Natal Untail: the one holiday still standing in a ruined Atlásia

An indie prequel to BROK the InvestiGator, this visual novel runs about an hour and splits the players it moved from the ones who smelled advertising dressed up as a Christmas tale.

A corrupted Christmas in Atlásia

In an Atlásia already fallen to ruin, the holiday that survives from Christmas is called Natal Untail — a corrupted version of the planet's old tradition. It's to celebrate it that the students Graff and Ott are summoned, and it's there, amid the decay, that the two discover that sharing, and having someone to share with, still count for something.

It launched in December 2024, still in early access on the store, and arrived with full accessibility for blind players in English — a feature the game's own store page highlights. The game also runs in other languages, which brought in spontaneous reviews written in French and German alongside the English-language ones.

The story works as a gateway into the world of BROK the InvestiGator: it introduces the characters and the vocabulary of the main game, and the store itself promises that you don't need to have played Brok first to follow along. You come in not knowing who Brok is and leave knowing enough to move on to the main game, if you want to. Yet the catalog also files the title under fighting, a holdover from the game it precedes — there's no brawling and no puzzle here at all, just reading, with no dialogue choices, told in chapters that shift the point of view among the three central characters.

The bonus scenes in the credits that no one wants to skip

Those who played right after launch, in December 2024, boil the experience down to one piece of advice they keep repeating: don't skip the credits. Reach the end and you'll find bonus scenes hidden there — the kind of treat that rewards anyone who doesn't give up partway through.

The French version, reviewed on December 14, 2024, praises the translation and points to the chapter structure that shifts the point of view among the three characters, with no dialogue choices and no minigame. In German, a review from December 18 of the same year says it was moved by the narrative and thanks the team for it; another, posted in January 2025, goes straight to the soundtrack, which for the person who wrote it is what lingers most after the credits.

But the most detailed review of the bunch, from December 21, 2024, is also the one that marks the limit: it calls the story short but complete, praises the graphics and the writing, and admits the characters get little room to reveal themselves. For its author, that's a forgivable flaw, because the tale is seasonal — it's not the whole adventure.

When Christmas becomes bait, according to the critics

The harshest critique, posted in late December 2025, isn't about the plot: it's about the intent. For its author, the studio put no real care into the story or the gameplay, once again left out the Linux players who backed the earlier releases, and uses the tale as bait to keep COWCAT's name in view and sell the main game. Their trust in the studio, this person says, is gone.

Another review, from September 2025, sees the same tale differently: if you're expecting a conventional Christmas story, the detour into the climate crisis weighs more than the spirit of the season, and the pacing stalls because of it. A third, from December of the same year, is even blunter — it calls the game weak and demands more language options in the subtitles.

The irony is that the harshest review and one of the most glowing land on the same day, December 24, 2025: while one brands the tale a marketing ploy, the other describes it as a moving story about a secondary character in the series, Graff, on the eve of the holiday. These aren't two phases of the audience — it's the same audience, at the same moment, seeing different things.

Who an hour in a decaying Atlásia is for

Anyone after the series' next chapter of fighting and investigation will find none of it here: there's no brawling, no puzzle, and the fighting label in the catalog is a holdover from the game that comes later. If all you want is a short Christmas story, with a decaying world in the background and an ending best left untold, you'll come away satisfied after about an hour of reading — even knowing that, for some, that same story is nothing but a lure for the main game.

Fans of the series get context that wasn't there before; anyone who's never heard of Brok can get in too, because the story itself takes care of introducing everyone. Left out is anyone hoping for decisions that change the course of the tale: there's no choice here at all, just the page turning. And anyone expecting a mature plot about climate change, rather than a side note on it, comes away just as frustrated as the most skeptical review.