The best visual novel of 2017 is getting a sequel

Five years ago, solo developer Brianna Lei released Butterfly Soup, a visual novel about an all-girl high school baseball team. Hysterically funny and upsettingly accurate to the experience of being awkward and young, we praised its well-written LGBT characters and dubbed it the best visual novel of 2017. Now, Lei has announced she's working on a sequel.

Butterfly Soup 2 will take place "a few months after the events of the original game" and will hop between the viewpoints of its returning main characters, Diya, Akarsha, Min-seo, and Noelle. According to the official fact sheet, it should roughly take a tidy three hours to play and will be available on a pay-what-you-want model just like the original Butterfly Soup.

Butterfly Soup 2 should release on October 29, though Lei says, "It's actually not finished yet, so once again it'll probably come right down to the wire". That will give you plenty of time to re-read the original, as well as Lei's other visual novel Pom Gets Wi-Fi, which is about a pomeranian's quest to get wi-fi, yes. You can also check out some of the other best visual novels on PC.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.