STEINS;GATE: Linear Bounded Phenogram Ten lab members, ten timelines

In STEINS;GATE the story moved through Okabe Rintaro, and everyone else stayed partly out of view. Linear Bounded Phenogram flips that: ten new stories, each told by a different member of the Future Gadget Lab. You get their inner thoughts directly, not just what Okabe guessed at. You watch Okabe from the outside for once, and he looks different when he is not the one narrating. Some stories run parallel to the original plot, some continue after it, and some drift onto worldlines where the divergence rate is a few percent and familiar people behave in unfamiliar ways. If you ever wondered what Kurisu, Suzuha or Daru were thinking during those weeks in Akihabara, this answers it.

The game is split into episodes, and each one is its own story with its own writer, tone and worldline. One sticks close to the main plot and feels like a lost chapter. Another loops through a different worldline again and again until the shape of the whole event finally clicks into place. Some are quiet character pieces, some lean into mystery and abduction, and at least one could sit in the original game without anyone blinking. Because the writers differ, the stories differ: a few are small and warm, a few go strange. There is also a hidden scenario beyond the ten. Fair warning: the quality varies from story to story, so some will land harder than others.

This is a visual novel, and a relaxed one: you read the story scene by scene over illustrated characters and backgrounds, with no branching by phone mail and no fail states. Your job is to read, collect the messages along the way, and let each episode carry you. The art stays in the style fans of the series know, with new CGs mixed among the familiar backgrounds, and the music does a lot of lifting: the opening and both ending themes are strong. It is a game for reading slowly, an episode at a night, the way you would watch a season of a show you already love.