I’m glad that people connected with Charlotte later on, but I miss something that got lost since this first game. May sound typical for this kind of RPG maker games, but to me the game is entirely about the peculiar and imaginative perception of the world from Charlotte’s view in videogame language.

If I’m allowed to make a guess, I’m pretty sure that most people who grew up with videogames being quite present in their lives have dreamt in videogame terms (specially as children, but also as adults), even daydreaming about them. Something similar must have happened with cinema and TV (camera angles, cuts and such being present in dreams and even when recalling memories) and Hello Charlotte has a lot of this new influence on perception. Her imaginary friend is someone never present that may seem (and may be) a fourth wall breaking reference to the player or just her thinking that she’s a videogame character. The multiple deaths act more as what ifs, what if the world ended if I touch this, what if the scary bear impales me. It may seem insensitive to think about these images, but to me it’s kind of liberating from the perspective of Charlotte, just her letting her mind express herself and experiment knowing that a bad end can always be rewinded.

What’s interesting about the mixed perception between videogames and real life is the point that I miss in the next two games. This perception happens (partially) as a way to connect very designed, even standardized simple rules and the bigger complexities of the real world. Think about little kids asking about “who are the good and bad guys” like if everything was a cartoon, not out of bad intent, but to try and grasp something unknown to them on their terms. The first Hello Charlotte is a quite well achived abstract adventure in the conventional sense with a lot of personal quirks in its presentation that lets glances at Charlotte’s deepest worries. If I’m allowed to take a picky example, Episode 2 represents Charlotte social troubles in school through RPG Maker standard combats. The first game is the imagination running free while still being inevitably attached to who Charlotte is and her life, the second one feels like a failed attempt to represent social anxiety in those terms, ignoring both the way that is really perceived and how the imagination tries to make some sense out of it.

My biggest shame is that the dreamy yet way less abstract influence in the next games does come occasionally incredibly close to my dreamy perceptions, apart from the cinema and videogames presence. The mix between everyday places with something always off, but something that seems normal unless you stop to think about it, and the meaning that such small changes carry (like everything about the school structure, for instance think about how the way to it requires the students to take a mortal drop into a mattress, a process that makes sense but only under a specific non sensical logic). In some way, a perfect match about videogames' constant failures at replicating reality by nature and yet the convincing sense that their obvious fakeness brings. I appreciate the attempts to try to have more focused thematic ideas later on, but while I never found my footing in those, I always yearned for that more natural expression of intuition from the subconscious. Charlotte lets herself see without noticing while dreaming of being herself.

i find myself endeared to this weird glitchy surreal world, with its opaque theology and its cutesy inhabitants. i really love the art style, and all the individual images that come up during bad endings or cutscenes.

there are frustrating moments, for sure. save as often as you possibly can, because you never know when you'll examine something and immediately die. opened the wrong door? immediate death! i don't mind that sort of thing, once i know it's that type of game. additionally, there's a maze with a bunch of enemies with random movement patterns, and if they touch you you have to start over from before a scene where you need to select the right dialogue options, but it's just that one area so keep pressing on. i recommend looking up a guide (there's one on steam for ep1 and ep2, just have that open if you start feeling annoyed, it's very light on spoilers).

should you play this game? if you've played and enjoyed yume nikki and the games it inspired, and you find yourself drawn to the art style, absolutely. if you played nier automata and were delighted by ending k, absolutely. if you grew up in the newgrounds/deviantart/invader zim/keenspot era, absolutely. plus, it's free, and the other eps are only a couple dollars.

i'm looking forward to playing the rest!

Mostly just settled at a lukewarm for me throughout most of it. It had a pretty strong sense of atmosphere and I liked the OST a lot, plus there were a couple scenes I really liked, but didn't really have much outside of that: The main relationship between Charlotte and Felix felt really scarce for how much weight the game puts on it, the meta elements feel really on the nose (having me supposed to be a character in the game really loses it's impact when I have such a rigid set of things I can do), and while I can't say this is these are the worst puzzles I've seen in a RPGMaker game (thank u the crooked man) it's certainly up there. I was mostly ambivalent about the art or the particular writing style. Game got a couple chuckles out of me, which is more than most games I guess.

I really hated that ending tho.