The legendary Visual Novel Katawa Shoujo has launched on the JAST Store for free with a slew of extra goodies. This includes a few artbooks, a wallpaper collection and soundtrack. JAST said in their Tweet they wanted celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary by doing our part to help preserve this piece of visual novel history.

We’re honored to announce that Katawa Shoujo is available for free on the JAST Store!

We want to celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary by doing our part to help preserve this piece of visual novel history for future generations.#KatawaShoujo10 🎂https://t.co/vAt5E4UwF2 pic.twitter.com/nu7rFAr71K

— JAST USA (@jastusa) January 5, 2022

Here is more about the game from the JAST Store page:

Story

Nakai Hisao finds a mysterious letter in his math textbook that directs him to meet the anonymous sender at a specific location. To his surprise, the sender turns out to be his crush, but at the moment she confesses her love for him, he collapses in the snow! The next thing he rememebers is waking up in the hospital. He is stold that he has arrhythmia, a serious medical condition which causes his heart to sometimes beat become irregularly. And so, his parents decide to have him enrolled him in Yamaku, a school for students with physical disabilities.

About the Game

The story is told through the perspective of the main character, using a first person narrative. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV text box. There are five main paths corresponding to the 5 main female characters, each path following the storyline pertaining to that character. Katawa Shoujo contains adult material, and was created using the Ren’Py scripting system.

It is the product of an international team of passionate amateur developers, and is available free of charge under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License.