I’ve written some lengthy and very in-depth reviews on this site before. This will not be one of those reviews.
This game is challenging in all the worst ways. It's not complicated; you don't need to be super attentive. There isn’t a gameplay loop that you need to master (it’s basically a kinetic novel). Rather, it challenges your basic human ability to stay awake.
I’ve played some truly awful games from this site. Games with terrible grammar and spelling. Games with awful, flat characters that serve no purpose except fetish-bait. Games with writing that make your eyes roll into the back of your head and your teeth grit. Just some abhorrent, low effort stuff.
I almost prefer those games to this one. At least those games are transparent wastes of time. This game almost baits you into thinking it’s good before you realize that, no, it’s just as bad as the worst games on the site, only differing in execution.
The writing in this game is perhaps the most heinous example of self-indulgence I’ve ever seen. The developer must love the sound of their keyboard, because I’ve never seen so many scenes that just drag on… and on… and on.. and on…
There’s zero substance or subtlety to their writing. Show don’t tell? Must be a foreign concept. Don’t treat your audience like an idiot? Skipped that day in screenwriting class. Subtext? Never heard of her. Edit the dialogue down to a reasonable length? No way! The audience needs to digest every bit of pointless verbal diarrhea and word salad.
What you’re left with is a dozen slides of painful dialogue, a dumbass MC who takes 7 slides to explain the obvious, 2 more slides of painfully unfunny fourth-wall breaking jokes, then 3 more slides of anime girl tropes instead of character development. Whereas a talented writer can probably express the entire thing in maybe 4 lines of well-written dialogue. So instead of getting crispy dialogue that leaves us wanting more, we get 25 clicks of RSI so they can indulge in the most obvious and formulaic of scenes.
And it goes on for chapter after chapter. Sprinkle in your cheap end-of-chapter cliffhanger (like clockwork), and your bait-and-switch lewd scene (didn’t you get the memo, it’s a “slow burn”), and get me out of this anime hell.
Don’t get me wrong, writing good dialogue is hard. It’s always a tricky balance to make the characters feel real and natural while paring down scenes to their narrative essentials. But the absolute last thing you want to do is try to capture every single word and sound that comes out of everyone’s mouths, along with every stray thought, and then tack on every stray trope or joke just because you as the writer can’t resist. That’s why in every Screenwriting 101 class, one of the first lessons is don’t try to transcribe full conversations. You use dialogue to tell a story, and that includes knowing when, as the writer, to shut the fuck up.
The developer of this game never learned that lesson, and everyone who plays this game has to suffer for it.