Thank you Shreibikus for sending this game for review on our Steam Curator!

Light de Deux is a kinetic visual novel (for those who don't know, this means it's a picture story without choices) about a man named Mark and a woman named Susanna.  They both meet each other at a local ballet and dance together in class.  At first, they dance together because they were assigned together with no particular affection for each other.  They also come from different worlds, with him being a handyman and her a college student with a wealthy but distant father.  

The story starts from Mark's perspective, and described how when he was twelve, he saw a male dancer on TV and thought it was incredibly masculine to him.  Elegance, confidence, balance and strength seemed like the ultimate in masculinity to him.  Soon after, he signed up for ballet classes.  Unfortunately his classmates made fun of him, so he stopped going.  Ten years later as an adult, he no longer cared what people thought, so he started going once again since he loved dancing.

Mark was paired up with Susanna, a girl that he thought was a bit strange.  Their relationship was rocky at first, as she was hard to get along with and wouldn't talk much.  They danced together in the class as nothing more than acquaintances for nearly two years before anything changed.

Mark had no desire to be mean to her, and he quickly realized that she was just putting on a harsh face to keep people away.  He would tease her, and she would retort in some quick and sometimes mean way, but he didn't take it personally.

For quite some time, Susanna thought Mark was an idiot with his silly jokes and seemingly taking life not very seriously.  He was always patient and courteous, though.  When a friend of hers mentioned that there was an ameteur dancing contest, she really wanted to join to show her father than she was serious about dancing, and asked Mark to be her partner.  From their, the walls separating them slowly broke down.  Going any farther would spoil the already short story, which lasted me just over an hour.

For those who have not played a visual novel before, the most common format used is a simple background with characters in front of it, with a text box on the bottom of the screen where you read the narrative of what's going on.  Light de Deux follows this common format.  In this case, all spoken text is voice acted in Ukrainian, while narrative or internal monologues are silent.  There are about six songs that help set the mood.  This music changes depending on the scene, and sounds like it's done on synthesizer with high quality piano (probably samples).  They are simple, but set the mood well and sound very nice.

A visual novel isn't very visual without art, and this game has the best art style and consistency of all of Shreibikus's works so far (this is the third of their works I have reviewed on Steam so far).  I really like the art style a lot; it's clean but expressive, and it's well animated, too.  I feel like if this becomes a new baseline for Shreibikus visual novels, they have a great future ahead of them.

The story itself is fairly well written, and quite straightforward compared to their more esoteric previous works.  With that said, I have to say I prefer it.  It's nice, heartwarming, and simple.  I played through it once, sat down to write this review, and played through it again on accident - it's just a nice, feel-good story.  The art is all of a fairly high resolution, and even scaled up to 4K it looks great.

There are certainly moral concerns, though not particularly out of the ordinary for a story of this type.  Being a romance, there are times when one character or the other will notice how attactive the other one is in various ways, like a toned body, leg, or breast.  In one section, they are close to each other and it comments that the guy's arm touch her breast on accident at first but since she didn't seem to notice, he did it on purpose afterwards.

Being a story about dancing, the characters are often seen in dance leotards.  There are also times that he is seen topless and she is seen in a sports bra, so her midriff is exposed.  When it comes to language, minor curse words like 'p*ss', 'h*ll', '*ss' are used.  More seriously, 'God', 'godd*mn', and 'Christ' are used occasionally.

Light de Deux is a pleasant but short visual novel from this new but improving storyteller.  The voice acting is really good, and the art and music is quite nice also.  I do wish it was longer; if it had a bit more it would justify the price better, and I want to know more about what happens past the end.  It's a really good effort, even if the formula is a bit cliche.  I recommend it for visual novel lovers who enjoy simple romances, especially on a sale.