I'm only a few hours in - had to take some pauses in between because of some tense scenes - but....oh my god THIS GAME IS JUST A THRILLING ADVENTURE OF EMOTIONS AND PURE ART!
I haven't finished it yet and no spoilers cause duh - but....this is amazing. WOULD RECOMMEND 100%

Overall, I enjoyed this vn very much and would recommend it to people who find the plot interesting and art style appealing. Here is a more detailed breakdown of my review.

The good things:
- I love the art style and details of the character designs. I found the animation at the beginning to be quite unique and fun to watch.
- The conversations between characters feel real. Unlike some relationships in other vn, rather than ignoring and glossing over issues or unhealthy behaviors, they actually address them and acknowledge that these issues cannot be solved overnight.
- All of the characters, including the protagonist, his love interests, the antagonists, and other side characters are quite charming. By the end of it, I was craving for more character backstories and their stories in the future. Showing players both Sasha's pov and other characters' (including the antagonists) really add to the richness of this story.

Things that bothered me:
- Showing pov from different characters is both its pro and con. In general, I am fine with being shown other characters' point of view. It feels like I am playing as Sasha and progressing the story in third person. However, it confuses me immensely when the player is given a choice not as Sasha but as Mishka. This is when they visit the night market (?) or the food place (?) together earlier in the story. It completely throws me off.
- The direction of Mishka's hair in the CG occasionally does not match the direction of his hair in his character portrait.
- The voice line (especially when the character calls each other's name) does not match the intensity of emotions in some scenes. For example, when a character is engaged in a heartfelt and emotionally intense conversation with another, it takes me out of the immersive experience when I hear a monotone voice line or when the character speaks like he is in a casual conversation. During these scene, I much prefer listening to the background music only.
- A minor detail that bugs me is when Sasha goes to meet up with one of his customers at the beginning of the story. It makes no sense to me that they meet up in broad daylight and exchange drugs in (what it looks like to be) a shopping mall! Why????? Of course, he is going get caught by the cops!
- Lastly, as much as I enjoyed playing it, comparing to other VNs (Japanese or other indie VNs), I feel like I should receive more content (including amount of CGs, voice lines, length... ) from a $30.00 game. I did not follow this game since its kickstarter times, and I found it through twitter. I am more than happy to support the developers and artists for this amazing game. However, solely based on the amount of content alone, this game does not justify its price tag.

Wow, can I just say it again? WOW. This game was fabulous! From the opening cinematic scene, to the animations, to the gorgeous art and even what voice acting there was? AMAZING. I LOVED it 100% and def recommend it 10/10! For anyone interested here are some possible PROS vs CONS to look into:

PROS:
-It's a nice shorter game-play of 14hrs. I'm used to playing long VNs sometimes, so this was a nice play-through
-This game has some really cool animations/sprites/cgs
-The art is so colorful and fun for both the character CGs and BGs
-It's an LGBTQ+ game with a diverse cast of characters
-The story is thrilling as you follow it's MC Sasha into his world of drugs/assassins/two large forces of powers fighting for control of his city for their various reasons of which you'll have to play and find out.
-There are 2 ROs, I usually prefer more, but it somehow worked for this game what it was. I wouldn't change a thing, I loved the romances/intimate scenes for both.

CONS:
-I actually only have one con. And that was the game being too heavy animation/sprite wise. Either the specs are off (because my laptop specs matched for this game just fine) or the issue lies in something I didn't really understand being the issue, but now makes sense. And that's the resolution settings. The game starts you out with max settings on all ends.

-No matter how I changed them tho, the game would overheat within seconds of me playing it and it would instantly cause a lag. HOWEVER, the fix for that was a specific resolution setting (something a friend mentioned that I hadn't even considered). So, if you drop the resolution to this setting, your game should work way better, or with no issue at all.

Just in case, for anyone having issues with this game. Here's what my settings were that allowed me to play it perfectly with no issue (I'm just going to write down exactly what I have in my options menu):

BASIC:
Language: English
Screen Mode: Full Screen Window
Resolution: 1920 X 1080 @ 60HZ

Now, other than the game not really working in the beginning, everything else was fantastic. I loved it all. And lastly here's just other information about the characters just in case anyone is wondering:

Some Side Information:
-The two ROs are Sasha's best friend Mishka who also happens to be his childhood friend, and the other is Dima who happens to be Mishka's boss.
-Intimate roles between our MC and his love interests are as follows:
*Sasha is a bottom, and he bottoms on top or underneath ;P
*Mishka is a top
*Dima is a top

ANNND that was it! I won't say how Mishka or Dima top as I don't want to spoil anything XD!! I hope you guys do play the game though, and find it as thrilling and interesting as I did! It was truly lovely to play through. Great job Devs!

Wonderful! I haven't finished a play through yet but what I've played so far is so amazing and I can't wait to finish it and play again!

Love this, super dark themes but a super gripping story.

This is my first-ever visual novel, and I'm afraid it might have ruined me for life. I literally downloaded Steam and created an account after reading about Night/Shade, and I have no regrets. If you like BL, do yourself a favor and get this game!

My favorite thing about Night/Shade is just how queer it is. Sexuality (and, to a more subtle extent, gender) is something the characters "do" and not who they "are." Being gay doesn't define the characters in Night/Shade; in fact, the characters are never identified by any specific sexuality, despite engaging in queer romantic relationships. I know this is Queer Theory 101, but it's such a rarity in gaming in general (and, I imagine, other BL VNs) that sexuality is just one of many facets of a character's identity. And the characters of Night/Shade are rich in dimension.

Which brings me to my second favorite thing in the game: the characters. As far as I'm concerned, there are no "side characters" because every character is so fleshed out, you end up getting invested in the "community," rather than just the protagonist and his love interests. Pavel is by far my favorite character, and Indigo and Natali are badass women.

Sasha, the MC, is very likable but flawed. He's pretty easy to relate to, in my opinion, and his decisions and thought patterns make sense to me. He gets two romantic partners to pursue, Mishka and Dima. Honestly, this, in my opinion, is what makes the game so good. A significant portion of the exposition is spent building the relationship between Sasha and Mishka, making the player organically get invested in their relationship. Even as the tension of the "inciting incident" is building, we get to experience these two do pretty mundane things: watch a movie, play video games, get something to eat.

I ended up pursuing the Dima route on my first play-through, and honestly, I was a little worried that the storytelling would decline because the game seemed to be setting up the Sasha x Mishka relationship as the "good" end. But the game does a brilliant job of slowly building Sasha and Dima's chemistry with really beautiful moments of vulnerability between the two, so the choice doesn't seem out of nowhere. Furthermore, even though Mishka and Sasha are best friends with history, and Mishka has charisma to burn, the game is smart to also give him flaws: he's very jealous and codependent with Sasha. When the player finally makes the choice between Mishka and Dima, it actually feels like a choice. Mishka is Sasha's best friend; they have history, but their relationship is unhealthy. Dima has been there for Sasha, protected him, but he's unknown and has walls pretty firmly built. It makes for a very compelling decision.

All in all, I don't know if my review will convince anyone to buy this game, but I hope it does. At the very least, I hope one more positive review helps the devs put out more content. Devs, if you're reading this: you have a customer for life. Be it DLC, a sequel, or a new game entirely, I'm in. I went to the website to buy merch, but it looks like the shop was under construction. But hopefully, merch comes back too!

If I had to give ONE minor area for improvement, based solely on my personal preference (others might have a different opinion): I wish there was a bit more 18+ content. I understand why there wasn't because every time the characters did sleep together, it was motivated by the story, and not just: "Now we're being nasty!" So I get it. But I saw on Twitter that there's a possibility of a DLC with 18+ content for Ada x Roman. I signed up for the mailing list, so fingers crossed.

Night/Shade: You're the Drug...thank you for such a riveting story. I will now begin my third play-through. <3

I've only had Mishka for 7.7 hours, but if anything happened to him I would kill everyone in this room and then myself. ಠ_ಠ

this game gave me exactly what i want to see in this type of visual novel. GREAT story, beautifull wrinting, amazing characters, BEAUTIFULL ilustrations...i just wish there was at least one more route with one more love interest, but i'm too demanding so i'll just call this PERFECTION.

totally underrated. people should know about this.

edit: ACTUALLY theres another thing: i love to see my games at 100% cause i'm sick on the head so i'd really like for it to have at least one achievement like...finished the game! or... got all endings! or something like that....it just feels empty without any achievement.

Great game! I backed it on Kickstarter a while ago and it was very worth it seeing the hard work by Thrill Switch and the fantastic result that came out of it. I'm only an hour or so into it but Thank you for an awesome game so far!

Just finished a run, honestly i recommend the game.

It's not a long story, but it's works in their case. There's very, very few downtime moments, which means there's things happening all the time.

The dialogue is fun, quirky, and pretty enjoyable. The narration bits were good too. Personally I liked the art style a lot too, there's a lot of fully drawn scenes and character expressions and clothes. The cast is diverse, interesting and unique.

There's a lot of dark themes going on, but it doesn't get TOO dark about it (like some OTHER popular visual novel about drugs and such c: ). There's plenty of action (in all senses of the word, winkwink), and I felt like it had good pacing and balance between action or angst, and fluff scenes.

There's only 2 romance options, which is fine IMO. I personally only did one route (AND LOVED IT). Had me giggling and kicking my feet. There is a sort of epilogue scene to close things up (sadly no extra spicy scene, guess I'll have to draw it myself :P ), and it left me satisfied with the story. Like, enough holes in it to be left to speculate, but not too many that it feels incomplete.

I'd say it's def a good buy if you're looking for a fun and interesting visual novel! And def worth supporting the people behind it, as you can tell the amount of care they put behind it!