Videoverse Shows There’s Nothing Shallow About Online Friendships In A Heartfelt Visual Novel
Logging on for the last time.
Online communities are naturally fragile things. At any moment, platform owners can choose to shut them down or let them wither through censorship or neglect. Users themselves might lose access for any number of reasons, or simply decide to stop participating. And in most cases, the connections formed there are just as ephemeral, demanding a lot of conscious work to remain solid. But none of those things make the bonds formed there any less real, nor the sadness when they fade any less impactful.
Videoverse tells the story of just such a community in its waning days. It’s 2003, and publisher Kinmoku is pushing its Dolphin console, the successor to the popular Shark. But with technological progress comes obsolescence, and the Shark’s Videoverse, a combination of message board and video chat service, is being shut down in favor of a paid option on the Dolphin. Videoverse follows a 15-year-old boy named Emmet, a Videoverse devotee, fan of the Feudal Fantasy RPG, and burgeoning artist, as he faces the heartbreak of his online world collapsing. And after launching on PC in 2023, Videoverse is now available on consoles.
Two years after its PC debut, Videoverse brings its heartfelt story to consoles.
With only small exceptions, the entirety of Videoverse takes place at Emmet’s desk as he uses his Shark (an adorable clamshell console with two screens and a webcam attachment), draws in his notebook, and leafs through gaming magazines. Every significant story beat happens within Videoverse itself, which immediately calls to mind old-school online spaces from AOL chat rooms to bulletin board systems to Square Enix’s wonderfully obtuse PlayOnline.
Emmet’s life on Videoverse revolves around a few forums — most notably, one set up for artists to share their pixelated work and one for fans of Feudal Fantasy. While scrolling through these forums, you can like and comment on other users’ posts while making posts of your own, and talk to a few characters in private chats. The story that unfolds there has Emmet working to build a community to connecting with other users and reporting trolls, before the revelation that Videoverse will be shutting down shatters the service’s user base.
I can’t say what effect it will have on you if you aren’t also an elder millennial raised on the early internet, but Videoverse stirred in me a surprisingly intense mix of feelings. Memories I hadn’t revisited in decades immediately resurfaced, of friendship and rivalries made on role-playing forums and online crushes on near-strangers who would one day disappear without a trace. The potential for Videoverse to devolve into mere nostalgia is high, but it dodges it in favor of telling a story of fleeting relationships and the ways that even transient interactions can shape our paths.
Videoverse tells a story of human connection through old-school internet forums.
It’s only in brief moments where Videoverse’s emotional story turns saccharine. A framing device has Emmet speaking about his experiences in this online forum from the future, reflecting on the events that transpired the summer it shut down. Here, it turns too sentimental, hammering a bit too obviously on the game’s themes while extolling the importance of games themselves and wrapping Emmet’s story up in too neat a bow. But when the action is restricted to its titular online community, Videoverse does a better job of demonstrating just how real the relationships formed there can be. I felt genuinely crushed along with Videoverse’s users as the confronted the dissolution of their online home, and when service interruptions start interfering with their ability to stay connected, they hit like an earthquake.
As a simulator of early internet communities, Videoverse is a blast to explore, but it’s the game’s emotional story that’s the biggest surprise. Online friendships are often held as less real, less valuable than those made in the real world. But Videoverse understands that it’s not the conditions under which a friendship forms that makes it real, it’s the feelings of those involved, and whether you’re connecting outside or sitting in front of a computer, it’s just as true that meeting the right person can change your life forever.
