Butterfly Soup

The game is set in 2008 and follows four young, queer Asian-American girls as they attend their first year of high school and bond as members of a baseball club. The narrative focuses on the relationship between two of them, Diya and Min-seo.[1] It addresses topics such as child abuse and homophobia, but its tone is generally upbeat.[2] For the story, which takes place in Oakland, California, Lei drew on her own experience growing up in a similar neighborhood among many other Asian-Americans.[3] While the player may make choices in the narrative, these do not influence the outcome of the story.[1]

A point and click section in Butterfly Soup.

Butterfly Soup is a visual novel, and, as such, its gameplay has a low level of interactivity and consists of scenes with static two-dimensional images of characters in a first-person perspective. The game's plot alternates its focus between four major protagonists; any decisions made by the player are followed through from the point of view of whichever character is in the spotlight.[1] Occasionally there are gameplay sections that consist of clicking through different locations or on various objects.

Lei was inspired by various sports anime such as Haikyu!! and Free!. Through this she came up with an idea for a "baseball yuri" game. The game was built over two and half years in Ren'Py, with the art made in Photoshop and Illustrator and the audio edited with Audacity. The characters were designed to be polar opposites of one another so they would create interesting scenarios. The game was intended to be much larger, spanning the entirety of the characters' freshman year, but the length was cut in half due to the scope being too large to reasonably accomplish. [3][4]

Butterfly Soup was among the visual novels of 2017 most popular among players and critics.[3] Rock, Paper, Shotgun described it as "an insta-hit, and (...) a contemporary classic".[2] It was named the "best visual novel" of 2017 by PC Gamer[5] and was the subject of an exhibition at the Game Developers Conference.[2]

The game is available in English, Polish, Tamil, Czech, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean for the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.[6] It is distributed via itch.io, which allows the buyer to name their own price. As of 2018, Lei intended to make a sequel.[3]

• Official Itch.io page