feels like the dev made this not so much as a fun game but more so as a form of therapy to come to terms with being trans, which is fine. I think It's admirable the developer put time and effort into making a game purely out of wanting to make something personal to them, rather than to please others. as some one who is trans and also was really into yume nikki, I somewhat resonated with some of the things in the game, although I do feel it was a tad melodramatic, even if it being that way could be cathartic. I wouldn't really recommend it unless the idea of playing someone else's diary entry sounds interesting to you.

i think theres something to be said about """"review culture"""" (lets call it that for now) when a 3-min long game that reads like vent art seems to garner attention for some reason

Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?

I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".
But I don't think "cave story sex rpg 2007" (lol) ever tried to be relatable. Its, as others have noted, similar to a page from a personal diary. So why rate it based on how much we cared about it? Do we need to care? It feels to me like that was never the point, or the intention.

Talking about this game feels like seeing a sad, personal comic online and saying that you don't relate. Or looking at a random poem on the bathroom wall and trying to critique it.

If I made such a personal game and then saw people were saying how "it didn't resonate" with them, I'd feel pretty awkward, y'know? Why would it ever?

I'm sure this is 10/10 in a timeline where p5 never released.......

Jokes aside, I think the gameplay and soundtrack are amazing and the visuals are good too. The dialogues are weak, I think it felt a lil' better when there was no voice acting too, maybe I'm bad at judging dialogue but it felt like people reading twitter threads out loud. The dating parts are what bothered me the most, I ended up ignoring them altogether (sidenote I did the golden ticket thing that exists for some reason???) and it turns out the social links affects the ending lol.
It is a pretty fun game to try out though.