Disclaimer: I first played the original itch.io release of the game, which is a far older release -- and I was also an offhand tester internally of this version (the Steam port of the game), though I didn't have the full, retail-level build at time of testing. Having now looked through some of the things added post-testing, I have a pretty comprehensive understanding.
With that out of the way...

Augma is the VN of All Time.

It exudes massively palpable inspiration from other visual novel series such as Shinza Bansho (by way of chuunibyou superfight and terminology overload as well as some of the distinct worldbuilding / characterization), Science Adventure (deep and absurd science-fiction concepts in tandem with conspiracy / violent serial killings), and Type-Moon (specifically Mahoutsukai no Yoru, with how visually dynamic the in-engine visual sequences are).

It's good. I imagine a lot of readers might find it meandering or lost in the sauce with how heavy-handed and grandiose many concepts / interactions are, along with how there are still much slower or more laid back moments interspersed, though I think the glossary system does a fine job of accounting for the sheer breadth of narrative backdrop accompanying the universe of Augma. This system is a new addition to the Steam port, and it is one that I wholly welcome.

The visuals of the original Augma were already something of great appeal for me, and it's pleasing to say that the Steam port here massively improves and actively overhauls the visual presentation. Visual novels are very oftentimes lacking in even average capabilities to engagingly present their narrative, and I have very few issues with Augma in that sense, at least for the ongoing story elements.

The official soundtrack is very nice as well. One of the tracks you can just absolutely tell is directly inspired by one from Dies irae (Shinza Bansho series), if not just a heavily altered personal take on the song. The size of the soundtrack is good for the length of the game, ideally you'd want at least one track for every hour of reading time for most VNs. Augma I would say is around an 8-10 hour experience at least, and it features 24 tracks in its Jukebox that play throughout the span of the story. This is a very fine ratio of hours:tracks that a lot of mismanaged VNs with enough budget behind them simply somehow don't even come close to reaching (like Raging Loop or Root Double).

The choices in this game are not particularly meaningful on a level of altering the story. It's a kinetic visual novel, really. You'll be starting at Point A and ending at Point B without much in the way of changing how you get there. Personally I think this is fine, if not ideal, especially for this specific title. Free will / branching are an often misunderstood and over-marketed gimmick that simply rarely add anything of value, and only exist because that is usually a staple in the marketplace. I am frankly glad that is not an issue here.

Overall, I think the story and its audiovisual presentation are very intriguing and a genuine homage to some incredibly good VN series out there. It's a massive love letter to its medium, and only just the start to an interesting universe of its own.

As for my gripes, those pretty heavily land in the UI. I think Augma eschews practically all the design theory that's cultivated in decades worth of visual novel history as well as general game design practice. The multitudes of menus present in the game come in various different colors, shapes, and fonts, with very little in the way of stylistic consistency. Compare the in-game pause screen with the settings menu, for instance.
There are also confusing elements like there being two pause buttons in the menu, albeit while on opposite sides, still can be parsed as individual parts of the same element. Those being "BACK" and "LOG," which have very often confused me in my search for just opening the Backlog in the pause menu.
Further, while I appreciate the efforts to create two separate UI layouts -- one dependent on Mouse-Keyboard, and the other dependent on Gamepad (which is used simply if you have a Gamepad detected by your system) -- the use case of a Gamepad would be more adjacent to something like a handheld such as a Nintendo Switch or a Steam Deck. I am sure some people would use the Gamepad for their PC playing of the game, but I feel like the most natural setups to be using this, would actually not benefit to a noticeable degree due to how the UI just actually is. For instance, the Quick Menu buttons alongside the screen are simply too small to be of any assistance on a Switch or Deck display, as well as the fact that for Deck, you would ideally use Desktop mode to launch the game in order to make use of the trackpads since the general layout was not at all meant to be navigated with a Gamepad.
An especially egregious example of what I mean by this is the Save menu. There are 23 buttons located on the Save screen, and only 5 of them are for actually saving in a save slot. The other 18 buttons are for changing to other pages of the menu or changing to another menu entirely. This is obviously a Mouse-Keyboard-only design choice, as scrolling through a couple dozen buttons in a save menu is not fun, especially since the highlight on the text you scroll over before selecting it, is just barely visibly different from non-highlighted text, as the design choice assumes your mouse is already hovering over it, and thus you should be already familiar with where your cursor is. This does not carry over to Gamepads, especially in a massively overpopulated screen whose buttons are already challenging to navigate.
The last thing I'd like to point out is the Log's ability to read full chapters at once in its menu. On my 27"/1080p monitor, it's incredibly, ridiculously difficult to read. I would rather the function not exist than exist in this state, because it's just very inconvenient to use given its poor readability. It does not fare any better on handhelds in my experience, either.
As for things I enjoy about the UI, I think it's actually very nice to have the pause screen elucidate what sound effect or BGM is currently playing, as well as there being a global play-time clock in the opposite corner to denote how long you've had the game open in all your sessions combined.

All in all, I would say Augma is a nice indie experience, especially for the price of Free. It could do with a massive overhaul of its user interface for better readability, easier interactivity, and more stylistic cohesion, but the narrative, the music, the main visuals / art, and everything else about the bulk of the game is just very impressive to me. It's cool. Would recommend.

Possibly one of the most unhinged and author-indulgent works of art ever made, and most definitely the funniest game(?) of all time as a result, for the better. The writer understands the absurdity of it all, and leans in as far as they can, just because they can—while never seeming insincere in their intent to tell a story either. You may not be able to understand a lot of the events that unfold on your first time through, as the plot is surprisingly dense, but that shouldn't stop you from having a fun time. It takes about 10 hours total to see the whole story, and Augma benefits greatly from a more compact presentation compared to the lengthier, loftier "chuuni" visual novels from which it takes inspiration. It rules.

I had a hard time getting into the dense writing. The flow of the narrative is killed by lots of lifeless tangents. Conceptually dense as well, not letting scenes build up a meaningful purpose. The characters come across as detached from the narrative events in an unnaturally flat manner. The visuals were great.

I love the character design. Interesting story with in-depth lore.

Really good kinetic VN, interesting art, nice music.
The work on UI and design is simply amazing, a lot of effort was put into this.

I want to preface this review by saying that I'd love to see these devs continue to improve and make more vns, and that I'm leaving a "recommended" rating in support of the devs, rather than in support of this game specifically. At the end of the day, this is a *free* visual novel that, despite my gripes with the writing, has clearly had an enormous amount of love and effort put into it.

To start with the biggest strengths of the vn, the music and visuals are quite good. While some character sprites are a bit rough-looking, they are still very charming and have a unique art style that fits the atmosphere of the vn. Some characters introduced later have a more polished art style, so it seems like it may be halfway through some form of revamp, but it looks good regardless, and the mismatched sprites don't stick out as much as you'd expect. There's also a very hefty amount of animation, especially during fight scenes; it's some of the most involved animations I've ever seen in a visual novel, and they are honestly very impressive, both from a technical standpoint and a visual polish standpoint. The music is also quite good, and although it's not exactly my cup of tea, it's all very competently made; it fits the mood perfectly and is unique among typical visual novel soundtracks. My one and only complaint about the visuals is that the menus and gui could use some slight animations. All the art assets and design of the menus are very nice, but some slight hover-over animations would take the production value beyond even the realm of high budget commercial vns. (This is more of a nitpicky piece of advice than an actual complaint/issue)

Unfortunately, the writing and pacing are flat out not good. There are a lot of scenes that felt torturously overlong, and seemingly the only editing that was done was a find-and-replace pass with a thesaurus, with no regard to the actual flow of the text. This mostly comes in the form of rambly monologues, which manage to not say very much at all despite their length, only really vaguely gesturing at something grand about life. There are also several moments of large plot dumps that are hard to keep track of, especially with how convoluted the magic systems and political structures are, and doubly so when almost everything with a proper noun in the story also has 2 or more other names that are used interchangeably. Even with the reference menu that gives you a quick rundown of all the people and events and places you've learned about, it very quickly becomes overwhelming to manage.

Outside of these moments, the dialogues are generally passable, although nearly every character has the same type of smug, sarcastic, teenage attitude to the point that character interactions aren't actually very interesting to read beyond their relevance to the plot, and there's exceedingly few scenes of character building to make you actually care about any of these characters in the first place. In fact, by the end there's really only 2 characters who I felt any kind of investment in at all.

This isn't to say the writing has no redeeming qualities however—there are a few scenes that excel in their drowsy-but-comfy atmosphere and do a good job drawing you into what's happening (the shira and loui coffee scene and the getting lost scenes come to mind). Additionally, even as someone who generally does not care for fight scenes, many of the fights here are well written and well paced, with the notable exception being the ending, which consists of 5(!) back to back 1 on 1 fight scenes, almost all of which end up being entirely inconsequential and taking up about 20% of the runtime of the entire vn. And while I did make fun of the ironic disposition of the cast earlier, it can occasionally be appealing in a sort of comedic self-aware way.

The plot itself is a bit harder to judge, both because this is only arc I of a larger work, and also because there are quite a few elements that feel in place as part of a chuunige plot, but may turn off readers who are unfamiliar or unwilling to excuse those elements. For instance, about halfway through, our main character becomes literally immortal. There are hints of adverse effects, both in the sense of mechanical drawbacks to this ability and in the implication of how this ties into the opening scene, but it does make it feel like the protagonist no longer has any real danger, given that the primary form of conflict is that a guy will show up to try and kill him. This also feels at odds with the main character's motivations, given that he doesn't really have much investment in any of what's happening around him. None of the political conspiracy, conflict between the gods, or murder mysteries really involve or matter to him; his primary concern is pretty explicitly his group of friends and their ability to continue their otherwise easygoing daily lives, and until about 60% of the way into the story, he could (at least to his and the reader's knowledge), just walk away at any point and live his desired average life.
For the rest of the cast, motivations are a bit more tumultuous; many characters have seemingly no motivations beyond simply helping to move the plot forward, only for a sudden monologue in the final hour to twist everyone into working on some 4d chess level of thought with 20 different layers of convoluted deception. It ends up not really making sense in universe to the characters, nor is it an interesting plot device to encourage the reader to try re-reading with a new lens, it mostly just sort of happens last minute.

Additionally, many plot points are brought up only to be resolved without any satisfaction or relevance later. The biggest example are the Visage Lock cases, which are introduced to the reader as a series of bizarre mystery murders following an esoteric pattern, that are so difficult to solve that they are included as part of an ongoing phenomenon of impossible-to-solve murder cases. The culprit is suddenly revealed to the reader during a completely unrelated chapter of the story, with no relevance between the culprit and any of the details of the murders. Furthermore, there's no consequence of the culprit being revealed since they are a previously unintroduced character, whose murder methods have no bearing on the plot besides the weapon they attack with in battle (they get into action scenes now instead of doing more serial killing).

I really, really wish I could like this vn. As I said at the start, there's clearly an enormous amount of love and effort put into this and that's made even more clear by the several major overhauls the game has received before, and despite being an OELVN there's clearly a lot of passion for the medium as a whole radiating from the devs through this work. Despite what I see as major flaws with the writing, I will probably still continue reading future works from this team and I hope to see them improve over time. Unfortunately, for a medium where 90% of your engagement with a work is through reading, having such poor writing makes it hard to actually recommend this.

this is such a self-indulgent piece of fiction im in awe. there is so much edgy stuff, so much chuuni stuff, its almost overwhelming at times and i love it. it's amazing, it knows exactly what it is and it takes full advantage of that. sometimes it gets a bit too dense and throws a few too many things at you in quick succession, but you'll be able to understand most things by the end. the art's quite unique and gives a distinct feel which i'm a big fan of, same goes for the music. i can tell that the author, hell the whole studio is so proud of what they've made here and they have every right to be because they slayed.

Nice short VN!

I'm currently at chapter 10 and I just ran here to leave a comment (a temporary one i'll come back later i promise)
i had to do it

THIS GAME HAS A FINNEGANS WAKE REFERENCE

i had it coming the paragraphs before and when that 'all lykkehud' popped out i knew it

sorry for screaming in here i just got too excited ;)
Finnegans Wake has been one of my favorite books and I've always dreamt of & been trying to work on creating a work anywhere near it (if possible, which is extremely hard).
Thanks a whole lot for the reference!


Nice and unique work so far!! Thumbs up to the devs!

awesome vn and i recommend everyone try it out due to its currently short (for a vn) amount of time you need to sink into it. the artstyle (i really like the artstyle) is nice and the whole game has a distinct soul to it.

it definitely has its flaws like certain parts are a slog to read but these parts are few and far between. while far from perfect this is most certainly worth spending reading (especially since its free!!!!!)

the general story really is something that was cooked up from somebodys dream and i think thats really awesome and a good idea (and something that inspired a work of my own) and im really forward to seeing what a sequel will do to make the story even better and hopefully farther develop the characters into more 3d beings

in the words of somebody i know: Hop the ♥♥♥♥ on