I think I ultimately have some criticisms too weighty for the overall impression to lean towards positive, though I don't think the VN is all bad. The art style is nice, and the colors feel cohesive across the art and the edited photo backgrounds. Many of the small visual touches, like the particle effects, are good. Even while I have my gripes with the writing, there are strong aspects: the dialogue is fun to read thanks to the vivid character voices, and there's some solid imagery. I really dislike the game's tendency to break lines across multiple text boxes, but apart from that, I think the prose has a decent flow to it.

To me, the shakiest part of the whole thing is how it works as a standalone story with the larger world and characters the author has apparently developed in other works. We're already off to a rough start when the first scene is a long stretch devoid of anything visually engaging where Sebastian – whose perspective the story never returns to – thinks about his backstory and various aspects of the setting to get the reader up to speed. The VN is supposed to be about Gavino, but its attention strays quite often elsewhere; we're constantly learning about complex worldbuilding tidbits that are of secondary or tertiary interest to his arc, and many scenes are focused on advancing our understanding of Sebastian in a way that clashes with him being presented as a mysterious, even threatening figure. And though it's not a short game, I feel like I ultimately learned less about Gavino than I would have wanted to.

I think these storytelling priorities are occasionally reflected on the sentence level as well, with the writing being just a bit too eager to explain itself and unpack its implications. (Consider lines like "This demon, this man, so tall and imposing, but he’s so gentle with you." that just tell the reader something they're probably already thinking.) We're putting the cart before the horse here, I think; the script reads too much like a guided tour through worldbuilding and character ideas the author had rather than a fully realized narrative. And I don't think the character profiles are bad by themselves, but for all the care put into them, I was left wishing there had been a stronger sense of interiority, development, and ambiguity.

I'll have to go into plot spoilers for this part, but as a related note, the big elephant in the room is how the game's apparent interests affect Gavino's arc. It is a story of a suicidal person in a world that sucks but has a genuinely pleasant afterlife full of demons breasting boobily, and there's a tension to this premise that I think demands to be navigated very carefully. There are gestures towards regrets Gavino feels about his decision, but I don't think they weigh as much narratively as the fact that everything works out just fine in the end – we don't see the consequences his death might have had on other characters, and he even gets to reunite with Sebastian. It's all neat and satisfying and, as such, quite troubling to read in a way the VN doesn't register as being entirely aware of.

To illustrate what I mean, let's hone in on one particular detail: the title. Knowing what the story dealt with, I assumed it would manifest as a symbol of Gavino's worries about how things would go on in his absence – "who will water my flowers when I'm gone?" – ultimately demonstrating that there are still things worth caring about in this world. What we get instead is a frankly jarring aestheticization of death where at the moment of his passing, his body bursts into a bunch of beautiful flowers. It's really hard for me to see the point of not only downplaying the inherent tragedy, messiness, and brutality of someone taking their life but also using an imaginary magical device to turn the act into something the text explicitly describes as beautiful. (Well, rhetorically: like I said, my impression, accurate or not, is that the VN just really wants to show us the cool afterlife without ruining the vibes too hard with how we get there.)

I was rotating a more charitable reading in my head where death ought to be seen as a pure metaphor and what the story actually revolves around is just Gavino moving to a new place; maybe it was the boyfriend's backstory that put the idea in my mind. But I feel like I can't go there because some scenes, like the grocery store visit, do rely on the tension and the emotional impact of Gavino really, truly dying.

That's what it comes down to, I think: besides being a questionable portrayal of the subject in general, the VN struggles to make its dramatic stakes feel congruent with how it ends. Gavino's suicide is both centrally important and essentially irrelevant because both his relationship with Sebastian and his self-improvement transcend the barriers of life and death. The grief is inferred; the catharsis of things working out is shown. Given this, I feel like it was just a mistake to build the story so unambiguously around a depressed person deciding to kill himself.

I have some smaller nitpicks on the UI side of things as well: a couple of strange UX decisions rendered the reading experience pretty terrible for me. One of Ren'Py's best parts is that you get all sorts of convenience and accessibility features for free. This VN removes the text speed slider, which is something I can truly see no justification for, and to make matters worse, there's no line end indicator, so fast readers smashing spacebar to skip to the end might accidentally proceeded to the next screen instead. Many other features – the skip button, proper saves – are missing or only available via keyboard shortcuts, too, and the only quit button I found was hidden in the preferences menu, where it had no reason to be. Whatever the game gets from all this does not feel like a worthy tradeoff.

That's about it, really; I want to stress that I see no ill intent here, nor do I dislike everything about the game's writing and art, but there's just a lot going on both in concept and execution that I had a very difficult time getting on board with. I think the serious subject matter demands serious criticism to match, and I hope what I said here came off as constructive.