bro this game was so tense?? they absolutely nailed this oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere, to the point where I was reluctant to play it late at night for fear of being TOO wound up to sleep afterwards. plughole's appearances were always a breath of much needed levity for me. as a coward, maybe this is a biased experience. also, as a coward, you could not pay me to play the abyss route.

my consistent feeling of unease while playing was encouraged by my deep attachment to the cast. they were all multifaceted, carrying their own sympathetic motivations and deep-rooted flaws and personalised brands of Idol-Industry-And-Media-Representation Trauma. i didn't want any of them to be the attacker. even when i started noticing some signs of the culprit early on, i allowed myself to live in denial during the whole internet troll arc. "it can't be them", i would say, putting on my clown shoes, "because there's no way they'd avoid getting any blood on their clothes." the ultimate reveal was appropriately heartbreaking and i care them. i care them so much.

while i thoroughly enjoyed the plot and characters, the gameplay itself was a slog. i loved scrolling through phater and despairing at how tragically realistic it was, but aside from that, the communication sequences were rough, and that's coming from someone who followed a guide religiously. the pacing almost always slowed to a crawl at these points, which created this bemusing stop-and-start pace as we moved back and forth between communication sequence and traditional visual novel. given the trial and error nature of these sequences, i don't envy those determined to play the game blind.

that aside, i still believe this game is incredibly underappreciated. among the positives i've already mentioned, it's stylistically beautiful, and do-yoon is a fantastic protagonist. i might never recover from the emotional trauma <3

please for literally one second stop talking about your smart watches and other inane shit. there's a dead body in front of you!

i only played the A route. you could not pay me to sit through another 10 hours of the most braindead Big Brother dialogue or sit through the most uneven pacing in the B route. it'll be the most high octane edge-of-your-seat thriller for like half an hour and then its just people talking about their bands and how the other staff hated them or past contestants for like 3 hours!

such a frustrating read man honestly dont bother, go read Root Double it's literally just this

I came into this game with practically no knowledge, it looked vaguely similar to Danganronpa which I enjoyed so I just kind hopped in on a sale. What Buried Stars turned out to be was a Korean visual novel with some semblance of Danganronpa's mechanics, but it's own interesting story.

Basically, you play the role of one of the top contestants in a show sharing the same name as the game where the goal is to essentially raise the most hype and votes from fans. However, in an accident the show's stage collapses trapping the top 5 inside, and you are forced to uncover what happened and why while keeping your sanity through the whole situation. At first, I felt the game moved quite slowly, and I still maintain that it does take a while to pick up. This is exacerbated by the fact that your first playthrough will always end in a predetermined way. Thus, you have to play through up until that point again where you can take a different route to a more fulfilling ending.

That last point gets at my major complaint with this game, its quality of life. The game is structured to be played multiple times for different endings, but lacks the ability to: see what dialogue you have already encountered or is unchanged (let alone skip it), know where the story diverges into different routes, jump freely to different points in the story, etc. This makes for a lot of guesswork if you like to play games blind like I do. I ended up using a guide to figure out how to get the different routes, and I would recommend you do to if you plan to try the game.

That all said, Buried Stars actually had surprisingly good writing and convincing characters. Once I got a good chunk through, I started to notice the intricacies of each character and explore them by conversing on some of the optional topics. During that time, you can also check the in-game social media app to see if people are talking shit, worried, etc. which really adds to the atmosphere. I enjoyed how the plot unfolded as well, my only complaint is that there was not a very big difference between the way the two main routes of the game play out.

Buried Stars is worth a shot on a considerable discount, but as I said I strongly recommend using a guide due to the sometimes annoying play experience.