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I played around six hours of this, getting into chapter four. I had some cautious interest in the first two hours, starting to get into it. I really liked Cathy and I liked the hints of something supernatural in the background. Some of the dialogue was hitting me a bit. But the game gradually became grueling. As the main character’s personality came to light, it was clear he was an asshole, and not an interesting one. He was smug towards Nicole, he went into a random room in her house, he initially ignored her desire for him to leave, and then took advantage of her mother’s ignorance of the situation to stay at her house after he did something incredibly wrong and got her rightfully incredibly upset with him. He ditched Cathy at the fair after simply bumping into Nicole to the point where he never went back to her nor bothered to tell her he wasn’t going to be back, or bye, or anything. When Cathy met him at his house, he didn’t address the situation and proceeded to be occupied texting Nicole half the time Cathy was there. Not to mention how he texts. He’s purely a typical rude teenage boy with no redeeming qualities, and you are expected to play as him, and see the world and the rest of the characters through his eyes. There’s no real acknowledgement of how much of a dick he is either. Cathy seems too afraid to lose him even more to say anything, and Nicole just “gets over it” seemingly. The plot meanders on and on with the boring days of a dick teenager, constantly teasing you with the more captivating supernatural elements, but not delivering before the game as a whole becomes as insufferable as the main character. The visuals were what initially drove my interest in the game but in truth, it looks very unrefined. There had been about 3 different pixel art styles used in the game and it’s always very jarring when one is used for a mini cutscene out of nowhere, like the hug at the chess game. All of them look quite awkward, with the default providing not enough detail and the aforementioned one just… I can’t describe it, but the faces don’t look right. The characters are constantly on a maybe 2 second at best animation loop and it looks bizarre to have all their pixels bouncing back and forth all the time. It doesn’t breathe any life into them, rather, it makes it more uncanny than if they were static. The visuals do not do a good job at integrating the 2D elements into the 3D environments, the characters feeling fully like 2D sheets of paper that are about to fly away. The music was rather unnotable. The gameplay was practically nonexistent, given it was a visual novel. There are “choices” but they seemingly have little effect. I did like how it lets you “type out” the messages though. I think that’s an inventive way to make you feel more connected to it. I know there is much more to this game’s runtime - perhaps at some point the main character’s behavior is acknowledged and there is movement away from his mundane life - but frankly, it doesn’t matter when the start is too terrible to get through. Even assuming that him being a dick and the boring days are the point, there are still ways to do that in an interesting fashion and not just throwing you into the shittery and expecting you to wade through it. Six hours is far, far more than I would give the vast vast majority of media that I was feeling so wishy-washy or increasingly negative about. I gave this until the last second, when I truly couldn’t stand it anymore - until I had stopped reading the dialogue and despised the game and my experience with it. There’s clearly something here, it’s just a shame that… everything ended up getting in the way. Terrible. I couldn’t recommend this to anyone.

Cathy was really adorable though. I would’ve treated her so much better. It should’ve been me there, not him……….

Dropped - 1 star