marrow #25 | posted 23 april 2026
i'm not very fond of christmas dinner. it always takes forever and the traditional food isn't all that great and afterwards i'm mostly just glad that it's over. i open with this because this was kinda like what fate/stay night was like. in comparison, the chrono jotter was a delicious little dessert: brief, well crafted and refreshing.
the chrono jotter (2021) is a brisk little yuri mystery vn. i finished it in 7h30, in three long sessions (it's conveniently split into a prologue and three parts). our protagonist, ran ibuki, wakes up in a strange school where seven other girls have been living for years. six of them are strangers to her. the seventh is her missing girlfriend, ann sakura, who has no memories of her time outside the school.
oh sakura is also dead. but don't worry, she gets better.
this is a murder game story, but no one stays dead. these girls are trapped in a supernatural anomaly of some sort, and every victim comes back to life once her murder is solved and the culprit confesses. the victims and murderers themselves are decided by drawing lots. it's mostly a play being put between friends. but it doesn't mean everything is straightforward, and ran still needs to figure out a way to restore ann's memories and escape.
the game plays kinda like a tighter and snappier danganronpa: you get a limited amount of time to interact with the girls, seeing and participating in their interpersonal conflicts, and then a murder occurs and you investigate. there isn't really free roaming, contributing to the faster pace, and you can't fail a case. the gameplay is facilitating the story, and the murders are facilitating character conflict. like a musical number.
the gameplay wrinkle comes with a really neat application of time travel that suits the visual novel medium perfectly. at specific points in the narrative, you get to use ran's recall ability. it lets her revisit choices, giving her a glimpse of how things could have gone differently. the main purpose is getting clues to solve the murders, but you can also go back to skill checks you couldn't meet before, or check up on people you didn't have the time to, letting you learn more about the characters.
speaking of skill checks, i'm sure you could minmax allocation but it's really quite generous with stats. you get temporary points to boost them for a single choice too, so it's quite low stress. again, tough and permanent decisions aren't really the point — none of this even affects the ending, i believe. the game is mostly concerned about these girls' various codependent relationships. yay!
you don't really have the time (or much narrative reason) to dwell on everyone's relationship with everyone else: the focus is more on specific couples, which rather mirrors ran's devotion to and dependency on her girlfriend. but the small cast still allows for enough moments of interaction that they feel like a friend group, and everyone gets developed nicely.
being a short game and a mystery story, i don't think i really can add more... i do recommend you just play it for yourself when you get the chance... just be warned it doesn't work well under linux. some conflicting reports on steamdb; i personally couldn't run it at all and had to use my cobweb-filled evil os partition.
a small price to pay, because i loved this game. it reminds me a bit of erin elkin's these rainy autumn nights, which i read earlier this month. and also of a really solid doctor who two parter...