@JDarkside these are cool recs - I don’t think I would have come across these naturally without your post here, so thanks!
I like VNs a lot, but I don’t play them as much as I’d like. In 2024 I got through quite a few in one year. I love the Steins;Gate anime and still haven’t played the VN yet but I did try out Chaos;Head Noah last year and finished one full route - essentially the first one you have to do if you want to do multiple endings I think. Chaos;Head is an absolute masterclass in paranoia. It has this dreamlike (or nightmare-like, more accurately) property that allows it to swing into really distressing and uncomfortable moods at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately I really didn’t enjoy the experience outside of its tone and atmosphere and didn’t want to continue past that.
I would consider the Citizen Sleeper games to be VN Hybrid, and there’s some part of their incremental dice-rolling system that causes me to binge them every time I play one. I think it’s a fun way to synthesize RPG elements into a VN experience. It’s kind of weird to play a game that feels like a visual novel and to be thinking “just one more in-game day and then I’ll stop” like I’m playing a game of Civilization, but I like it a lot (speaking of, @CalDoesThings of this very site has a VN Hybrid game that utilizes a similar design and it’s really great - thread here).
I’m a big fan of both the Danganronpa and Zero Escape games, so of course I also picked up The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. It really is a sprawling, monumental game. There are in fact 100 endings, and while they’re not all created equal (the first unique ending I got was a joke ending, which was not really an ideal way to kick off my ending hunting) when Hundred Line works, it works. I think it has some of the best of what Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi have to offer. It also has some routes that are not engaging, interesting, or pleasant. The scope of the game is so large that you get a lot of pretty good, some great, and some bad. The RPG elements start off engaging, but you very quickly get to the point where you’ve completely maxed everything out (I’m there and I still have dozens of endings left to get to), but the game does let you skip this content at certain points and just enjoy the story, which contains hallmarks of both creators and their teams’ styles.