Cute little story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, even though it does have some issues that made me enjoy it substantially less than the other VNs by the same author.

First of all I appreciate the references to the dev’s previous work, the inside jokes, the underplayed humor. The surrealist setting and premise draw me in, they definitely had potential. My issues with the game are two-fold

On the one hand, I couldn’t help but think the narrative lacked a clear point. We spend a lot of time establishing the fantasy prison, and I expected the strange setting to be used to explore the inner workings of the protagonist and/or his relationship with the love interest. Instead, the prison plot is resolved very effortlessly and brushed aside to focus on the protagonist introverted personality. The climax where the two mains open up to each other feels mostly disconnected from the light drama that preceeded it.

My second gripe is a more stylistic one. Like I said above, a lot of the game focuses on the protagonist’s lack of verbal communication: he doesn’t speak much. That is a fine trait to have and to explore, but I wasn’t a big fan of how it was written about. The protagonist will be involved in dialogues where he doesn’t speak much, but instead we are presented with his internal thoughts. The problem is that his internal thoughts… are very basic and surface level, and also don’t seem to have much to say. The protagonist seems to think in the sort of short sentences that, if spoken aloud, would also make us think “he doesn’t speak much”. The result is that, instead of coming across as a timid person with a rich interiority, the protagonist comes across as someone who doesn’t have much of an interiority to explore. As anyone who’s read anything I’ve written can probably tell, I’m a big fan of writing conversations where the characters say a lot less than what they think, but IMHO for that to work you either have to explore the protagonist’s inner thoughts more deeply or keep them implicit. This middle ground, where we get a constant of stream of consciousness that doesn’t go deeper than reacting with “That’s horrible!” left me pretty unsatisfied.