A girl, a guy, and an after-school get together that could turn into something more. Sounds familiar, right? Wrong! Made in just two days, this short and silly but also surprisingly earnest little visual novel dating sim is weird in all the best possible ways.

No one has to die is an HTML5 visual novel by Stuart Madafiglio where sacrifice is the only way to get closer to solving the full mystery at hand. The turn-based puzzles that drive the plot feel a little perfunctory when compared to the twisty story, but fans of cerebral, complex stories should definitely give it several playthroughs.

Inner Vision, a flixel visual novel, from debuting developer Sunil Rao, tackles one of the most important subjects, and one of the most difficult to do justice: suicide. Based on the author's own experiences with depression, Inner Vision presents you with three individuals contemplating killing themselves, and asks you to talk with them. It's a game that's not at all subtle about its message, but it's one many deserve to hear: "You are not alone."

Detective Marco is having a rough week. There's a serial killer on the loose, the professor he wished to consult has run off to the spooky town of Kraig Rock, and there's all these friggin' dire wolves on the prowl. Even as a typically hard-boiled Visual Novel action-RPG protagonist, he'll need all of his skills and the support of all of Kraig Rock's mysterious inhabitants if he hopes to unravel all the mysteries of the Town of Fears.

You may have escaped Aurora before, but in Aurora 2, it's time for you to go after her in another point and click horror/Western from Pastel Games. Middle games in a series are tough to pull off, but this one lays the groundwork for what could be a seriously cool conclusion.

Visual novel meets shooter meets RPG meets space opera meets awesome in this unusual hybrid from Anonymous D Studios. After decades of skirmishes and violent protests, the battles between the pirates and the Federation appears to be heating up, and one young pilot finds himself in the middle of it. Strike out on an hours long adventure that combines drama, romance, and fast-paced arcade action in this impressive game.

FrankenFriend is the RPG/Visual Novel tale of Frank Von Friendenstein IV, a eccentric youth with a passion for the sciences who lives alone in his mountain castle high above the village of Frankenfriendsylvania. Though for years, his education and "unorthodox" experiments have satisfactorily taken the place of social interaction, he's found that, as of late, he's been lonely. So it is with great trepidation that he heads to the village below looking for companionship. A CGDC9 entry with excellent characterization but more than a few glitches.

Are you checking your RSS feed instead of working on something you really should be? Hummingbird Mind is a visual novel that wants you to cuddle up to your distractions and make peace with them. It'll only take you 15 minutes, so go ahead and click. Dooooo it. It's not like you have anything else you should be doing... right?

Sometimes games are just there for us when we want to have some fun, blow up the princess, and save the zombies, or something like that. Other times, we want to explore more difficult and painful stories. Grace's Diary manages to seamlessly integrate the theme of a relationship abuse into a sensitive and moving visual novel.

What happens when infatuation becomes complacency? Or dependence? You take on the role of a young man having doubts about his current relationship, and whether it really is what he wants out of his life. Air Pressure, a visual novel by Bento Smile, might be a simple story about falling out of love... or something else entirely.