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Adorable game, made me tear up with happiness. I'm so happy Maia gets to accept that she is loved. The art is wonderful, the music is beautiful... it's a short, sweet game, just play it! There's even some girls kissing girls! NomnomNami you will always be famous

An adorable game with adorable art, it warmed my heart. That wasn't supposed to rhyme but I guess that's how things go sometimes. Wait that wasn't supposed to rhyme either. I guess I liked this game so much that my brain defaulted to poetry mode lmao

It's been a little while since I played it, so I admit that my brain has lost some of the details - but if it gives you an idea, I played it once many years ago and once one year ago and loved it both times enough to keep playing more games in the series and to subsequently download almost all of the rest of NomnomNami's games. I'm just so happy to see Mochi be the one person (bunny?) that believes Treat is a good person (wolf).

Ohhh, this is SUCH an improvement over racheldrawsthis's first two games!!! (I mean, I haven't played the two games in-between yet, but nonetheless GOD the difference was stark!!!) The writing is so much more mature, the dialogue is so much more naturalistic, the plot is so much better paced! And the art is killer (pun intended)! It's short enough that I shouldn't spoil it, but it all wraps up very neatly and does not disappoint. I should note that for what I assume must be flavor reasons, the name tabs above dialogue boxes are written in hangeul, not romaja, which means that you can't read them unless you know Korean already, and my unfortunately poor memory for Korean names due to relative unfamiliarity meant it took me a bit to figure out which character was who. But you figure it out in time, and it ultimately never poses a major problem to understanding.

Really good, especially for something made in as brief as time as NaNoRenO???? Crazy! The art is great, the fact that the music is original is insane, the story was interesting and the characters were complex... it was a bit reminiscent of the qualities I liked in Herbert West - Reanimator (the original story, not the movie, since the vibe's a little different - but like, without the racism inherent to anything that asshole Lovecraft writes), though I can't explain why without spoilers lmao. Also God Mint is so cute... Pretty much the only flaw I could find is that there are a fairly noticeable number of typos - they don't affect understanding or anything (trust me, I've played many many games where the typos very much DO affect the understanding, and that is definitely not the case here), but they do affect the flow a bit. I saw that the game is still being updated, though, so while the game's already absolutely very good, if the typos in the script were cleaned up I think it'd be pretty much close to perfect! (Genuinely I would help with it for free lmao. My amateur editor heart loves to see great games polished.)

Took me a while to organize my thoughts on this game. Ultimately my opinion is... mixed. I gave it three stars, but I gave Space Funeral three stars, and I think Space Funeral was better than this, so I kind of wish I could give it two and a half... hm.

We'll start with the good. The exploration, the puzzles, the environments - all that's quite fun, and the visuals are very lovely with adorable character art and CGs. (My favorite CG is a photograph mentioned near the end of the game - it's so cute.) Probably my only criticism of the exploration aspect is that the screen is a bit overly dark at times, so it can be kind of hard to see. I love the talking with the books, and slowly trying to uncover the mystery of what's going on piece-by-piece... but unfortunately, therein lies the problem.

The writing.

Now, there are some typos in this game (possibly from translation errors, as this game was originally in Spanish), but I could let those slide pretty well. The main thing I noticed about the story as I played is that most of the characters are rather one-dimensional - Aria is very much the "sometimes-improbably-nice anime girl protagonist" you've seen a thousand times before, Lewin is the the angsty defrosting tsundere kid, etc. Personality-wise, we really don't know much about Aria besides this other than she likes reading books. Reading books is, in fact, what most of her dialogue centers on, to the point where it feels like it's kinda all she's got as a character. But this would not necessarily be a make-or-break thing, so long as the plot was interesting... and this is when we get to the endings.

First of all, as we approached the endings, I noticed that the game was trying so hard to preserve the "mystery" of it all that the dialogue began to get unnatural. I don't think most people speak in sentences like "ever since that day" and "I'd forgotten that part of my past" when talking to people they know, who also know what happened. The end of the game also suffers from some badly-written exposition, with characters explaining things to each other that they're already aware of (why does Aria need to be told that her favorite library, which she visits every day, is ancient and far from the village??), including a literal, actual usage of "as you know" that unfortunately made me laugh because of the extreme context in which it was used. But let's actually talk about the endings themselves. You see, in the most recent, 2.0 version of Aria's Story, three more endings were added... and since the ending guide attached to the walkthrough* mentions that the Normal End and the True End were the only ones in the original, while the two Bad Ends and the Good End were added in 2.0, I feel confident in saying that the game was genuinely better writing-wise in the original version. The Bad Ends and Good End are... boy. Well, it's hard to talk about them without spoiling everything. But Bad End 2 reveals an aspect of a certain magical object that calls into question why the entire premise of the game even happened in the first place, the Good End has... uncomfortable implications about autonomy and free choice that soured the tone, which was clearly intended to be heartwarming and cheerful (and also implies a romance that is both weird for several reasons and directly contradicts a puzzle present earlier in the game based on types of love), and the first Bad End (also known as the Perfect End) actually touches on those implications... but does so by completely going off the rails out of nowhere into the over-the-top Edgelord Zone. While I have some issues with the Normal End and the True End (mainly a choice made by Aria in the True End that I think would have read better story-and-logic-wise if it had been a mechanic of the world she was in, rather than a choice she made - the issues of the Normal End are at least sort of implied to be a bad thing in-universe), the game is much, much more functional and cohesive if one operates only by them, without taking the other three new endings into account.

Overall, it's definitely not the best RPG Maker game I've played, but if you are interested in experiencing the good parts of it, I'd say honestly just play to get the True End, maybe the Normal End (though it's kinda underwhelming), and none of the other ones. Thus, I have placed this game as "middling/up to you" on my ranked list, rather than good or bad.

*What the ending guide doesn't tell you is that in the branches that require you to "answer correctly" or "answer incorrectly", even if you answer two questions right and one question wrong, it will count your answers as "correct" instead of "incorrect". I'm not sure if this operates on majority, or if you have to get all of them incorrect for the bad ending, but I figured I should note that since the endings guide makes no mention of it, and since you have to repeatedly go through numerous scenes over and over if you're trying to get all the endings. I'd like to attempt to save you a little bit of time. Also, even though the guide says that the Normal and True End were the only ones in the original, the bonus room says that the first Bad End was also in the original, so...? I dunno.

Incredible art, in terms of character sprites, CGs, and especially the environments. I don't even know how you do that with an RPG Maker game - it's pretty incredible to look at. The writing's what puts it at middling for me, though - it's got a very interesting premise, but so much of it is deposited in an exposition infodump at the very end, and said exposition dump in either ending also effectively spoils the other ending so there's not as much motivation to get both (and I'm not entirely sure it explains why the protagonist has amnesia, or how the photo got in her pocket). The angel is a very fun character and is probably the second-best thing to the art, though the humor in his dialogue did occasionally feel a bit forced. There were also some spelling and punctuation errors, with one grammatical error near the end that I remember left me a bit confused for a second, but though it can be noticeable it mostly doesn't affect the gameplay experience. Overall, it's definitely not a bad game! I think the execution could just have been better - and since this was the creator's first game made in 18 days for a game jam, I think that's pretty understandable.

Hmm... Really cute idea, I just think it suffered from its length. Even were this game to be extended to just a half hour or the like, I think that would have helped it immensely. As it is, it just feels a bit too rushed... though of course it was made in 24 hours so obviously that makes sense. For 24 hours it's pretty dang impressive! But as a regular game, I'm not sure you 100% need to play it. (Also! Fish having short memories is a myth - I mean, they're shorter than human memory spans, of course, but can still last many days to even months!)

I played this game a long time ago and don't recall the details very well, but playing its sequel reminded me that my takeaway was that it wasn't bad or anything, but nothing about it really grabbed me either, if that makes sense. It was kind of... eh? But as I say about the sequel, pretty amazing that the creator did all their own sprite and tile graphics!

I couldn't recall what to review the first Living Playground game, but I remembered I had ranked it as middling, and this game is similar. It's not that it's bad, it's just that it feels... eh to me? In a way I can't describe. It may entirely just be my personal opinion, because I can't articulate a reason for it. The actual reason I quit playing this game before finishing, however, is that I encountered game-breaking bugs on two separate occasions - first, I got stuck in the police officer's office with the power refusing to go out (I started the game on Pablo's route) and had to restart the game, and second, after I turned back from a slide and was given a rock by the green-haired kid, Pablo entirely disappeared and I was unable to move or continue the game. At this point I figured I wasn't invested enough to risk running into more game-breaking bugs, so I quit. The sprite visuals are super cute though! It's really impressive that no assets in this game are third-party.

The trouble with judging this game is that I deadass don't know how to respond lmao

It did make me laugh at some points! Most of it just doesn't make sense, though I think I understood what it was trying to get at at the end (?). However, I wouldn't say I disliked playing it, so it's really up to you whether you want to give it a shot. If Space Funeral is one thing, it's certainly a memorable experience!

Definitely the best part is the house with Dracula. Iconic dialogue.

I love a lengthy JRPG, especially if it's free. I've loved JRPGs since I was a kid, and I can forgive many faults. But bestie, what the hell were you all thinking with this one? The game, despite reading like it was written by a native speaker, is decidedly not free of typos - often enough that I frequently noticed. It's very unintuitive, to the point that I had to consult a walkthrough to even figure out how to leave town, because I had no idea I had to do a bunch of random sidequests to cause the ferry to show up (there was no indication of this in game). But most of all, it's got one of the worst enemy systems I've ever seen.

So you don't have traditional fights - random animals just wander the map and you attack them by going next to them. Sometimes animals are so strong they can oneshot you, so you learn to avoid them. Sounds fine, right? Except those animals will still oneshot you even if you have already moved past them. In what I cannot imagine could possibly be anything other than a severe programming error, the delay in the attack means a wild animal can oneshot you from four tiles away after you run past it. A regular-ass snake can kill you at 30 feet. Once I get to the mainland, I find that every single animal can oneshot me, I don't have enough money to buy any stronger weapons, and I can't even get to the city I need to reach to learn magic because the way the enemies in the cave are positioned makes it so it is literally impossible to even move past them without them killing you four tiles after you've walked past them. Upon looking at the guide I consulted earlier, I found that this game apparently just expects you to grind up to level 3 -5 before you can even come close to challenging those animals, and then grind even more up to levels 8-10 before you can go all the way through the cave. On one of the slowest leveling systems I've ever seen (I swear to god I killed 20 bees before even reaching level 2). This game wants me to go to the mainland, realize I can't fight any of the animals there, and then go back and kill even more bees, and then go back to the mainland and kill animals for 5-7 more levels before I can even get to the goddamn main objective. I am not giving this game that kind of time - not when nothing else about it has shown it's much more than a badly-designed generic JRPG. I am done here, y'all.

Another game with very cute art but mediocre writing. I wasn't really attached to either of the leads, and didn't feel much chemistry between them - which is rough when this is meant to be a romance! I don't think I entirely understand the meaning of the title, the puzzles were kinda tedious and didn't always make sense (how was I meant to know the 10 yen coin would open the bathroom door? how was I meant to know that it took me clicking on the bathroom door and finding it locked for the cockroach fight to activate on the microwave - two completely unrelated events??), Seryozha said a number of things that felt misogynist... overall, beyond the art, I didn't find much that stood out or much to like. I think this'll be the last of Colonel's games I play.

Absolutely adorable art (Hubert is a very handsome boy), and I am always here for the gays. But the game was so short, and the writing, which had numerous typos, didn't really grab me... so I'm not sure how worth my time the playing experience was (especially since you had to replay it and constantly click through text to get all the endings).

After playing racheldrawsthis's first game, Eloquent Countenance, which was flawed but had a lot of potential, I was looking forward to this game since I knew it was more well-known and well-liked. However, I... actually liked it less than Eloquent Countenance, to the point where I don't really recommend it. Something about all the dialogue in this game feels really bizarre and unnatural in a way I can't quite put a finger on, the protagonist really doesn't talk like an elementary schooler would at the beginning (I have not met any elementary schoolers who would give a speech like that), the "good" ending is really overly didactic and lays everything out, even things that were pretty obvious from the kinda heavy-handed symbolism... but the biggest problem was just that I wasn't at all invested in either of the characters. Even the art, though it was definitely good overall and had a metric ton of CGs, didn't impress me as much as it did in Eloquent Countenance, especially in the environments. It's not that the idea for the game was bad, it just felt like the quality of the writing wasn't enough to carry the premise. (Not to mention that it felt weirdly like one character's much worse behavior was treated as equal to that of the other...) So I'd pass on this one, honestly.

(Final note: my incredibly specific thought that I had when playing the bad ending was "this is just like if A Separate Peace had a lot more typos", and I didn't like A Separate Peace.)

The lead-up to everything was pretty interesting, and the gameplay, while occasionally slightly clunky and often rather stressful, was reasonably fun, but I dunno, man, something about the reveals felt kinda underbaked to me. I didn't feel like the story came to a round and clear enough conclusion for me to have considered it worth playing - like there wasn't enough to it? There was a strange emptiness to the story writing that I can't really describe... so I don't really recommend it because the payoff wasn't worth the effort put in for me.

Yeah, not a good one. The twist this has was fairly easy to see coming, and was done *much* better in a much more popular RPG Maker game... though I can't say the name of it, given that that would kind of give it away. The writing was pretty mediocre/over the top, and I really didn't appreciate the suggestion that the murderer was committing murder because "ooh schizophrenic hallucinations scary". Are we not past the demonization of mental illness? Apparently not. Overall the game felt pretty... childish, I suppose.

Same issue I had with the first game, unfortunately... art is super cute and well-done, and the music in this one is great, but the story and writing just didn't grab me... especially since this one wasn't really the end of a story, nor did it shed light on much until one very brief bonus scenario. It felt very long to play as a result, so I can't personally say I recommend it...

The art and animation was lovely - it's what drew me to the game in the first place (aside from hearing about it through toby, of course!) - but I just couldn't get into the story or characters or any of that. I know it's supposed to be an intro to a larger series, and I still intend to play Dweller's Empty Path, but I guess I just wasn't that invested in any of the events involving these characters, which I feel bad for saying, because it's always so hard for me to put a finger on why that is.

(Not technically an RPG Maker game, since it was made in Game Maker, but it's very much styled after one, so I'm mentioning it here nonetheless.)

The trouble with this game is that it's got an interesting concept, but - unless I'm just stupid and don't pick up on things, which is entirely possible - you are actually incapable of understanding it until the epilogue and the author's afterword. Tie that in with the overarching fantasy element that is pretty much impossible to gather without the afterword, too-short music loops that start to wear on the nerves, and overall a game that is just much too long and takes much too long of just sort of wandering around solving puzzles and not understanding what's going on, and I can't say I really enjoyed it. I love queer stories - I'm queer myself - and I love stories that end in queer happiness and the avoidance of tragedy. The message at the end is good, too. But I don't really think this journey was worth the destination for me.

I... can't express why I didn't like this game without spoiling the whole premise of it (well, other than that the game is real overly edgy and on the nose and no one talks the way humans actually talk), so I'm just going to go ahead and do it. There is no reason in the world why this protagonist wasn't just trans. I have rarely seen a game with a premise so obviously steeped in the detrimental effects of suffering anti-trans discrimination that would so laboriously fucking LEAP to avoid being trans. Half the details in this game feel like a transmasc experience, and the other half of the details in this game feel like a transfemme experience, and yet the main character is clearly intended to be entirely cisgender. It's such an unrealistic scenario that would be far more realistic if it were just trans, to the point where it genuinely feels transphobic. One of the comments thinks it was an allegory for being trans, but it doesn't need to be an allegory! It would literally make sense if it were just canonically trans! This is a recent game, too - there's no law, no insurmountable taboo, that would prevent this anonymous indie game that bears no conservative company oversight from being trans. It still would have been overly edgy and on the nose, but at least I could have respected what it was trying to do. Instead, just... God, I'm so tired.

As someone who has been learning Japanese but struggles with kanji, I was real excited for this one. Unfortunately, it didn't work well enough as a language tool to be helpful, nor was its story or gameplay compelling enough to make me keep going. Amazing idea, but the execution left a little to be desired.

It feels like there were some interesting Lovecraftian ideas a play here, and I thought it was pretty neat that the main character was non-binary, but I'm not sure I understood like, most of the concept of this game beyond the obvious, especially the ending. So I wouldn't really say I got anything out of it...

Art is very cute, but the text has errors and there's not really enough substance or successful humor for me to recommend it. Given that this was made for a 20 second game jam, I suppose that's logical lol, but nevertheless.