Thirty-two loops, two and a half hours, two endings. Holy shit, that was fun. Took a while to figure out which things needed to be repeated in what order to unlock the stuff I knew damn well was there, because it followed from what I'd already uncovered, but I eventually got the hang of it. Still, the good end is absolutely wild, and refreshingly bizarre.

Unbound sprites are wildin'.

Manna for Our Malices is a Visual Novel that's a mashup between generic high school anime setting, X-files style conspiracies, and Groundhog Day time loops - and I think it's interesting enough that it managed to succeed in spite of itself. A "delinquent" girl is murdered on her way home from school, only to find out she's repeating the same day over and over. She investigates the paranormal occurrences around her in an attempt to stay alive. Getting criticisms out of the way: First, the art is bad. Really bad. Second, the dialogue and characterizations, especially of the main character, are unrelatable and unbelievable. That said, the dev did a decent job of taking sci-fi/occult themes that are common in western entertainment (esoteric secret societies, cold-war type government experiments into physic powers, extra-dimensional alien entities) and applying them in a different setting (Japanese high school). I like the time loop mechanic, encouraging you to make slightly different choices on each loop so you can eventually solve the puzzle. It took me just under 3 hours to reach the good end. If you can tolerate the art and look past the cringy dialogue, you might just find the underlying story and looping, clue-hunting gameplay surprisingly entertaining.