I absolutely love this game so far.
I've often complained - lately - about story in games, because I went from being an epic gamer in high school/early college to an epic reader in late college/early grad school back to a gamer, and so I realized what shit most video game stories, even the supposedly good or smart ones, are.
This one is novel quality. At least the prose is. I've never played much visual novels. I was doing one, A War of a Madman's Making, and the writing was so lazy and childlike that it made me disgusted with the genre if that was considered a GOOD example of it. This shit on the other hand is extremely well written, often dreamy and expressive, often hilarious, sometimes moving. I can see how it attracted so much attention with the politics, because you can tell that the Communist Finn that wrote the books (did he write the game too?) has the same brainaids as most other modern artistes when it comes to racism, but he seems to actually have a fairly good understanding of them. Measurehead is like a Black Hebrew Israelite kang mixed with a poltard and it's wonderful.
I really admire the way they did skills. I like that what most games would call Intelligence and Charisma have been blown up into their individual components. I'm the kind of gamer that cannot help myself but go max of both, because I like dialogue-heavy options in things like Fallout. I like being a talker and problem-solver. But like society in general, these games tend to conflate a whole bunch of different things as "intelligence" that are really separate skills. I love the way it gives them their artsy/psychobabbley names and separates them out. Like, you could have a very solid understanding of people and how they tick (Empathy), yet not necessarily be charming (Persuasion), like a phlegmatic personality. Or you could be very clever at using logic to interpret scenes (Visual Calculus), but NOT be a walking "Encyclopedia" of bullshit trivia. It's fantastic. And in Fallout you'd have different systems, 3 had the percentage-based rolls, New Vegas had you either have the necessary level or not.
The way the game presents the skill checks is fantastic, since you've got the dramatic rolls (like a Fallout 3) and then the ticking in the background (more like New Vegas). But instead of putting up a big billboard that says "hey, here is the SKILLFUL ANSWER for SMART BOYS, PICK THIS" it instead presents it as, you've NOTICED SOMETHING, your inner voice is drawing your intention to something, and that gives you a new option. But it doesn't point the option out. It's not hard at all, but just by taking away the marker it does force you to actually put two and two together in your own mind. Such a small detail but it makes such an impact on how interrogations feel.
It's absolutely brilliant as a detective game, on top of being beautifully written.
Edit: BTW there is one visual novel I am willing to try and that's Over the Hills and Far Away for the War of 1812 (based war) setting.