umineko when they cry is a visual novel produced by 07th expansion. it is the spiritual successor to the much more well-known higurashi. it is my most favorite thing on planet earth.

summarizing umineko is hard but basically it goes like this:

the ushiromiya family is extremely rich. they meet once a year on their private island, rokkenjima, for a family reunion. but in the year 1986, the family conference ends with the entire ushiromiya family being picked off by someone claiming to be the witch beatrice. the core of the game rests in you, the reader, deciding if a witch really did kill them.

a sillier more bait-y summary might go like this: the roy family from succession goes to a private island and get wrapped up in agatha christie's and then there were none, only hatsune miku is claiming to be behind everything even though miku obviously isn't real. and yet, when the entire roy family is found dead on the island two days later, everyone is left only to accept the obvious: that miku is real and killed the roys.

obviously these are both extremely gross over-simplifications of what umineko is. but if you like mystery, witches, crazy family dynamics, and stories about grief, heart, and what happiness is and what that means for other people you should read umineko. and i encourage you to avoid looking up much else about it because you will run into spoilers and umineko, as a mystery, is best experienced as blind as you can. seriously, that's the only reason this shrine is as short as it is and not full of me gushing about everything i love about it or slapping pngs everywhere.

it's a story that has shaped me and my interests in a way that encompasses me so fully. "guys it's kind of like umineko..." is something i say almost every time i get into something else i like, much to the to the chagrin of my friends who haven't played it. so please trust me when i ask you to read it blind and not to look up spoilers because otherwise you're doing yourself a disservice.

umineko is available in two parts on steam as the question and answer arcs. question is pt1, answer is pt2, you need both for the full umineko experience. please for the love of god use the original sprites and not the ugly pachinko ones the game will try to force you to use.

if you really feel fancy, you can download the umineko project mod with witch hunt's english translation (the generally agreed upon better translation) for the sprites and CGs from the PS3 version as well as full voice-acting, but i don't think it's necessary, and prefer to play without those 'enhancements'. a lot of people insist that you have to play umineko with umiproj, but if you read really fast, you probably won't want the voice acting. also, personally, i just prefer the charm of ryukishi's art over the more sanitized anime ones in the PS3 edition of the game. but! at the end of the day, umineko is umineko and it's really worth reading.