Good day, my dear ones. I hope you’re all doing great. I, fo..

Good day, my dear ones. I hope you’re all doing great. I, for one, am doing absolutely fantastic because, guess what, I slept from 4 AM to 2 PM. So if you ever catch me online after midnight Latvian time again, please block me and report me. On the bright side, my mom woke me up with a glorious bag containing two cheeseburgers, fries, and Coke Zero (to stay slim, obviously). Oh, and a bar of Dubai chocolate. What a perfect morning!

Today, I want to tell you about visual novels. Visual novels are a narrative genre where storytelling and dialogues are enhanced by the visual depiction of characters, events, and active player involvement. The player takes control of one or more characters and, as the story progresses, makes decisions that shape their personality, choices, and even romantic interests. Essentially, it’s an interactive comic book.

I absolutely love visual novels. I discovered Romance Club three years ago, and later, the brilliant League of Dreamers. A year ago, I stopped playing due to depression since I couldn’t relax or focus, but recently, I’ve come back to them. I started my return with League of Dreamers.

Romance Club and League of Dreamers share one core feature that drew me in—they prioritize the story above everything else. Most of the time, I went through the stories without even having a favorite romantic interest, as romance doesn’t intrigue me much. But amazing tales filled with adventure, tragedy, battles, death, and character growth? Now that’s what takes my breath away.

These two apps, however, differ greatly. Romance Club is more juvenile. Often, the heroines are excessively praised by other characters, possess abilities that don’t align with their experience or status, or receive admiration and outright affection for doing absolutely nothing—or even for being rude. Additionally, the success of relationships, decisions, and endings often depends on how many premium choices you purchase. Some stories also lean into over-the-top tolerance in inappropriate ways, and the sex scenes are often absurdly cringey.

All in all, today I’ll criticize Romance Club more than praise it. The developers focus on quantity over quality, releasing new stories with every update, which often results in mediocrity. That said, many of the stories are incredibly immersive, and a few even make you think deeply.

League of Dreamers, on the other hand, is a different story. This app is less popular because it targets a more mature and thoughtful audience. The novels are long, with intricate and often heavy plots, protagonists with distinct personalities, and love interests who are full-fledged characters with their own lives, not just empty shells designed to adore the heroine.

In particular, I want to tell you about one specific novel: Silence of the Sea.

Initially, the novel hooked me—surprisingly—because of one of the love interests, Koschei the Immortal. The author modeled his character after my favorite Melkor, and when I accidentally stumbled upon a screenshot from the novel, I immediately recognized familiar traits. I started digging for more information and realized that this was an entire story set in a Slavic world—a rare find.

I downloaded League of Dreamers, saved up emeralds for premium choices, and began playing. Since this was my first novel in the app, I was absolutely blown away by the events, the writing, and the quality. The story takes place in a fairy-tale world with a fictional map divided between human kingdoms, the Sea Kingdom, and the realms of supernatural creatures.

You play as Marya Morevna, the heiress of the Sea Kingdom and its ruler. She’s basically a machine of death and violence. She’s immortal, ancient, and powerful. She knows how to rule, fight, and kill—and she does it well.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of the Sea King and one of human tsars. All evidence points to Koschei the Immortal, a powerful lich with whom Marya waged a devastating war years ago, ultimately imprisoning him. Before becoming a lich, Koschei was a sorcerer—a melancholic, witty, and ambitious man. Depending on the player’s choices, Marya could have had a relationship, friendship, or mere acquaintance with him in the past. Obviously, he—and later Koschei—was my romantic interest.

Marya teams up with the missing tsar’s son, Ivan Tsarevich, and embarks on a journey to find the missing rulers. At the same time, due to her father’s disappearance, she loses her connection to water magic.

Along the way, they encounter characters from Slavic folklore and fairy tales—Vodyanoy, Bayun the Cat, One-Eyed Likho, the bogatyr, Baba Yaga, the Unsmiling Tsarevna, Tsar Dadon, and many others. And these are not just names—each character is memorable and filled with vivid, often eerie color.

Eerie, because many of the characters are sinister, cunning, and cruel. The supernatural forces are unique and far from safe, and the narrative revolves around the theme of the Underworld (Навь)—the realm of undeath, whose influence has turned Koschei into an unstoppable weapon, bringing everything to ruin.

Interacting with everyone requires care—a careless word or action will have VERY far-reaching consequences.

As the story progresses, you learn of a northern knyaz whose goal is to unite all human kingdoms and exterminate every supernatural being. He wields an incredible military power—gunpowder.

At this point, I’m dying to share spoilers, because when I started writing this, my intention was to talk about my impressions of the ending. But I really hope that some of my followers won’t shy away from trying this story themselves and maybe even getting into the world of visual novels.

And honestly, there’s no point in discussing the ending because the story is so intricately woven that I’d have to recount the entire novel for it to make sense. So I’ll settle for a general description.

What struck me deeply about the story—besides the rivers of🩸— is that love interests die. And they die like flies. I personally executed Vodyanoy because of a rivalry for the Sea throne. Ivan was killed by Koschei. Vasilysa was eaten by Baba Yaga. I don’t even consider these spoilers since there are more variations of death than there are characters. Secondary characters don’t even bear mentioning. It’s also very easy for the protagonist herself to die, both throughout the plot and in several endings.

As for Marya herself, she’s far from a delicate, sensitive woman. Her character is sharp, authoritative, and ruthless. In many ways, she felt emotionally primitive to me and too forward. But that made it even more fascinating to follow her journey—not as “me in a 2D skin picking between boys,” but as a fully realized heroine navigating her path among equally vital characters.

And about the ending—it blew me away that even with tons of emeralds, the best stats, and purchasing almost every premium choice, I still ended up with what could be considered a “bad ending.” Although, personally, I liked it. In this story, as in life, events are influenced not by “good or bad” decisions, but by chance and combinations of circumstances that often lacked any specific intent. No spoilers here, but it’s going to take me a while to recover.

As far as I know, the novel has been translated into English, and there are guides available in English as well. I can’t speak to the quality of the translation since I played in Russian, but in Russian, the old-fashioned language and folk expressions are absolutely stunning. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Slavic culture, mentality, and folklore.

Now, I’m off to explore other novels!