The same handful of images and phrases kept circling back throughout Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows Refrain, slightly reworded each time, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize that repetition wasn’t a tic the writing needed to grow out of, it was the whole point. Written by Hikaru Sakurai, whose credits stretch from Fate/Prototype to Fate/Samurai Remnant, this is Liar-soft’s fifth entry in their steampunk anthology series, set in an alternate twentieth century where widespread steam engine use has left the skies permanently grey, and it tells a story split between two women whose parallel journeys only gradually reveal how they actually connect. I read the Refrain edition released through MangaGamer and Steam, the all-ages console version of the story that later became the basis for this English release.
In the story, Lily, the main character, wakes with no memory of who she is, deep beneath a strange, transformed version of New York City, accompanied by an enigmatic young man who calls himself simply A. Above ground, in the ruins of the same city, another woman pursues her own investigation into what actually destroyed it. The two threads run alongside each other for a considerable stretch, deliberately vague about how, or whether, they’re actually related, and the game commits fully to that ambiguity rather than rushing to explain itself. That patience is a real gamble, and it’s the single biggest factor separating readers who fall completely under this story’s spell from readers who find the early hours more frustrating than intriguing. I’ll admit I spent a good chunk of those early chapters in the second camp before I came around.
What made the gamble pay off for me, once I settled into it, is the sheer density and specificity of the prose itself. This is writing that leans hard into that same circling repetition as a deliberate stylistic tool, returning to slightly reworded phrases and recurring images rather than moving in a straight line from point A to point B, and it reads as considerably more literary in register than most visual novel scripts attempt. That approach is genuinely divisive on its own merits. The same repetition that built a hypnotic, dreamlike momentum for me by the midpoint could easily read as monotonous padding to someone with less patience for it, and it’s worth knowing upfront that this isn’t a brisk, plot-forward read regardless of which camp you land in. The payoff for that patience arrived for me in the final stretch, where the story’s two parallel threads and its central themes around memory, loss, and what it actually means to hold onto a life once it’s gone click together with real emotional force, elevating everything that felt frustratingly oblique earlier into something that retroactively made sense.
The cast benefits enormously from that slow-burn structure once the story finally lets its characters breathe. Lily herself carries real charm as a protagonist, curious and a little lost in a way that never tips into helplessness, and the mystery surrounding her connection to the woman investigating the surface ruins gave even her quieter, more contemplative scenes real underlying tension for me. Flashback sequences involving a supporting character named Elysia stood out in particular for how effectively they held my attention despite the story’s generally unhurried pace, a sign of just how strong the character writing can be once it commits to a specific emotional thread rather than staying deliberately abstract.
Visually, this is a striking production, built around a distinctive violet-and-shadow color palette from artist AKIRA that gives the underground world a consistently unsettling, otherworldly beauty without losing visual coherence. Full-body character portraits during conversation scenes add real presence to dialogue-heavy stretches, and the underground sequences in particular use colorful, almost bubble-like outlining around characters that gives those scenes a distinct visual identity apart from the more grounded surface-world segments. The soundtrack, while modest in the number of individual tracks, held up well for me across a lengthy runtime, leaning into a jazzy, melancholic register that suited the story’s persistently gray, depressed atmosphere without becoming repetitive the way a smaller collection of tracks sometimes does over thirty-plus hours.
One recurring structural frustration worth flagging honestly: certain points in the story gate progress behind specific, unexplained conditions that the game never clearly signals, which left me stuck rereading a previous stretch without understanding why forward progress wasn’t happening. It’s a minor but real usability gap, more of an annoyance than a serious flaw, but one that caught me off guard more than it should have for a release of this polish otherwise.
Verdict
Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows Refrain asks for real patience through a deliberately obscure, slow-building opening stretch, and rewards that patience with prose and thematic payoff dense and thoughtful enough to justify the wait, anchored by striking, distinctive art and a genuinely affecting exploration of memory and loss. Its repetitive, circling writing style and some unclear progression gating won’t work for every reader, and this remains a demanding, unhurried experience rather than an easy recommendation. For readers willing to fully commit to its atmosphere and trust its patient unraveling, though, this stands as one of the more genuinely distinctive, literary visual novels available in English.
