Recent reviews by BoxxPup

This game is vile. Absolutely sickening. Like a siren's beautiful song, it lures those unsuspecting into it's jaws only to land the killing blow. Every time I tell myself "I'm only gonna play for about an hour," it turns into a multiple hour expedition because it turns out I have to wait like 10 in-game days for a tree to grow or something and then I need to wait like 10 more days to get the juices out of that tree only to find out I need like 99 more, or I need to reach floor 100 in like 2 different mines because some suave blue guy told me to, or I need to watch the TV on this exact day of the year otherwise I miss out on an entire cooking recipe. Disgusting. If you want to be a functioning member of society, don't play this game.

I've put a bunch of hours into Crush Crush but admittedly its just because grinding takes time. Overall Crush Crush is a decent game to sink your time into whenever you're bored and it has some pretty memorable characters but it isn't anything special. With that in mind, I didn't have very much hope going into Hush Hush but caved when I read reviews saying its worth it (plus the absolutely banging trailer theme which has been stuck in my head).

Let me just say, this game is NOTHING like Crush Crush. I haven't played the other VN by Sad Panda but this definitely is a strong motivator for showing what they're capable of. I'm not too familiar with the mainstream VNs, but the few that I've played before are all extremely linear and have a handful of endings at most. This game blows that out of the water with over 40 different endings and your choices really do matter.

I assume most reviews mention how saving isn't just a liberty, but a requirement. Unless you're gifted with the RNG of the Gods, you're guaranteed to run into at least a few game overs. It can be extremely tedious having to start over from the very beginning because you have to change where you allocated points on day 1, or because you should've gone to this location instead of that one like 10 days ago. This got to a point where I really felt like I wanted to stop playing and wait for a guide to come out just because of how impossible it seemed to remember everything, but I ended up caving in and by some miracle I was able to get to the very end, at most only having to reload saves made earlier the same day.

Every hour, every cent I put into this game, it all felt like it was unfair because of how incredible of an experience it was. It certainly does have flaws here and there, like the voice lines sometimes coming out sounding oddly low quality, the music either not fitting the mood perfectly or simply being much louder than the voicelines, and occasionally voicelines not matching up with the text. However, I'd imagine these are all very minor fixes and aren't actually directed towards the finished product since it really is a masterpiece. The VAs all did phenomenal with making this game feel alive, and although it can admittedly be a little distracting at first having different voices noticeably sound like they used different mics and recording environments, it was pretty easy to ignore after a while. I'll admit that for a series I first got into for the 18+ content, it reached a point where I didn't even care about that anymore and I was purely invested in the story.

In the end, Sad Panda has exceeded my expectations beyond what I thought was possible, and this miraculous storyline is one that I won't soon forget.

I may not have put a lot of hours into the game on PC, but this game was my life years ago