From the writer of the surreal horror steampunk visual novel Inganock of the Brightest Flame, also called Sekion no Inganock, Sharnoth of the Deepest Black is a visual novel follows that similar theme; Lovecraftian horror in a steampunk setting. The difference is that Sharnoth takes place in 1905 London, you can grab the patch from here, let me describe the visual novel in case you ever want to import it.
Sharnoth of the Deepest Black is by the writer Hikaru Sakurai, who has a very unique style that makes use of archaic and obscure words, and is also skilled at writing a surreal horror setting. The protagonist is a teenaged girl called Mary Clarissa Christie, who is based on the British writer Agatha Christie. A heterachromatic girl who once had blue eyes, but one turned golden, and from then on she suffered from hallucinations that are a major plot point. She attends university with her friends and leads a typical schizophrenic Londoner’s life, until she meets a man known as M.
Meeting M, Mary’s life takes a turn for the worse as she is pulled into the secret supernatural side of the steampunk city. London is plagued with rumors involving monsters called Metacreatures that attack humans in the night, and she aids the black-suited man in his hunt for the creatures.
Sharnoth of the Deepest Black is very unorthodox as a visual novel released in modern times for many reasons. The female protagonist for one, as many visual novel protagonists outside of games aimed at women are male adults. Second, though set in a Steampunk city, there is a significant degree of occult horror much like the anime series D.Grey Man.
Unless you have read a lot of classic British literature, a large amount of references made in the game to works such as the Hound of the Baskervilles will likely be lost on you. It can be a difficult read for those not used to Hikaru’s writing style, and is not as great as the previous entry in the What a Beautiful series, Inganock of the Brightest Flame but is definitely a real change from the norm. The narrative contains many figures from the victorian era of England, anachronisms be damned, in a steampunk horror for God’s sake.
I’ll be importing this, been looking forward to a translation of this for a long time since I loved Inganock. The translation is very accurate to the setting of Britain, using words appropriate for the era and for the culture of the United Kingdom. An impressive job.
