A Love Simulations and Sci-fi Mystery Visual Novel. Story: Yukina Kudou looks like your normal high school student, but she has a huge secret. She was ordered by someone to be the girlfriend of Youji Kataoka. She doesn't know why, nor what the true purpose behind it is. Everything begins from a mistake of the past and continues on as an eternal lie. In the end, What will she find beyond the lies? Play hours: Estimated to be 7-10 hours. Event CG: 67 (including variations) Endings: 15 *The demo is including 2 endings (General Good Ending and General Bad Ending), but both of them is not the real endings of the game. The full version game would be around 8 times or longer than the demo.
On the offset this looks like just another boy chasing game and to be fair there is a romantic element to Duplicity. However, it’s so dialed in its hard to point to as anything worthwhile. Each romantic subplot is predictable, the guys don’t stand out and by the end of them any relationship you achieve feels more like the runner-up prize to the actual story. This isn’t a knock on Duplicity from where I sit, since what the story pushes in its place is more psychological narrative surrounding the plot hatched by Dr. Serizawa. But I feel it is a fair warning to any fan girls who look at the promo art for Duplicity and think that it’s going to be worth their time to chase around Youji or the Doc. It’s not.
Roseverte tries something bold in this realm by focusing instead on a pseudo psychological thriller targeting girls. It has more than a few rough spots that leave you lost in translation, especially when you’re grinding. As for our heroine Yukina really stands out. Every path in one way or another backhands her with the uncomfortable reality that the men she can develop feelings for are nearly damaged beyond repair. And again, being fair to Duplicity, her actions are true to life and make her a much stronger character than what you would expect from other otome heroines. Similar praise goes for the handling of the men around Yukina who are all equal balance of broken and resolute.
Duplicity is an odd game. It doesn’t do any one thing extraordinarily well, yet at the same time it stands pretty well on its own. While its weaknesses are noticeable, there is still a lot of fun and thinking tied into Duplicity that will entertain otome fans while serving as a nice distraction for the atypical EVN player...just don't expect fireworks.
I feel that I could just copy&paste my comment from Always Remember Me here. These 2 games are really similar, in a way that they both keep to clicking away at stats, and with occasional story fragments.
But the game is really good. Great artwork, awesome music, I can't put my head around the writing though, but that's ok. I'm not the most socially aware person around, so failing at VNs is normal for me ;-).
Anyway - this game deserves much better that the average rating of 5 shown here. Haters gonna hate ;-P. I'm giving it a 10.