Recent reviews by Denki Bran

You're kinda required to be well versed beforehand about the stuff the subtext refers to to follow the story at all. This being required, the game feels more like a summary of worldviews you already have to know instead of a fresh take on this groundwork.

I feel like people just dipping their toes in the subject matter will be excluded and not enjoy this, but those knee-deep into it won't find anything new. If you're lucky enough to be in the sweet spot or fine with accepting either of these outcomes then the VN might work for you. The presentation is sick, the soundtrack is great and changing the POV and endings is fun.

Edit:
After being away from my home country for about a month, I found myself half-jokingly referring back to this game's portrayal of "gravity". It ended up being a useful tool/framework I didn't have before; something new.

Extremely fun and memorable all around.

Before this, I hadn't truly experienced a game where you could feel so strongly how carefully everyone involved tried to make their vision a reality. Very rarely do you see a game this incredibly personal be executed at this level of quality.

There are so many tiny design considerations that are genuinely all accounted for, even those that would initially appear like oversights that go against convention. More often than not, conveniences that you would find in adjacent genres were taken out deliberately. Conversely, the things that were put in, such as an extremely hostile save system, obtuse goals, cryptic puzzles, and complicated lore requirements, cannot be taken out without changing the game fundamentally.

The game places full responsibility on the player, to a fault. Since it seems one of the core design principles of the game is to be strictly diegetic, there are no safeguards to prevent oneself from making terrible choices. You can and will likely miss key information, which depending on your overall knowledge of the game at the time, might result in you having to replay the entire thing. No respect for your in-game progress means that there is no real respect for your time either. However, by design, this cannot exist differently. It really has to be like this, or else the game would truly be less.

So with all this in mind, I'm torn! I finished an incredible game that has no analog, but I couldn't say that I enjoyed the process. The amazing set pieces you get to play you can only get to after trudging through the floors for hours. I became so jaded to the game by my own mistakes that I just wasn't able to emotionally connect with what was happening anymore. Obviously, this is my fault, and I wish that I could've interacted with this differently so that I could've gotten more out of it.

There are great puzzles, incredible surprises, and masterful execution. Even so, I just cannot recommend this game to anyone, somehow. Maybe because there's no guarantee that their experience with the game will be a good one. My experience was almost entirely fueled by just wanting to continue seeing more of something I had never seen before. This is probably why the game's gonna stick with me for a long time, despite everything I didn't like.

If you are dead set on experiencing it though, you definitely should. There's nothing similar to this game. Maybe trying this with a friend will help alleviate a lot of the tedium you'll have to subject yourself to. Also, as a general tip, something that will help you is to set yourself clear goals when you're in the thick of it. A clear objective on your mind will make it more likely to not lose what made you begin playing the game in the first place.