I just finished a first play-through (as typical with these sorts of visual novels, multiple plays are required to reach the multiple endings) and found Sweet Fuse to be an endearing experience.

The story is simple: When a new theme park is taken by a terrorist and the employees held hostage, a team of seven people has to get through the series of puzzles the terrorist lays in their way. Failure = bombs and the death of everyone. We play a young high school girl whose uncle is the park's designer. With the park taken over, she volunteers to be one of the seven people to help rescue everyone and save the park.

Some pretty direct parallels can be drawn between this and some of the highlights of the genre: 999 and Danganronpa. The sense of a group of people unwilling gathered together to play a sinister sequence of deadly games at the whim of a maniac? Yup. Different paths based on choices made (ala 999)? A cute animal-esque antagonist? Yes and yes.

But Sweet Fuse keeps the interactive elements on a much shorter leash. While each room presents a puzzle, it is mostly solved without our direct participation. So we can't compare the puzzles to those of 999, despite them occupying a similar place in the narrative. Instead, once or twice a day (the game is split over seven days) we get to play a little mini game to try and find what part of the clues they've been ignoring. The logic behind it is iffy, and the actual impact on the gameplay minimal, but I generally found them enjoyable (if underutilized).

Instead, most of our interaction with the game is in choosing how to react to certain situations, what characters to follow (when group splits happen), and what types of things to say. Which is to say, the gameplay elements are finagling your relationship with the other people on the team. So, to a certain extent you could look at Sweet Fuse as a dating sim. (Apparently each of the six guys that you're teamed up with can be wooed, though not on the same playthrough. And each of the six guys have two possible endings, I mathematically-speaking, there are 12 endings.)

I'll be honest, I'm not sure how the "picking" process works. That might be my favorite part of Sweet Fuse; I just naturally played my character the way I wanted to, and all of a sudden I was like, "I think they kind of like each other." How did they reach that point? Could I have spun things away or were they already too far in? But at that point I decided to roll with it--if playing my character the way I wanted to brought me to that point, who am I to object?

Compared to the big visual novel titles, Sweet Fuse is a bit on the short side (I burned through it in about three days without obsessing over it like I did Danganronpa), but it's a pretty solid experience. Writing (or, perhaps more accurately, the translation) isn't wooden (each character has a personality), and only occasionally cringy. It's pretty fully voice acted (which surprised the hell out of me). But the biggest reason I rate it a middle-of-the-road three stars is that I'm not clamoring to immediately replay to find the different endings. I imagine I will at some point, but I'm pleased with the choices I made and the way my character evolved. Even the story--of which new paths apparently reveal a lot more to--feels good to me as-is. (Of course, as 999 proved, a first ending is rarely the best ending--then again, 999's non-true endings demand that replay. This one does not.)