Familiar Travels is a good visual novel game! It's unique among the genre by being "open world", in the way that you can choose which place to go, and in any order. You tend to have multiple scene choices, which are important events. But you can only experience that one scene in any given day ( or night ), which will improve your relationship with that character or characters. Time will pass in the game after this scene, and you can either choose to go to sleep or wander around to find more scenes/characters to interact with. So each day you have two chances to explore around and experience scenes. As you look around these places, there's some objects in the environments you can examine. But not as much as I'd like in a game that claims to be akin to a point and click adventure game. The background art, luckily, is pretty good and filled with detail. Not always, but I'm impressed!

The characters in these environments are fantastic, they have great and expressive designs. They really pull the whole thing together. Although... some characters are obviously... er... suggestive. The art and sound assets were made by other people besides the one man design team, the character artist being someone that I know and I'm close to. This game is obviously very special to me. I grew very attached to the characters, the world, and so much more. I wanted to come back to immerse myself in this universe, the themes, and hang out with some genuinely wonderful people. Although... you'll quickly find out that they have issues that you too can painfully relate to.

Familiar Travels isn't without flaws, of course, one of those flaws being the barrier to entry. That barrier being: "OMG, furries, get them away from me!" But if you can get by that barrier, either if you're already a furry or just someone who likes great characters/stories, then you're in for a treat! There's bugs, typos, and grammar errors that are steadily being obliterated by the SINGLE hardworking developer. However, another barrier to entry is that it's a visual novel game with SOME sexual themes. If that isn't your cup of tea, I'd advise you stay away. Even with that warning in mind, Familiar Travels is sort of tame... but you will eventually encounter adult scenes with each main character, and you can choose to skip them, or indulge in them. The writing for these scenes is superb and honestly entrancing. Which is saying a lot considering how awful adult visual novels tend to be.

In order to enjoy Familiar Travels at its fullest, you should play it a few times through, choosing 1 of the 6 main characters to "romance". The story slowly unfolds more, and things begin to make more sense. Playing it only one time through won't give you the full story, due to gaps in events and scenes you didn't experience. You can't do every scene in one playthrough after all. But it's very much worth it, and you'll find that the writing is surprisingly good!

The only issue is that sometimes, side characters won't know who you are even if you already met them, or the complete opposite scenario will occur with them. You will know THEM but you haven't even met them yet. This does create some major plotholes, but it never broke the game completely for me. Main characters will sometimes talk and act as if you already experienced an event with them, or as if they never experienced that event ( such as a character somehow forgetting that she already went to the Red Light District with you, and to the arcade ). This becomes a bigger problem if you didn't hang out with them every single day before you decided to hang out with them that one given day. It lends itself to this experience being more rigid in terms of narrative, choose a main character and stick with them, don't steer off course. Think of each character having an invisible "affection" meter, and it appears that you can increase more than one of them at a time. The character with the highest affection will become your boyfriend/girlfriend, and you can accidentally end up with a character route you didn't want to do.

I highly recommend Familiar Travels, it will leave an impact on you when you least expect it!