The Cradle of Thorns (found mobile visual novel; 2014)

The Cradle of Thorns (Japanese:「茨の揺り籠」〜弟は僕だけのもの〜, lit. "Cradle of Thorns ~My little brother belongs to me~") was a Japanese Free-to-play BL Visual Novel developed by Koyonplete. It was released on the May 7, 2014^[1] for Android and iOS and was available in Japanese and English. The app itself it's still available through mirror sites, but since the servers are down only an error message is displayed and the app closes by itself.

The app's icon.

Status: Partially Found

Story and Gameplay

A picture of the roulette that gave the player gems to read. Free rolls where given away daily.

The game was a Kinetic Visual Novel (the story had no branching paths and a single ending) "suspense short story" ^[2]about two twin brothers, Johann and Joshua, living inside a secluded mansion who come into contact with a girl from the outside world. It used a free-to-play model where you'd use gems to read through the story, and get a free roll daily, encouraging users to play every day. Alternatively, you could pay $1.99 to unlock everything.

Official synopsis:

Based on the real story that shocked the world!
Is it insanity or love!?
The end will shock you!
Past the hills that stood miles away from the forest and the village…
There stands a mansion guarded by roses as though it wants to disappear from the world.
Two beautiful brothers live in an abandoned house secretively.
It was as though they want to shy away from people’s eyes. It was as though they care nothing about the world except for each other.
The time of bliss.
The sanctuary of bliss.
These two brothers live in a world isolated from others. Their names: Johann and Joshua.
Now and forever more—
“Let’s stay together forever and ever, okay?”^[3]

Joshua, the meek younger brother, takes a liking to this girl, who comes to their rose garden to visit periodically. This makes his possessive older brother Johann jealous. One day she stops coming and Joshua is very sad about it, but his brother comforts him. It is later revealed that Johann killed her, cooked her corpse and fed it to his little brother.[3][4]

In-game screenshot showcasing the comment system. [2]

The game also had a system that allowed readers to leave comments at specific sections of the story for other people to read. These where displayed on a text bar at the top.

Status

The servers for the game and all other Koyonplete games are down as of 2021. There's no exact known date for when the closure took place, but the company's website was last archived in a working state in October of 2016^[4], whilst their official Facebook page stopped posting in January 2016, except for two out of character Sanrio giveaway posts posted in 2018 after two full years of silence.

There's also plenty of evidence that all Koyonplete games had stopped working by late 2016/early 2017, with the earliest explicit mention of The cradle of thorns not working being from September 2016 ^[5]^[6]^[7]. Most people say they went bankrupt but I couldn't find any concrete sources for that claim.