How To Date A Magical Girl is a pretty mediocre visual novel at best and a pretty bad horror experience at worst. It's not atrociously bad by any means, but it's not great either. I'm gonna tell you why. Keep in mind this is all my opinion. I can see why others would like this game. (minimal spoilers ahead)

The writing for this game is not stellar by any means, the protagonist is bland and so are the magical girls the game puts so much emphasis on. They're all stereotypical anime tropes and there's not much more to them other than a forced in dark backstory you only discover near the end of the game. There's not much substance to the fight scenes, nor is any of the world building that interesting.

As for the horror, it relies entirely on gore and shock value. None of the main girls die until all of that shock value has worn off, so it doesn't hit hard enough for the player to really feel anything other than "oh shoot, I guess my waifu died." Yes, the gore is really well done, but it doesn't really do enough for someone to feel scared or even a little bit tense. The innocence doesn't last long enough for it to impact you enough like in Doki Doki Literature Club, which this game so desperately wants to be.

My main pet peeve with the game (though this is probably mostly just a 'me' thing) is that even when choosing to play as a girl rather than a boy, the characters will still treat you like a male mc. One NPC even called me "a gentleman," but other than that, the game will refer to the player as gender neutrally as possible no matter which gender you pick. It mostly just makes me question why it even lets you pick at the beginning rather than just keeping your gender mostly a mystery.

One thing I think the game did well in though, is the social sim and time management aspects. It's completely possible to max out your stats and experience everything with each of the girls in one play through, only ever needing you to reload a save once the Magical Girl festival comes around at the very end. But that's also when the game falls flat. The girl you accept will become your girlfriend and you only get one more date with them before the day ends, and it's literally just off screen sex.

The game really falls flat at the end, and not just because of the girlfriend experience lasting less time than it takes for Kaori to call you her "esclave" for the hundredth time. The ending doesn't just suck, it's straight up dumb! (Ending spoilers, skip the next paragraph for conclusion.)

The ending falls flat on so many levels. This is the part where nothing happens at school and then it just decides to finally kill your waifus in more gruesome ways than any of the previous background characters. Then it actually does what it was setting up for, it makes the mc go ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane. It all happens way too fast and it's just death after death and it just feels mind numbing, and not in the way it wants for it to feel. Then the game has the audacity to go "yeah... you were in a coma the whole time! Isn't that soooo crazy?" And it's just feels lazy. There are glitches throughout the whole game, making you think it's gonna go the 4th wall break route, but it didn't give that route enough lolipops, so it has to settle for the coma ending. I just don't like it.

(TLDR) In conclusion, How To Date A Magical Girl is a game that tries to do what DDLC did and completely fall flat on it's face. It had potential to be amazing, but the lazy ending and boring writing squandered that. Overall, I give this game a 6/10.

But also Kaori is best girl and I really like her so it's actually a 10/10