Thanks! I haven't played visual novels in years, right now I'm mostly into multiple choice fiction on Android, but yeah there are some really great ones. I used to especially like kinetic novels. They aren't interactive, but use really neat graphic and sound effects to make reading quite an experience and tend to tell more sophisticated stories than those you find in most visual novels.

There is one free visual novel on Steam I did play a year or two ago, made by a Russian team of developers that plays in a Russian pioneer camp. I think it's originally a hentai dating sim but the Steam version has that content removed so it's just a really interesting mystery story. It's called Everlasting Summer.

That visual novel has one seriously cool game mechanic. You play through the game and then, you play through it again and your character notices that he has seen all of this before... It's like being caught in a time loop. The story begins anew every time and you can use things you learned the last time you played it to get better results. Oxenfree also does this, another really cool game, but it's a point & click adventure not a visual novel.