Abyss

I've always liked this, it has pretty much everything you could want in a personal project: a catchy name and a whimsical idea that is just on the edge of being actually practical.

I was also a lurker on those subreddits, although I mostly just used the r/visualnovels suggestions list to help pick what to read.

Recently I finished both Fate/stay Night and The Fruit of Grisaia after many months (years?) of on and off reading. Maybe not an achievement in the traditional sense of the word, but in the VN world it feels like one lol. I was a big fan of the characters and somewhat flippant tone of Grisaia, and despite the lack of realism I think it still handles its subject matter pretty seriously. Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion, but I was a bit more critical of FSN, and I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you were already interested in the world-building from being exposed to the anime.

I'm new to lemmy, but I think we're trying to make a VN community happen over at visualnovels@comfysnug.space . This post is the first I've heard of Jack Jeanne, but with it recommended twice already I might have to check it out, although I'm not usually much of a console or handheld player. It could be a good excuse to wipe the dust off the old Switch though lol.

Although it's more of a total overhaul, I've been a fan of Requiem. It's more of a traditional RPG overhaul, returning to a static level based system (i.e. enemies do not scale their levels with you and will be much more dangerous at low levels). The time commitment of compiling a good modlist and setting up and debugging the mods has discouraged me from playing it recently though.

Michiru is definitely a solid pick. That was my second route, and probably my second favorite too (I think I must give the win to Sachi though). I've only played about an hour or two of Labyrinth of Grisaia so far, and although I didn't think Fruit really needed a sequel, I'm interested to see where else they take it.