National Park Girls: Episode 5 - Eternal Evergreen Part 2

After finishing the last episode of the game, all I can say…is holy moly! The voice acting of Eve, Yosemite, and Death Valley was so, SO, good in my opinion; the screams of agony and anger, the jokes, and the moments of intimacy were really incredible…I don’t know if it’s just my impression, or maybe it’s because I’ve played the previous episodes a long time ago, but I was very surprised by the last chapter of the story.

Really…props to the voice actors, I felt really immersed, even more so since I could relate to the problems Eve was facing. Apart from that, I enjoyed the comedy of the little rocks (that joke about Dwayne was so funny I couldn’t believe it when I read it! The art though, the ART! It was amazing, the moment I saw the vastness of that park I got the chills (also, Eve’s and Yosemite’s avatar looks so nice!!!). My words don’t do justice to how much I enjoyed this final episode and how great I think it was. I won’t say it’s a perfect game, however I can say I enjoyed it very much and that for now it’s one of my favourite visual novels. I wanted to write this review so you know I appreciate your work and all the effort you put into, along with the many incredible people that worked on it. Thank youuuu crying emoji!!!

So I would really like this episode in isolation, I think it has nice themes of moving on even if you've made mistakes and death valley was wonderful to see. It's just that as a continuation of episode 4 which touched on the colonial (and genocidal) origin(s) of the national parks, a continuation of those themes feels missing.

Like for example Yosemite getting over the trauma of forgetting we see her experience in episode 4 offscreen would be fine, if not for the fact that she's the only native charachter and so we miss that perspective, especially because episode 4 actually conveyed really well the existential dread and fear that (cultural) genocide brings, knowing that things were different once but still only being able to conceptualize yourself through the colonizers framework. I was really excited to see where you were gonna go with that but then it's just... dropped. It matters to the overall themes too, since even though "You may forget and die, but the now matters" is a nice message, in Yosemite's case this forgetting is because of a genocide which forced her current identity upon her.

And I get that maybe you feel that it's not your place to talk about the native experience but then you shouldn't have written a story where that's necessary. I hope that the next time you set a story in the USA we can get a foregrounding of native experiences or at least one that doesn't go "look at this cool bit of the US" without considering the material conditions that made it like that.

Thank you for this visual novel. I loved it from start to finish and it really resonated with me on various levels. Kudos to the writers and the amazing cast. You have created something truly special.

Studio Coattails! Thank you for this amazing visual novel first of all.
I just bought and downloaded episode 5 (+ updating the base game and the previous parts (2-4) as per your instructions. (Deleted the original install and started from clean).

I had issues getting this game to start properly and I found out the reason why!

For some reason the directory/folder which the game files resides inside CANNOT have a space in it.
So I solved the issue completely by renaming "National Park Girls" to "NationalParkGirls" without spaces.
Now the game runs fine.