izigame.me

Kanon is a Visual Novel created by the same team who made Clannad and Little Busters to name a few and this is the first English release of this game in the 25 years since it's original Japanese debut.
The story revolves around Yuichi Aizawa who lives with his cousins family to attend high school, with the 7 years since his last visit being all but a mystery to him, encountering various people in his day-to-day life in their town.
- Presentation -
Like a lot of Visual Novel games, your goal is to essentially follow the story, making decisions based on your own interests, be it favoring a specific girl you encounter, or to just be a jerk to everyone and see the world burn.
Speaking of girls, this particular type of game is very common with romancing a particular girl of your choice, often with varying outcomes based on your decisions, be it to become the love of their life, or to get a bad outcome and having to reload to an earlier save in the hopes of salvaging your progress.
The game play and mechanics of the game is fairly straightforward and what you would expect of a visual novel, being a heap of text lines with accompanying voice lines and character illustrations to convey the conversations between characters, as well as a fairly intuitive, seamless, and easy to navigate User Interface to complement it, with plenty of options to customise your experience (font type, transparency, individual voice sliders etc) and a feature to jump back to previous dialogue akin to a quick-load option, which is a really great option!
The difficulty of the game largely depends on how much of a completionist you want to be, as the story will branch off in different directions depending on who you make the most progress with, and each path with offer varying difficulties so using your multitude of saves is highly recommended if you want to get the most out of the game.

- Design -
This particular release is a widescreen version, as opposed to the original Japanese 4:3 release of years back, and typical of old console and computer releases that are remastered, will zoom in on scenes showing a character in certain scenes to compensate for the original releases not having redrawn art for this release to avoid showing black bars on the side of the screen
The full artwork is still available however, which can be viewed by hitting the "space" key during certain scenes and by either dragging your mouse on the screen, or scrolling with a mouse wheel, so you can still enjoy the full art without any image cutting shenanigans.
The music has amazing audio, as expected of key's other releases, which really sets the mood for the games snowy landscapes and effectively portrays a scene, whether it's fooling around or a tense moment.
The artwork of the background scenes has a great deal of detail for the games age, whereas the character designs can be a bit jarring for some and will likely take time for people to get use to, as seen in the Steam Store screenshots.
Having played the original 1999 Japanese release, the game itself does seem to be somewhat brighter, with some likely AI up scaling and touch ups to reproduce the backgrounds at a higher resolution, though is done quite professionally in my option with it only being obvious in very minor areas for those with keen eyes (and the OG game to compare it with!) but if it bothers you, just follow my handy brightness and desaturation guide availble in the guide section here on Steam.
- Rating (TLDR) -
Overall the game is a really fun title with great music and art (depending on your taste) with plenty of replay value and at a great price compared to it's Japanese counterpart, I'm really pleased with the effort put into this release with really minor nitpicks at best and am really relieved they've finally ported this game in English for fans of Key and Visual Novels alike to enjoy one of the forefathers of modern Visual Novels games.
Oh, and please release AIR in English next, you'll have my money the second it's released (like this release!).
(9/10)