Incredible Worldbuilding offset by a lonely MC with a lonely mission
This game’s setting is awesome. Our MC is working in some sort of purgatory where he needs to help people get over their last regrets and/or final struggles, and over the course of helping these people get over their last regrets, we get to see how he might been made for this of job.
You see, the people he’s helping are in this sort of a purgatory, a place where the only people its residents are able to interact with Shades, ghosts of the imagination, or Remnants, vestiges of the people who failed to overcome the grievances of their past life, and as consequence, became featureless husks of a human being not unlike how you might imagine an autonomous mannequin might look. Cool.
I really enjoyed this initial premise. Seeing the MC interact with the female leads while learning about the rules of this weird, in-between purgatory world was cool and exciting. I really liked how the interactions between and the girls and the MC just “made sense” to me.
For example, often when the MC approaches one of the girls, they might give him shit for a bit before almost immediately opening up to him. In most games, this would come off as tacky and poorly written. In a game about a purgatory world where lost souls are held victim by their grievances and/or regrets, a game where these girls are constantly starved for any sort of actual human contact? Then yes, I would believe the last man on Earth might be desirable at this moment. These girls don’t need a handsome man, they need a friend, and this MC can deliver.
Unfortunately, my praises for this game stop with the worldbuilding and logic behind these interactions. As the game continued, I found myself more and more unsatisfied with each girl’s story and less and less enraptured with this fascinating new setting. Why you might might because? Because I found it such a terribly lonely journey.
All these characters are disconnected and unrelated in such terribly superficial ways that the whole story starts to feel empty at some point. Each girl has her own life and own separate problems all taking place in her own separate delusion. These delusions can’t and don’t really interact with each other in such a way that the MC practically has to be invited into this delusion — consciously or otherwise — to even enter them. No one knows what life this girl is leading within her delusions apart from the girl herself, and even when they do talk with the MC about what’s going on in their delusions, does she really give him any way in which he can participate in them with her? Nope, not really, only in ways where he can pretend to be.
And all that just sucks. It’s incredibly lonely.
So again, from a world-building perspective, it’s very cool to see how these girls come up with these entire worlds to support their fragile psyches relating to their past and how they wrestle with their grievances in real-time. There were some genuinely interesting scenarios going on with these girls.
On the other hand of things, the character side of the whole affair positively sucks. I’m constantly yearning for some meaningful connection and/or developments between the MC and the girls, but that’s almost impossible in a story chronically focused on only being between two people. Girl is having trouble with her peers? Her coworkers? Work? Parents? Doesn’t matter that you know, you can’t even interact or relate to her about these people because they don’t even exist! Awesome, you’re effectively being asked to sympathize with a psych ward patient who’s created their entire own alternate reality, and then you’re asked to pretend like hearing about it is all really cool and exciting to you. Wonderful from a world-building perspective, terrible from a “WHO WOULD WANT TO SUBJECT THEMSELVES TO SOMETHING LIKE THIS?????” Angle.
But yeah, how can you have a world that doesn’t have actual people in it? That just doesn’t make sense to me. It just doesn’t work.
What I think would’ve actually saved this story for me would’ve been to strike some sort of balance between this theme of a ghost-filled purgatory world and what we would expect from a non-make-believe, populated one. Give the MC the power to actually see what these girls are seeing, make their delusions a reality, at least for the player, and then suddenly, we’re not just playing as a character tending to his latest batch of psych ward patients — psych ward patients he secretly hopes to fuck — and instead get to follow the tale of a magical doctor that can enter a patient’s world holistically, giving them the closure and self-satisfaction they deserve with the focus on how their lives had been and not how they are now(purgatory).
I’d much rather see glimpses of what worlds these girls had actually been seeing in this ghost-filled purgatory world rather than suffering entirely through the depression that is these make-believe ones. Could we not at least give the MC the power to actually see what they’re seeing? Actually interact with the people from the girl’s past that might have initially caused these grievances? Because without actually being able to do these sort of things, I, the reader, struggle heavily to relate to these characters trapped entirely in the make-believe. I want to be a part of their world, I want to see exactly what kind of people they’re interacting with within these interactions.
I’m harping on this a lot, but I truly believe getting to interact with the actual people from these girls’ pasts is the difference between sympathizing with these characters and getting tired of them. Like I am now.
Regardless, even this game’s one last hope for a saving grace falls to mediocrity as it’s pioneered by the most annoying, unsympathetic, most unhelpful, aggravating, most flippantly dismissive, inhuman, piece of unadulterated alien waste product that is Mira.
I hate Mira, all my homies hate Mira.
Mira is supposed to be your partner, your helper, the person that helps guide you in this absolutely fucked up world of purgatory. She’s supposed to explains things. She’s supposed to keep to you from getting too lonely and upset with yourself.
But what does she do? SHE DRUGS YOU WITH MAGIC! YOU TRY TO QUESTION HER ABOUT IT? SHE BLOWS YOU OFF! THEN SHE DISAPPEARS! HOW AGGRAVATING AND AWFUL A CHARACTER CAN SHE BE?? SHE’S THIS WAY INTENTIONALLY, BUT GOD! AH! MAN DO I HATE MIRA!
Continuing on with the psych ward patient analogy, our MC is the nice doctor: he gets to know his patients and truly cares. Mira though? She blows her patients off, drugs them to oblivion, ignores their concerns, and tells them to do better. God, she is the worst alien lifeform I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading about.
There is so much miss potential with Mira. She could have solved all my concerns about loneliness and being forced to deal with psych patients by being the MC’s one true friend and coworker. Don’t you think the story would’ve been 10x better if it was about you and a girl born long-long before you working to help lost souls pass on together? And eventually finding peace within yourselves as well? I think that would’ve of been greaat!
But no, Mira is not a human. She’s an Entende(?), a non-human entity that exists in the purgatory to do… things. I’m not sure what exactly she does because part of her schtick is being as entirely unhelpful and unforthcoming as possible with the MC about what she actually does. Super fun character, am I right? She’s an alien, alright! One written entirely too well. I hate her; she’s not relatable at all.
Anyways, there are other characters and entities like Mira, but they aren’t so friendly, so don’t expect any allies in this game. It’s just you and your mental health patients of purgatory! For eternity! Fun, fun.
God, and it makes this game so lonely. 4/5.
TLDR. World and concept is amazing, characters and execution fell flat for me. It’s so close to good though that I’d still recommend it anyways and still found it enjoyable. Your mileage may vary.
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