Utter rubbish was such a delight! I expected something a bit more existential or scary from some of the screenshots, so I was in for quite a surprise when that main menu hit me. In the end, I think the game told the story it wanted to quite nicely.
The presentation carries the show single-handedly, from the cute simple style that reminds me of old Flash animations, the gorgeous more rendered illustration, and of course the abstract imagery used.
I really liked the retro UI as well, including the fake loading screens. I do wish the UI would integrate all of Renpy's buttons, it was a bit jarring seeing them sitting below the nice custom made textbox.
My only complaint about the visuals are some minor animation errors (like the layer order issue pretty early on where Cal stands up and walk away), or some strange artifacting that happened during most scenes. It is the worst during the dancing scene, but I am going to assume it is the fault of God's silliest little engine that is Renpy. Another distracting thing was the slight flickering every time a movie starts and stops playing. These are all very tiny complaints considering the impressive amount of animations created in just a month's time. I do feel like this came at the cost of some more "traditional" sprites where we had Cal's visuals strangely static compared to what is being described, but I'm not going to hold that against the game. I liked seeing a more dynamic way of portraying the character compared to sprites.
Lastly, my absolute favourite part of the visuals were the abstract bits. The painting scene was so good, but I adored the visuals used when Partridge describes what the sensation of touch feels like to a robot. It is a scene and concept I liked in general, but the visuals enhanced it even further.
This leads me to the writing, where scenes accompanied by more abstract imagery were also my favourites. The story is a cute romance which honestly advanced at a pace I felt was a bit too fast for my own liking, but hey, I can excuse that with the memory recalibration time skips! Also both characters are pretty direct and don't waste any time beating around the bush.
The idea to tell the story from the perspective of a robot was interesting, and it did hit a lot of notes I enjoy in monsterfu- teratophiliac works. We get the usual non-humans experiencing human emotions like love, self-doubt and a search for meaning. It's always nice seeing the fun fantasy (or in this case sci fi) exterior used to explore topics about relationships, like here with trust, intimacy and boundaries. While the entire game did that well, the memory chip repair scene was the cheekiest when doing that.
This was a very first strong showing! I hope more people read this VN, it's worth it for the visual spectacle alone.