Fuck around and find out is the prerogative of this game, and honestly it's really fun to do so.

The Narrator is just so entertaining, whoever voiced him should be given a medal. His sheer confusion and panic and varying levels of hostility to the player is really fun to sit through, elevating this walking simulator to a good time.

Plus, it can get really damn clever. I'm surprised at how many ideas there were for this game.

Flat Eye is a little shopkeeping/visual novel hybrid, covering themes of technology, capitalism, and identity. The shopkeeping is chill and satisfying, executes nicely upon most of the building/management conventions you'd expect, with an interesting added layer of supply-lines that must me hooked up to one another to keep things working.

The visual novel side, however... fuck. The writing is insufferable. I'm a queer person who is in love with a queer person and surrounds myself with queer people. But when I look at a little tumblr ass red nose lookin character strolling into my shop and I think to myself "Yeah they're gonna be nonbinary arent they" and then they are, and they start soapboxing about fatphobia and patriarchy, it's like. Yeah buddy. I know. Find a more interesting/nuanced way to say it. It's just full of tactless cringe like that. It's the most twitter adorkable millenial version of identity politics, satirical writing, and pseudo-black-mirrory situational drama. And it's all pretty much unskippable, like you have to interact with all these dorks to keep the game moving. I had to drop it because of this. It's a bummer that in your game about how human interaction has more value than capital - your capital-building simulation is good and your human interactions are fuckin annoying.

Whatever your first impression is, that the art is gorgeous, that the subject matter is alarming, or that the story is not as grandiose as other AliceSoft games I highly recommend giving Dohna Dohna an honest chance. It had had many surprisingly thoughtful moments, and I have the sense that the authors cared about what they were writing.

The cyberpunk elements are light, but the theme addresses certain niches within the genre (eg. the commodification of human life) in a stand-out way. What most holds it back is that due to a strained development history, certain plot threads weren't fully developed. But this is a character driven game over a plot driven game, and the character writing is still top notch.

Also, the localization is amazing. I've talked to Shiravune's loc producer, and he has such a deep understanding of this work and made some perfect choices. It's extremely faithful and preserves meaning of subtle details.

The game gets better with each playthrough, you'll notice more and more small things that foreshadow or call back to certain developments, and things take on new meaning. It's pretty meticulous and I constantly notice new character details!

It's one of the most polished eroge ever, in the UI, the gameplay flow, and overall design. On a first playthrough, the difficulty is just right IMO. The music is full of bangers in a variety of EDM genres. It's relaxing (despite being emotionally challenging at times) and a great 'white noise' game.

Those coming for a fun cyberpunk-lite rebel romp with vanilla H will find it, but those coming for something darker will also find it, and a player is free to choose to what degree they engage with that content. NSFW can also be turned off if you want, but...

I'd recommend a playthrough where you don't raise any heroine's feeling level at all until first getting their bad ends in the second half. It changes their Feeling events in such a way that shows its true morally salient character as a game about this type of violence. Some of it is surprisingly gentle and left me speechless. Even though these scenes are difficult to access, I encourage people to read them before making final judgments.

Violent scenes in this game are usually written from the perspective of the victim and focus on their emotional experiences, which is probably the most important thing to keep in mind. Some things, for example, an instance where a character was written as basically dissociating, and an abuser was written in a realistic way, gave me pause. Characters struggle with a lot of authentic PTSD related emotions that I was personally able to recognize, and they are told compassionate and healing things.

FWIW, the moral argument is not that 'its not that bad because there are worse people doing worse things', and certainly not that 'SV is okay.' instead, it presents a cycle of violence and raises questions about the factors which perpetuate it and why someone would be capable of such a thing. The one clear thing it does is condemn abuse, but it leaves the reader to ponder it's events and the meaning of them

They aren't ALL perfect, and it IS ero... but genuine effort was made (that didn't have to be), and I really appreciated it. In fiction, a reader can explore their emotions about these topics in a safe and controlled way to ask themselves tough questions. Stories are one way obfuscated issues like abuse can be brought to light. The medium does not effect the value of that message, and I also think that a whole work can be both serious and enjoyable, and that the two are not mutually exclusive.

The explicit scenes highlight the discrepancy between the abusers selfish, lustful acts of domination and degradation and the victims experience of extreme trauma, the lack of empathy that makes something healthy, safe, loving rather than violent. These scenes are contrasted pretty expressly with the consensual scenes.

The heroines own trauma usually directly calls into question the type of abuse their clan is involved in through Kuma, and he tries to show them compassion while at the same time ruining the lives of others, and its a compelling point of conflict.

Both sides of the game work together perfectly when all of the content is experienced, so don't skip it! It's my favorite work of fiction ever, it genuinely suprised me, and i will never forget it.

If you're interested in what I touched on, I wrote this essay that elaborates on it:
https://fuwanovel.net/2023/08/why-dohna-dohna-matters/

There isn't any way I can separate this game from my own extremely personal emotional investment in it and I don't particularly want to air all of that out in public forum for strangers' viewing pleasure, so I'll keep it short:

Lobotomy Corporation's subject matter and primary themes are particularly pertinent to my own life and the kind of person I am, and in that regard it's the story I've been searching for for as long as I've been alive. I've never seen my own point of view on the matter reflected so clearly and wholly before.

It's a laborious experience, but a worthwhile one.

Unreasonably cruel by design, completely decrepit and crusty as an entirely grounded virtue, and still earnestly unplayable no matter how much I or it tries to justify that as part of its core thesis. And that's soooo cool. The surface levels of its completely aware corporate, deterministic, and hellish analogues for depressive and nihilistic thought that you quite literally ascend out of is MORE than worth the thorns, but not for me. Nope. I got several days in before the realization that metagaming would be an encouraged straight-faced requirement and that's when I knew I would never get through this without hotkeyed console commands every single day so I committed the immutable sin of just... watching/reading my way to victory. Sorry! My "reviews" are glorified blogposts anyway, so it's nothing new. And I personally just don't accept this kind of design altogether, especially in the later days of this game.

I still hold so much respect for it though, both in terms of encapsulating such a stark but brutally real depiction of life through its particular lens, and grounding it all in such a way that all of the complex layers can be easily peeled back to the same pathos core. Kind of difficult to dance around a lot of the elements here without spoiling, there's quite a few character cuts that go for the throat on various levels of "how does one find that strength to continue" here that I'm going to think about a lot. I couldn't delve that much into the detail anyways, I've lived privileged, I have not been in the depths of darkness that walk the hallways here. I will say as my single form of criticism to the story that its philosophical quandaries aren't exactly hitting high above the clouds, and I don't mean that in terms of vs. philosophy I mean that the highest highs here don't hit so hard, another victim of the gameplay making you largely senseless to it but also because the pacing kind of crams some of that in all at once.

On the other hand, the music mmmmmmmmmm. Awake in Death, When It Rains, Second Trumpet are incredible. The aesthetic is lovely too, with immaculate detail that's super suitable. If nothing else I'm committed to anything Project Moon comes up with (god I'm really going to get another gacha huh) simply for its irrefutable direction over every single one of its elements, even if this game is barely managing to make its initial mechanical concepts meet by sheer tedium.

To sort of address a last elephant in the room, I'm not going to say that if you are curious you should go down the same path as me. You will ABSOLUTELY most certainly be filtered at some point to like, 90-95% of the people I know who read the shit I write, but you should try to persevere as far as you can. I think at the least everyone should like, TRY, this, to understand the full scope of what the fuck Lobotomy Corporation has in store for you.

lend me 50,000 yen

aesthetically very reminiscent of jrpgs of its contemporary from the late 90s with a cool as fxck aesthetic ala racing lagoon. chapter select is depicted as dj deck cant get any cooler than that. the way the assets are put together throughout the vn with the portraits of the characters, backgrounds, and dialogue placed/layered throughout the screen gives off the feeling of a real time evidence board mixed with surveillance recordings; fitting for a story about solving crimes. plot being broken up by cases with an accompanying evidence report chapter is a good way for the story to maintain mystery while also delivering just enough information so the player isn't too lost. it is almost like the player themselves is also a detective trying to figure it all out. it got to the point where i became one of the characters with how seamless i would wake up and log on to the computer to read my emails and feed my pet turtle. dialogue got me actually laughing out loud and the ost is effective. however, its age shows with how clunky the controls were during the exploration and puzzle bits which took a bit to get used to but became second nature eventually. i welcomed how slow the game was sometimes but i do understand that it is not for everybody. imperfect game but the imperfect can be considered perfect by virtue of its imperfection (lol) so thank you Grasshopper Manufacture Inc. recommend if u wanna be cool tho cuz only cool people played this game

𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐔𝐑𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐔𝐌𝐀𝐍 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐀𝐁𝐈𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘, 𝐀𝐍𝐘𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐍 𝐁𝐄𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐀 𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐓.


There's a cheapness in the thrill of being on the verge of death. Risking something as valuable as life itself just to get a kick out of it is really the dumbest thing a human can do; then why is that an hour in I was feeling that exact same rush? In the cold comfort of it being fictional, having my heart pound with excitement as I put these people in harm’s way, there’s nothing quite like it.

The thing about Your Turn To Die is that the premise in of itself isn’t really unique. Completely ignoring the obvious comparisons one could make to that one video game franchise with the talking bear, “death game” as a genre is something that’s existed long before many of us were even alive. That is exactly how this game deceives you, making you think that what you’re about to experience is a by-the-numbers tale you’ve experienced many times before; but to chalk up Your Turn to Die as that is to box it in a cage that’s completely ignorant of the bigger picture. Because underneath this game’s bleak atmosphere is a tale of the exploration of the human condition, as it’s seeking an answer for why we do the things we do by putting us on the cusp of death. In a way, it's exactly what you've come to expect from experiencing the contemporaries of this sub-genre yet that's why this game works as well as it does, why it's willing to go the extra mile.

The level of deception this game operates on isn’t just something that exists in regards to the way of how it presents itself to the player or the narrative in of itself, it extends to game mechanics themselves. Whereas one could see the way every choice in Chapter 1 being inconsequential as cheap, I view it as a mockery of your abilities. To fully make you realise just how out of your depth you are here, which only serves to make the later chapters hit as hard as they do due to the newfound resolve you earn at the end of Chapter 1 earns you the right to change the course of the game both narratively and mechanically. It’s character development in the truest sense, where the effects are felt in also how you play the game, as second guessing becomes natural for you; it's not out of need to survive yet due to a want to protect those you hold closest to you, even if it means not having complete faith in them.

The character of Sara Chidouin in many ways feels combative against many other protagonists who’ve been placed in similar situations to her. It’s the same old tale of heroism, morality and hope. Trying to be an example even in the roughest of times yet Chidouin is deeply human. “I don’t want to die” is understandable sure, but sprouting up the same old message about “truth” seems to feel redundant when it’s going to deeply hurt the ones you care for. This is why Keiji Shinogi works so well with her, easy to see him as this game’s stand-in for a Maya Fey archetype, a policeman who can’t even hold a gun, but here the effectiveness of these two depends solely upon how much trust they place in each other. Their trust weaponizes itself, as it takes Sara being the finger and Keiji ironically being the gun in their dynamic to let them move past any difficulty they may face, and they may have faced, letting them grow with each passing argument. With the arguments themselves being mechanically comparable to the trial segments in Ace Attorney. While not as complex or difficult, it sets itself apart with it’s own mechanics, trying to bite further down into your mind as it makes every line thrilling. It’s exactly what the character of Sara Chidouin would do, and that’s what sets this apart from the rest. That every lie, misinformation, contradiction and even truth the itself is irrelevant; it’s completely irrelevant if she can’t even save one life.

Your Turn To Die breaks down those concepts of heroism, morality and hope I mentioned, but not out of cynicism. It goes to greats lengths to reconstruct them from the ground up; showing why such childishness and stubbornness is necessary for you to keep moving forward. Everyone’s got a reason to live and with each passing trial you have to wonder if death would be preferable, if it’d be better if you died in their place to make sure your hands stay clean, but thoughts like that are irrelevant. You still live, you still breathe, you still eat, you still sleep, so what’s the harm in living in another day?

It’s not Your Turn To Die. Not yet.

It would be disingenuous to review this without first prefacing that the finale is not present at the time of this review. So why, then, would I recommend an unfinished game? Your Turn to Die: Death Game by Majority truly answers the question of, "What if Danganronpa... was good?" The story feels like it has actual weight, in no small part because of the multiple route splits and chances to just lose characters. The minigames are fun and creative, and the "trials", while clearly heavily inspired by Ace Attorney, have their own sense of self and style. The graphics are also incredibly charming, and the music(while sometimes poorly looped) is quite catchy. It's not too long, and I definitely recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the concept.

Remarkably complex and deceptively engrossing, Chinese Parents is a unique experience. Life Sim and visual novel, mixed with light puzzle elements, training your child to ace their Gaokao is very fun throughout. It also is a great window into Chinese culture and what childhood and teenage years are like, of course masked by several game mechanics.

The game has several issues here and there. Although it's great the game has a translation now, and most of it is fantastically done, some parts are hit and miss. The odd typo or poor translation shows in terms of clunky sentences, or just outright bad English; some references or situations may go completely over your head because of their nuance with Eastern culture mixed with a bad translation. There's also gameplay differences between playing male and female children, and while this isn't inherently bad, playing a girl is way easier (at least in my experience) than playing a boy, particularly related to the dating mechanics, which are much more restrictive on the male side of the things.

This being said, the game is worth it despite the rough edges. The unique experience of a really solid life sim - which are few and far between - is a joy. And the game features generations of kids, so you can move into a NG+ starting as a newborn again. Each run is always a little different, because of generational skill enhancements, family income differences, and learning the mechanics or taking a different route in a new playthrough, giving hours of additional gameplay to be had.