Oh my god this is my favorite VN ever... I bought this game on steam in 2024 and I played it for like 150+ hours... I really want to read the dev book! I just got a few excerpts from other players and I know that some of the words may cause controversy... I wrote a lots on this game. I used translator and I apologize if there were any misunderstandings as English isn’t my native language.
I absolutely adored this experimental VN.
-----------------------------Spoiler! Warning!----------------------------------While I can’t claim to fully grasp the developer’s intent, I can say that both the game and the dev book offered me exactly what I was looking for. I’m drawn to this bleak, failure-ridden world of struggle and despair. I’m really captivated by its philosophical musings and the unrelenting darkness of the narrative. I love those characters—fearful, twisted, world-weary, and furious—whose dialogue brims with nihilism, skepticism, antisocial tendencies, and anarchist undertones.
Markus is my favorite character. I was thrilled to learn from the dev book that he was originally designed as a manipulator incapable of genuine affection for the character. This original conception is brilliant to me. Yet I also love the warmer, more amicable version of Markus in the game—the partner-in-crime who stands with the character until the apocalypse. It feels as if he’s the one watching the entire drama unfold from a meta perspective. Whether he hints at exploring other storylines at the end of "Amor Fati", or tells the character that you two will meet again when you’re both ready, there’s an eerie detachment to his words.
Each new playthrough is a cycle—a repetition of history where the same events unfold again and again. Fate here is a modern retelling of Sisyphus’ myth, a tale of life’s inherent meaninglessness. We’re merely treading a path that countless others have walked before, trapped in an endless loop of decay and corruption in Hollywood. Time stretches on infinitely, but our choices remain painfully limited. It’s almost as if Markus is just waiting to see if we can ever turn our thought from enduring “what it is” into creating “what you want”.
Throughout my playthrough, I never sensed a trace of conventional romantic love between Markus and the character. Their dynamic relationship felt more like The Beasts in the Jungle—mutual observers. I’m so glad I chose the option “No, I don’t need sex to get close to you”. I did go back and reload the save to see what happens if the character sleeps with him, and what I saw struck me deeply: his eyes were fixed the entire time—not on the character, but on us outside the screen. “Is this what you desired?” “Does it make you feel alive…” “Even though your body is all but numb—does it truly satisfy you?” This exchange is my favorite part of the game, because it echoes that billboard line perfectly: “Does fake love make you less lonely?”
Sex itself isn’t something ugly. It can be an intimate experience—one that lets you feel the continuity of life by crossing taboos and brushing against the brink of death. But when sex is commodified and turned into a spectacle, it devolves into nothing more than sensory stimulation or a power play, wrapping conquest and submission in the pretty packaging of “love” and “desire”.
Beyond that, I constantly caught echoes of modern philosophers like Nietzsche in the game’s scattered lines—from Amor Fati to Ex Nihilo. Markus’ SE is, without question, my favorite ending. The destruction of the entire city is also a brand-new beginning. If you lack the courage to lose yourself and embrace ruin, you will never be reborn. What gives us our wings, our colors, our garments, our strength today will turn to ashes tomorrow.
There’s no denying that this visual novel is a far cry from mainstream dating sims. The narrative logic of mainstream commercial titles boils down to physical surrender to power, where “emotional manipulation” is glorified as “pure love”. These are nothing more than hyper-charged emotional experiences crafted by capitalism, sanitized of any deep exploration of desire, designed to keep players safely within their comfort zones. What we get from them is nothing but idealized, intensely codependent love stories—so-called “fake love”.
I also love every single ending this game has to offer—even though they all feel so bitter and fraught with struggle. (Though if I’m being honest, I don’t think any ending is quite as hopeful as Markus’ SE.)
Why does a game have to have a happy ending? Why does the end result need to be “success”? That right there is the festering flaw of our society. In this age of technological rationality, all pain and unease are numbed away with quick fixes; all drifters are tamed and co-opted. Even rebellious impulses get packaged as commodities, yet they still linger on like ghosts all the same.
Some might find stories like this unsettling, but to me, feeling that discomfort is a kind of liberation in a world that’s grown obsessed with optimizing every little thing.
I used to be a die-hard fan of romance sim games, but I’ve long since grown tired and skeptical of the genre. This game’s existence has given me so much food for thought. Thank you for creating something this extraordinary.