I really want to like this game, and it has a few genuinely clever ideas.

Health pickups doubling as a collectable that you’re rewarded for having a certain amount of at the end of a level creates a unique tension where you don’t want to heal unless you’re above the quota for the level. On top of that, enemies only drop health when you kill them after they lose aggro and run away. This encourages you to be ruthless, and communicates the Dros’ dark fantasy setting brilliantly.

The problem is that the games puzzle design doesn’t evolve much beyond its initial ideas. Every puzzle is a slight variation on sending Little Dros out to an area Captain can’t reach, activating something that lets Captain come through, killing the monsters you had to avoid as Little Dros, then opening another path for Little Dros, rinse and repeat.

When I reached the second world, I was keen to see what new puzzle ideas the game would present me, and the answer was not much. There were new elements like conveyer belts and lava pits, but none of them changed the funadamental puzzle solving enough to avoid it feeling like I was solving the exact same type of puzzles from the first world.

Schlocky but fun haunted house story that punches above its weight with limited visuals and stellar sound design. I felt the tension and spookiness hard the first couple of times, but successive playthroughs unlock goofier dialogue options that kinda highlight just how little most of the choices matter. Hard to tell how many choices actually determine your route/ending without any English guides at time of writing, but most of them seem to only exist for the player to RP as the protagonist. That’s fine on its own, but quite a few dialogue options didn’t even get a unique response from the game/characters in the moment.

I get why it’s considered a classic, and I’m really glad I played it, even if it didn’t blow me away. Definitely worth a look for its historical value if you love the genre. I can see the influence it had on so many other VN’s I love.