"Are you ready to fall?"
"The slums are rotting. You are spilling out."
Seraphim Slum is a sapphic liminal visual novel revolving around fallen angels, the horror of intimate relationships, self-perceived sins, and love conquering self.
You play as Ezekiel as you explore the slum, helping your love interests fight against their inner constraints and give in to their desires. Alongside that, you delve into the unsettling nature of life and death, and find out what it truly means to have free will: at the price of corruption.
Seraphim Slum was a project made from a team of twenty for the Spooktober 2023 5th Annual Visual Novel Jam. It was released by the sapphic game developer rosesrot
.
It can be played for free with an upcoming Steam release in 2024.
Seraphim Slum provides examples of the following tropes:
- Anti-Hero: Ezekiel.
- Bittersweet Ending: Ezekiel falls from grace, accepting her determined fate as Lucifer, "free to fall". She leaves her Eden behind, but resolves to find "her girls" on mortal Earth.
- Caring Gardener: Ezekiel is a twisted version of this. Not only does she care about her plants (which vomits out of her body into the slums), they grow and proliferate until they swallow the slum itself.
- Deconstruction: Ezekiel's character arc is a huge deconstruction about what it means to have free will when you're damned to fall.
- Genre Deconstruction: Of visual novels and choice-based stories in general. On a meta-level, how can there be true free player choice when everything is scripted? The game's fail states reflect this, the "wrong" choices being struck through, railroading the player into a perfect victory state, exposing how there's no real choice at all, because everything goes back to the critical route, the events you must run through. Ironically, it's only after going through all the fail states — choosing all the "wrong" choices — that allows you to free Ezekiel. Illustrating in a meta-sense that, maybe, maybe, there is a kind of free will even if you are predestined to undergo certain events (like, in Ezekiel's case, predestined to fall)— after all.
- Hanahaki Disease: It's not quite Hanahaki disease, but not only is Ezekiel is hacking up flowers and and branches, her flesh is opening and spitting them out. One interlude describes Ezekiel's arms opening to drop apples on the corridor floor. The twist is that it isn't happening because of unrequited romance between her and her girls; it's happening because it's a symbol of the love between Ezekiel and her plants.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Ezekiel is some deconstructed variant of this. She's eccentric, unhinged, and brings the girls out of their monotonous lives… until she corrupts them.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Ezekiel, when she's in her corruption mode, is an unhinged glitchy mess.
- Queer Flowers: Oriel and Macy have their flowers. Ezekiel has her vines. The odd one out is Salxire.
- Satan: Ezekiel is suggested to be the devil and in the God Endings she is outright referred to as Lucifer.
- Talking to Plants: Ezekiel exchanged promises with a dying plant. So long as she lived, it would live too. The promise goes both ways.
