Not Your Average Fairytale: ‘Cinders’ Has Been Released

Ooh! Someone fetch my dress, quick! Apparently the Royal Ball is like, well basically tonight, and I look like crap. The prince is going to turn his nose up at me and I’ll never be the slimy gold digger I’ve always aimed to be. Everything is ruined! Ah well, I’ll just start again and maybe this time I’ll be a bit nicer to everyone as tradition would have it. Oh hi – you’ve just caught me playing Cinders, it’s a bit good you know. I wrote so in my preview of the game, but if you’re all too eager to jump into this stunning visual novel then now you actually can! It’s been released!

I know what you’re thinking: “steady on there, love, what you talking about?” Well, Cinders is a visual novel that takes a more serious approach to its fairytale source material. Through presenting the players with choices and quite a varied bunch of them too, it allows them to almost translate their personality on to the eponymous pauper. You’d think that the original Cinderella story would be followed all the way through, and in this case it is very loosely, but with several different scenarios and endings to discover, there’s a lot more than you’d think.

Really, Cinders is about the lives of four women and how they came to be. Fairytales paint things in good and evil but Cinders adds layers of complexity to these simplified characters, which will make you think not just twice but several times about your view of them. The themes explored are similarly numerous and interesting on all different levels; oppression, responsibility and innocence being some of the major overarching ones.

You can buy Cinders and try a demo for Windows and Mac from the official website.