism for branching content. The hanahaki-adjacent body horror motif and the three heroines’ grounding in real religious tradition give the story real thematic teeth, and for a free release built out of a game jam, the presentation and voice work punch well above what that origin usually promises.
