What are your favorite visual novels? Or just visual novels you're dying to talk about? I'm especially curious to hear about things that are recent.
the best visual novel i have ever played is 428: shibuya scramble.
428 shibuya scramble is like an fmv game, only there are just a few short video clips for specific moments. most of the rest of the game is still photographs. the writing is hilarious while still making for a compelling thriller plot. you play as six different people over the course of a single day in shibuya. you go hour by hour, and the game itself is a sort of puzzle box -- you have to figure out the right combination of choices that gets everyone to the end of the hour alive and well. sometimes a choice made by one character won't matter for them but will screw things up for another. this might sound annoying, but the user interface is designed incredibly well to make this kind of tinkering with the timeline as fun and easy as possible. every single person with an interest in game narrative needs to play 428 shibuya scramble.
428 shibuya scramble was made by chunsoft, who kind of invented the visual novel (they called them "sound novels," which was a trademarked term; other developers coined the term "visual novel" to get around the trademark) back in 1992 with their game otogiriso (there are other claimants to the throne, such as yuji horii's the portopia serial murder case, though portopia is substantially more like a typical western adventure game than it is like other visual novels). it's also a sequel/spiritual successor to chunsoft's machi, which was first released for the sega saturn in 1998.
shibuya scramble is among the more recent in a long lineage of highly non-linear visual novels. machi no doubt took inspiration from two sources: EVE burst error and YU-NO: a girl who chants love at the bound of this world.
EVE features multiple protagonists you can switch between at any time; YU-NO features a branching nonlinear narrative with an innovative user interface to allow you to easily view and jump between the different story branches to make different choices. since YU-NO, this has become common in visual novels, from 428 shibuya scramble to the more recent and excellent 13 sentinels: aegis rim.
EVE has never been released officially in english has been officially released in english once, 20 years ago, and is only on mangagamer, though you can find fan translations of some of the other releases online. YU-NO has an official english version, but it's of the most recent PC remake, and honestly it's fucking ugly. to my knowledge there's no fan translations of the other versions with the nice pixel art.
also worth noting that both EVE and YU-NO are eroge, as were most PC visual novels until fairly recently. the sega saturn version removes the porn, the updated pc version still has it; the ports of the pc version to consoles don't. also, being from the 90s, the specific kind of erotic content may warrant some... viewer discretion.

