This is a hard game to rate. It’s also a hard game to enjoy, but I’ll get to that in a second.
Short version: The models look fantastic. The engine is a tire fire. Hate the MC. The writing is good to great, in most places.
Long version: I really wanted to like this one, because I’ve enjoyed some of Palmer’s other stuff, and also because of how damn impressive it looks. But, even though I’m usually pretty patient and forgiving with VNs, especially when I find the writing to be of higher quality like this is, I really couldn’t do it this time around.
The game does a lot of typical VN stuff, most of which I wouldn’t’ have a problem with, but I found myself getting annoyed playing more than 1-2 episodes in a sitting. There’s a MC who doesn’t really know how to human, some exceptionally beautiful “childhood friends” that he cares about, a pile of other attractive girls who hit on the intrepid hero dickhead, and a pile of contrivances common in this kind of game. There’s an accident that scars the main characters, an asshole antagonist, some mystery bullshit the reader doesn’t get to understand even though it’s the subject of literally everyone’s conversation, a dozenish teenagers and not a parent in sight… typical genre fare.
What keeps the story from becoming an eyerolling stroll down Tropey Nonsense Lane is the ever-present something that Palmer does very well: damn good writing for some damn good characters. Most of them are complex, with interesting motivations (not that the MC usually can detect them, of course; as one of the LIs points out, he’s got the EQ of a radish) and interesting flaws. The MC does feel like a character as well, and not a boring, emotionless black hole. The game almost feels like an able-bodied, incestuous Katawa Shoujo, albeit one where Kenji is a raging cunt. [I know this is irrelevant, but I’m gonna humor this tangent. MC has just suffered a life-altering event that damn near killed him, and now he’s gotta break out of his shell of self-pity and self-loathing and learn to be a person again. All the characters are in this particular (summer)school because there’s something wrong in each of their lives. Some cope better than others, but all are incredibly fascinated with the MC, even though he shouldn’t be that interesting.] Still, it never feels like a derivative affair because of how good the writing is. And because the models are almost uniquely gorgeous. And because I found the pre-episode synopses where two of the characters explain (often with humor, often with horror) the MC’s actions to the reader to be absolutely delightful.
So here’s what sucks: it feels like an absolute chore to get through it. The engine is a nightmare, with frustrating, unskippable transitions everywhere. Seriously, sometimes there are multiple transitions where it feels like I’m fighting game and mashing Space as quickly as possible, but it still drags like hell. The transitions don’t take long, just a couple seconds, but they suckkkkk when staggered. Here’s an example:
Sparky and the redheads are heading off to school. Fade out from the kitchen.
Fade in to the front of their building.
Literally nothing happens because there’s no dialog here. Fade out from the building.
Fade in to the street as they walk.
3-4 Space taps worth of reading as the MC describes the girls’ moods and their conversations.
Fade-out of the street.
Fade-in to the school entrance.
Fade-out of the school entrance.
Fade-in to the hallway.
4-5 lines of dialogue as one of the girls goes one way and the other two characters head to class. Fade-out of the hallway.
Fade-in to the classroom.
EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. PRESENT. gets an individual fade-in and fade-out to show the reader who’s in class that day.
And these are, for some inane reason, not skippable. Sound like fun? Yes? Fuck you, you dirty liar, because no, it doesn’t.
This also ruins one of the most interesting parts of a game where you make choices, because it becomes an absolute nightmare to reload a save and see what happens when you make the alternate choice (don’t bother anyway; the majority of dialog choices don’t matter, and the majority of action choices just choose the order the MC does a list of options). After the first few episodes, I just quit worrying about it, because the idea of slogging through more of these outweighed the thought of seeing more of the writing. It literally ruined the VN for me.
I quit playing at the end of Episode 8. Even with only 2 out the 10 remaining, I had no desire to finish. Sure, there were some other annoying aspects, like: the MC could be an unaware twit, I hated one of the primary characters that was forced on him, the choices felt pointless, sometimes the tropes felt copy/pasted. But I really think the only reason these things irked me was because I was already spending most of my time going through the VN irritated instead of amused. It reminded me of watching “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” for the first time; all the little things were annoying me because I couldn’t stop thinking “Holy shit, I paid $13 to watch a remake of A New Hope.”
I’m genuinely interested in the characters and storytelling, but I just can’t make myself keep playing it. There’s a positive experience here, but I doubt I’ll be making another attempt to find it until either it’s finished or the engine is overhauled.
Final score: Almost playable/10