Well…
Carl: It is the route that I liked the least, it is very stressful and I can understand that that is the intention but the ending is not satisfactory, you can tell that it was the first route they did, making it look low quality at times.

Jenna: I enjoyed this one more and in this route we do sympathize more with Jenna and understand her points of view, what I didn't like was that it won't contribute anything new and will try to conclude many loose ends feeling rushed, it is entertaining but not as shocking as the others.

tj: poor him, the people who first chose the cat did not expect it, here he theorized that Chase's true personality is shown here and what he is capable of committing the same atrocious acts (if we assume that it was he who killed to Sydney).

flynn: this route is crazy, compared to jenna's route here there are too many themes but it is well balanced so that the ending leaves you in shock, in the epilogue seeing Chase at the most depressing point of all the routes is very melancholic and poetic, an otter without soul and identity.

Leo: this is my favorite, it is the first one I chose when I played it and the one that impacted me personally, this game caught me by surprise making the same mistake in Leo's bad ending, accepting that we will not be able to help a loved one with our love and having to abandon it so it doesn't do more damage, it hurts.

Yeah a lot of text...

Obviously, playing enough 18+ gay furry visual novels would inevitably eventually result in me unknowingly playing one which is basically just porn. Which this is.

There's still definitely more going on here than just the sex that happens in it, horrorbuns is a great illustrator and there's some good drama and character writing in and surrounding the bar, which makes me interested in what they could do without quite as much of a focus on the sex, but this is still, like, 60-70% porn by weight lol. Was hoping itd be a little more Kyell Gold and have eroticism as a theme in the beginning to get people interested and then be focused more on the sport and the romance/drama between the leads as it goes on, but ah well, at least it's got some of it, it's short anyways. Read if you want gay furry porn I guess!

If Echo was emotional catharsis that was paced out over a tense 30 hours, Arches is an unrelenting 5-6 hour panic attack. Arches has some of the most grueling, devastating, genuinely upsetting horror that I've seen in any piece of media and a lot of it is only further exemplified by how non-stop it is. Arches doesn't have brakes for quieter lighter moments like Echo did and is just more visceral in general when it comes to its descriptions and subjects it tackles, to the point that the content warnings and trigger warnings are to be taken even more seriously than Echo's were. If Echo was a difficult read and you had to stop playing it because of how grim and screwed up it got, do not play this game. Even for somebody like me, there was a point reading this where I would almost describe the writing as unhinged, almost close to teetering over the line of excess and being genuinely too much. There's a couple spots where I think I was worried for the writer himself and am actually hoping he's doing okay, because holy shit, some of the stuff in here is the kind of stuff that you can't just make up on your own.

And yet somehow despite being the most graphic and upsetting of any of the Echo Project titles, Arches might have managed to come out in the end with the single most resonating message across the Echo Project games. Getting there is painful and difficult, and it's... just kind of part of the point? While I think I still probably prefer the larger cast and scale of Echo and just the feelings I got from the entirety of playing through that package, Arches has a much more clear defined point to it that not only satisfies and hit home in a way I wasn't expecting for this story, but also serves to make a grander point across all three of the games taking place in the setting (Echo, The Smoke Room, and this). While the material here is harsh and brutal to get through, if it's something you can stomach and have played Echo before this, this is a worthy sequel in a thematic sense that I wasn't expecting to nail the landing as hard as it did, and I probably will be incapable of not thinking about it for months on end like I was with Echo.

Forks in the road. Divides in life. Choices that can change everything, for now, just like they always have.

There's a certain point early on in Arches that made me fully realize what Arches was really all about, when Cameron finds a irrational rationalization for his mental illness, for his struggles he found so much strife and loathing for in life.
It's when that happened that it really fully hit me that this wasn't just a sequel or a rehashing of Echo (like I deep down feared it might be) but it was a rumination of the post-Echo writing experience, an exploration of how writing Echo made things worse, and, I think most importantly, how to move on from something like that.

Or, how you can't.

The good thing that Arches does that Echo did so well is to make it somehow relatable? There's a lot of very specific and, I imagine, personal experiences being drawn into Arches that I definitely don't have experience with (I have never done shrooms.. yet) but it's the way that Howly is able to write these things to make them understandable. How he is able to turn a trippy experience of looking into the future, past and present and seeing things accordingly into an experience that gives me a sort of deeper look into myself and my own psyche is just, fucking incredible. I resonated a lot with Arches, I found a lot of weird comfort in Arches, and I found a lot of hurt in Arches.
I really enjoy Arches' writing (and by extension, Howly's writing), and I really can't wait to read more.
Also pls Howly I hope you're doing at the very least OK

The other aspects of Arches are really fucking good too, Paintfox on the cg's and sprites was fucking incredible, the BG's were really good and Anthemics blows it out of the water with the soundtrack, so much so that I'm buying it as soon as I'm able to.

Arches may be a short, rough and tough read, but if you're interested in a sort of closure to Echo, then definitely read this. It comes to terms with the entirety of Echo as a concept in a way that really feels satisfying and, well, closing.

(But yeah it can get really hard to read sometimes, and also these are a little sliver of thoughts that I've had in this first read of Arches. I definitely want to read through it again, my rating might go lower, but it definitely emotionally hit me. Good stuff!

Arches is a game about suffering. Deep, horrible trauma that sinks its claws into you and threatens to tear you at the seams. It expands on what Hell is for people. For Chase, it was Echo itself, and the tragedy that broke his already jagged friend group. For Sam, it was the betrayal of his trust, the seed he unwittingly and unwillingly planted in the mine.

For Cameron and Devon, two lovers visiting the almost-deserted town, Hell is being unable to let go of the past. Hell is change. Hell is drugs, a dead family member, a fear that one of them will leave the other.

Hell is a town named Echo, and it breaks people.

But you don't have to be another victim. If you fight, if you trust, if you hope that something can pull you out into the light... that's something to hold onto. God dammit, hold onto that hope like it's the last thing you can do, because it very well could be.

jesus fucking christ howly


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writing's less tight moment-to-moment and i have a hunch that the hard pivot to psych horror with only a bit of psych drama left might result in this leaving not as lasting of an impression as echo, but still very good and an essential play for psych horror vn fans and especially echoproject fans. lots of super indepth and uncomfortable descriptions here as always from howly, and the music and CGs add a lot to the experience as well

ironically, might be better than echo for onboarding non-furries lol. considering this completely ditches the slow burn of echo and is also only about 4-5 hours long if you binge it

The fact that Password is a thing that exists in the first place is kind of insane--likely well over 700 thousand words written, and over 100 CGs and sprites drawn by a single person--the scale of this thing compared to how many people worked on it is pretty ridiculous. For how obscure it is, it still strikes me as one of those huge indie passion projects which only come around every once and a while. Password is also a game I can understand the appeal for. But even as someone who fits into the miniscule target demographic of "gay furries who like Zero Escape", I still can't help but feel like it's just not for me.

Currently, Password is still technically under development, but back in February it got its last major story update, and everything from here on out will be polish. So in effect, some of my points may become invalid with time, but I still think I would still have pretty fundamental problems with a version of this with all of my easily fixable nitpicks gone.

My two biggest issues with this VN are its characters and its structure. I just don't really like these characters. Which is a point I admit is entirely subjective: of the people who have read this so far I seem to be in the minority here, but I found most of the main 7 kind of boring or cloying or both. Everyone outside of the main 7 was written well and was interesting to me, so what gives? I think it just comes down to personal preference. A recurring thought as I read this is that "these people don't know each other well enough to be mean to one another". Which admittedly, isn't something everyone wants in a story! But that still doesn't change my personal preferences and my frustration at the feeling like every single person in this friend group save Tyson is just trying to mediate everything and make sure everyone gets along.

The other is with the structure. Functionally, the romance is (mostly) divorced from the rest of the game, so you can see almost all paths of the game romancing only one character. There are minute details here and there that are different, but the general trajectory remains similar. What this ends up doing is making the two parts, the romance, and the rest (what I'll refer to as "the mystery" from here on out, even though it also includes some other stuff), act independently from one another, so bits in one cannot largely influence the other. I think this can probably be done well in some execution, but it is a damn hard needle to thread and I don't think Password got it. So often will a scene be a Romance scene or a Mystery scene with very little interaction between the two--there are exceptions, but I would say that the vast majority are one or the other, especially past the 10-day mark or so on any route. Even more is this evident in the lead up to the true ending: which constituted probably, like, 7 or 8 hours of replaying the VN on other romance paths to trip some flags, and seeing how little changed on the mystery side of things. But from my opinions on the characters, you probably know that I'm mostly playing this for the mystery anyways! So yeah, really didn't like that bit, but I still felt fairly satisfied with how things wrapped up in the true ending so maybe it was worth it?

I feel like I've been overly negative here, there are plenty of good bits in here. But they're parts of the mystery, and therefore basically impossible to talk about without spoiling stuff, so, uhh, take into account that even with these two pretty major issues I'm still giving this game a 6/10? The mystery is mostly pretty good, the small bits of horror are even better, and if you like the Zero Escape games, well, you can tell Uchikoshi was probably an influence. And Dean is cool. I like Dean.

You'll probably like it more if you like all of the characters, though.

probably the most consistently fun multiplayer game in years, and im glad internet society at large has stopped pretending fortnite isnt fun as fuck. granted im saying this as someone who has played... uhh... 548 hours on and off since release? (probably a bad thing)

in a world where every multiplayer game is trying to be HyperCompetitive Metagaming Play 18 Hours A Day to Keep Up With Being Good Enough To Queue For A Game, fortnite sections off its playstyles well enough that a guy like me who just wants to have fun can actually just do that. nobuild continues to be The Way To Play this game, in case you were unaware and queued into the normal mode which is pretty much overrun by sweats lol

this season particularly is great, augments are among the best additions in quite some time, and it finally gives me something good to use gold for lmao. hammers were great too, for the time they were in at least. only iffy additions i think are the Anime Items which were insanely overpowered at one point but i think complaining about that is like complaining about items in mario kart, like come on! its stupid but its fun!

also balancing seemed like much more of an issue for them this time than the last time i remember really playing this game, but i dont know if thats just because i was playing enough to be aware when they vaulted the hammer for like the third time lol. it was still pretty fun though, even when you lose to something stupid its not that hard to laugh it off due to how unserious the whole atmosphere around this game is.

but yeah? tldr? fortnite is fun? and good? excited for the next season

Morbid curiosity got the best of me.

Echo: Benefits is a Carl X Flynn porn fanfic that the people at EchoProject liked enough to make canon. This was written by someone completely uninvolved in Echo's development and you can tell--the characterization of Carl and Flynn are both a little off, and a lot of the internal monologue here doesn't make sense for this point in the timeline (this happens vaguely somewhere in the year before Echo, so I feel like "the old friend group" wouldn't be something Flynn would be thinking about nearly as much). Lots of little weird things that crop up in the writing like that, which makes this not a very good entry to the really tightly written Horror Mystery Psych Drama energy of Echo. But that is not the point of Benefits, the point of Benefits is to be a porn fanfic.

I will give them this, though: Flynn definitely would be the type of dude to suck ass at Dark Souls, and Carl definitely would be the type of dude to say "I'm not gay" 5 minutes before sucking dick