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@hyperlinkyourheart since you said you're looking for sci-fi:

planetarian is a highly rated classic that's a fairly short read (2-4 hours, no choices) and gives a good representation of some themes, aesthetics, and storytelling tropes of the genre

Time travel/time loops are a recurring theme in the genre, partly since it messages well with the meta context of the player making different choices to find different endings and having knowledge of previously played routes.

Steins; Gate is a great example, as well as an example of a less straightforward mechanism for choices and branching, but it's pretty long (30+ hours, with multiple sequels. Not especially long as VNs go, but as a newbie you might want to start with shorter titles.)

her tears were my light (<1 hr) is a space romance that plays with the meta of being able to skip and rewind text.

Rail of Mobius (~10 hours), which I think is really underrated, is a Chinese VN about a time looping underwater train. (The English translation has issues though, and I'd recommend grabbing this unofficial patch https://vndb.org/r130396)

Fyi when searching on itch.io, you can edit the URL to add other tags, e.g.
https://itch.io/games/duration-minutes/free/genre-visual-novel/released/tag-science-fiction (you can tweak the other filters in the left sidebar). If you want to hide NSFW games, you should be able to edit that in your user settings.