Solo indie dev Brianna Lei has revealed the sequel to LGBT+ baseballing, romancing visual novel Butterfly Soup will hit itch.io on October 29th. Butterfly Soup 2 continues the story from the first game, and brings back all four main characters. It’s set just a few months following the original, and Lei says it should occupy you for around three hours.
The game will serve as a full sequel to the original Butterfly Soup, which celebrated its fifth anniversary last week. Its announcement on Lei’s Twitter account marked the date. Lei said on her itch.io devlog that she’s still working on the game, and that “once again it'll probably come right down to the wire”.
Butterfly Soup and its sequel focus on the lives of four gay Asian-American teenagers – Diya, Noelle, Akarsha, and Min-seo – who love baseball and, they find, each other. The first game was released on itch.io in 2017, and Lei has been working with translators since to add a bunch more language options. Lei also made the pomeranian-starring RPG Pom Gets Wifi in 2013 too, which you can try out here.
We named Butterfly Soup among our top ten visual novels to play on PC this year. Back in 2018, Lei talked with RPS about her plans for a sequel. Although Lei had planned for the first game to be twice as long, it had to be cut in half due to the scope of developing a larger project as a solo dev. While one couple got together in the original, the other didn’t. Lei hopes to explore their relationship, and flesh out some other characters, in Butterfly Soup 2.
Butterfly Soup 2 releases on October 29th for PC, Mac and Linux. It’ll be available on itch.io, and is pay-what-you-want. You can find the original on Lei’s itch.io page here.
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