~ Estimated Reading Time: 4 min ~
[ maybe self explanatory from the game itself, but i do have to mention abusive relationships, self harm and edgy shit. etc.]
Was talking to a friend blind reacting to this game, and they immediately latched onto the video game-y way that you can do something horrible to Ame, for her stats to only take a mild dent in response to it. The toy-ish way that you play with her to get a reaction out of her - as one usually does in these choice-based ending-collectathons - ends up depicting in a non-sequential chain the shit ppl in co-dependent relationships put each other through out of abusing their partner's reliance. Every ending is where it should've ended, but we're aiming for 100%
I like that you can't earnestly dialogue with Ame; only being able to reply to her with vague emoticons that can never truly match in meaning to her lengthy mentally ill tangents. Due to the game forcing you to reply to her consistently regardless, it locks the player into this insincere mindset of arbitrary meaningless replies. It goes to some real lengths to put you in the mind of a serial "ok" text replier.
Where the game will live or die for most people is if they can stomach its rancidness. A lot of my favourite stuff here is the long texts and Twitter priv rants Ame leaves. The sincere insincere stream of consciousness venting out insecure paranoia - the writer shows a lot of humility for outing that they can think these things. I guess that's why the game doesn't work for me when Ame's interiority can't be felt. giiiiirl there are so many endings where she cheats on you and fucks a man!!! This is confronting a different type of person from me. Her character folds to the whim of the game's shock value, and they're willing to take some aggressive jumps in her believability for the bit. That's why any attempts the game does to "critique" her doesn't land right, she has to be representing something real for her to be critiquing something. Give Ame personhood or the suffering means nothing
Anyways, if you asked me if I liked the "gameplay" of this, I'd easily say no. This is not a well playing Princess Maker-like, and that's okay - if the game was sincerely fun, it'd probably clash with the blasted tone. But does it make sense to recommend this as a cool miserable experience if I also think it's a shallowly miserable experience? I at least can't say that it wasn't worthless time spent personally; way too much stuff is packed into this one. The localizers also do a lovely job of elevating this one into feeling like an accurate period piece of post-monetization internet culture. If you played this when it came out, it was right in the middle of the storm of the internet breaching reality - when all the old people got addicted to their phone during COVID, and you started hearing words like "Qqnon" in real life. So it felt natural but awful to play something I bought on my fuckin nintendo console that used cutting edge month old social media slang. This game has fresh, authentic haven't-listened-to-lil-b people spamming "based" in a twitch chat
There's a wrist slitting mini-game in this. Calling this a sexploitation game feels apt; there were times playing this I was angry that I was obviously supposed to jerk off to it, and times I was perversely excited about its existence. It's the dirty tap water you have to drink to find fresh discussion of new age internet psychosis, I guess. I do find its expanding franchising a little disgusting - exacerbated by the aesthetic commodification going on surrounding it. I'd only recommend this to curious adults who could process what it's going for, but it's instead found its audience with weirdcore tiktok teens being exposed uncritically to 2000s saya no uta lolicore scenes. Weirds me out to think about how genuinely successful this was; the kitschy music videos they made for this are actual chart-toppers in Japan.
Its time capsule-rawring 2020s grossout artifacting feels bound to be buried and dug back up every twenty years for the rest of time. It'll be even more fringe for the kids who didn't live through it
anyways check this song out its p good