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(-10)

I'm gonna be honest. I would say that this is a shit story, if it were a story at all. But this is not a story, this is a scenario designed to illustrate a specific problem. There's no depth, no characters (only blank archetypes with no souls inside), this doesn't feel like it takes place in some world, just a sterile, deliberately designed evnironment, a single scene.

The lack of any depth whatsoever makes this whole game pointless. A message should be a compliment for a story, not the whole story itself. There is no characters to be attached to, no atmosphere, no nothing. I felt nothing playing this game all the way through. Not a single emotion. Then what would make me  think about the game's message? Playing this game is equivalent to hearing the following: "I wanna tell you something, imagine there's a mysoginist and he created an AI girlfriend, and then he treated her like shit. And then, like, it'd be cool if the girlfriend broke free and lived happily ever after. Whaddya think?". Basically no value was lost by simplyfing the game to this, except I guess the pleasant art. No music to make this more of a game than just a PSA, though.

And the whole message is kinda... weird. I didn't really get what exactly the game was trying to say. Like, "it's bad to treat women like property"? Is that the whole "message"? That's all? Or is it about treating AI properly? Finishing this game just made me confused if anything.

(1 edit) (+1)

Thank you for the feedback! I admit that this game was very experimental for me; I usually make pretty "generic" visual novels (generic as in they're long/wordy affairs where you achieve different endings by making a few different choices 😂), so here I tried to do a better job of coming up with more "novel" gameplay that tied in better with the game's themes (in this case, the loop mechanic). I also tried out a few different things that I had been wanting to try (e.g. full VA, including narration) and seeing what I could do with deliberately limited visuals in a chatsim style, since before I operated on the philosophy that "more art = better" (and I was burning myself out HARD doing that).

That said, I don't claim to have done a good job 😂 this is definitely my most polarizing release so far, and I'm honestly surprised that so many people liked it as much as they did.

Regarding the message/theme, you can feel free to take a look at other comments, if you like! A lot of people really nailed what I was trying to communicate with the game, which was essentially an illustration of how people cope with and are affected by abusive relationships. Of course, your interpretation is valid as well - if my intent wasn't communicated, it's a weakness in the writing/game design.

Thank you again for taking the time to leave your thoughts! I do appreciate criticism that isn't crazed ranting 😂 I'll take the critiques into account, and hopefully my dev abilities improve with each release! 💪 

(Ah I noticed that you posted another comment that got caught in the spam detector? Since it seems like this one is almost identical, I'll leave this one and delete the other one. I hope that's all right!)