A new version of Afterschool Tag? Count me in!
Or so I thought.
There are some improvements : the "day" part is funny, allows you to meet the girls and build up your expectations for the night, and gives you a story (not that well thought sadly). The art is also a bit more interesting in my opinion, though the sex scenes are less enticing.
The map is really interesting. Between the various corridor ends, the teleport, the elevator, the usefull background elements and the more complex rooms, it really looks like a labyrinth in a nightmare. It's great.
On the plus side, two of the monsters can be avoided through minigames, giving you more control on what's happening.
However, all of this amounts to nothing compared with the biggest issues : difficulty and RNG.
I am one of the few that thought Afterschool Tag's difficulty was ok. It was just hard enough to give you a real challenge, to the point that I came back to play it numerous times and still had difficulty finishing it every attempt. But it was beatable.
This one is not.
For one, heals are extremely rare, and considering it's the most important item in the game, it's making it really difficult. How many you manage to stumble upon will decide whether you win or die.
Then you have the exhaustion : if you are too busy running to keep track of you stamina, it reaches 0 and then you cannot run until it's fully refilled. Translation : you're dead.
The enemies are far more difficult, as there is next to no way to counter most of them, even if you understand their mechanic.
And more than anything, they can all complement each other to the point where you see your death coming and can't do a thing. Even if you know the map and every enemy by heart.
I'll explain in detail here so spoiler alert if you don't want to know how the ghosts work.
So it's not that the game is hard. It's that it is unfair. Even if you're fully prepared, there are too many combinations of girls that will result in an instant loss of one of your 3 precious lives. Many of the girls are impossible to outrun, and hiding is nearly impossible. You need skill to even have a small chance of winning, but ultimately luck WILL be the only deciding factor.
With a more balanced gameplay, a better ending and maybe the possibility to get some sexy time during the day, it could have been the absolute best game in this category. Right now the game is SO frustrating that, despite its beauty and clever ideas, it doesn't deserve more than 2/5.