Right after I played this game, I had an urge to write some kind of big essay about it. But most of what I could say that hasn't already been said in this comment section would be too personal for a public comment like this, and I dunno how to PM you without making a bsky account. But it's been like 2 months now and I can't stop thinking about this game, so, uhh...
THIS GAME IS SO FUCKING COOL AND I LOVE IT TO BITS!!!
Literally every minute there was some new thing that got me to think "this game is so cool", to the point where we'd be here all day if I listed them all. Music-dream.mp3 is genuinely in my top 3 favorite title themes of all time now. I love the character designs so much, Bao in particular, she's perfect. The swordfighting is so tense, and I love the character animation so much. I love the backgrounds, the character expressions, their poses, the music, the environment design. There's so many little things, like, the moment with the window in the classroom is great, it's so cool when VN sprites are reused for cinematography in that way. I love how the text gets a coloured outline around it in place of italics. The design and description of Bao's swords are so cool and evocative of her character, and I really wish Jan's swords got the same treatment, especially since we know so little about her. The dithery animations in the dream tower are so beautiful, I just really love this kind of pixelart. All the little animations the character sprites do for emphasis are great. The duel taking place in an endless field of flowers was genius, I love when a story's most harrowing scene is in its most beautiful environment. God, I'm barely scratching the surface here-- it's so hard to express all the ways this game feels like it was made for me.
You know, I've sometimes been on the periphery of erotic media, but was usually put off by the tone of what I saw-- either they'd bring the story to a screeching halt as the characters act really out-of-character and start spouting stock porn dialogue, or have overtly sexual imagery pervade every aspect of the art in a way that tends to come across as insecure key-jangling to me. But I think this game is near-perfect with how it handles the 18+ stuff, and not because Bao is the villain of the story. At first the sexual aspect of the story just weirded me out and made Bao quite inscrutable and alien to me on my first reading. Took me way too long to realize that her fantasies stem from a deep loneliness and belief that the only way she could meaningfully connect with someone is by dragging them down into a pit of filth, to make their external self as rotten and mangled as Bao's internal self. And when seen through that angle, I could kind of empathize. Though I don't get sexual enjoyment out of it, there's a small bit of similarity in the way I sometimes find catharsis in intense horror media with beautiful female protagonists, and Bao simply takes that feeling, multiplies it by a thousand, and converts it into rage and lust. Honestly, the nightmarishly direct way Bao's worst aspects are presented makes me feel as if my own work doesn't go hard enough when it touches on these kinds of themes. I really love art that handles eroticism the way this does, as something put on top of a solid story that accentuates the horrible, messy emotions and desires of the characters.
Also, I really would love to see more of these characters and this setting, ideally a continuation of the 'Bao lost in her heart' ending. Not like a direct sequel, though. Probably something that takes place many years later, outside the academy, where Bao and Jan both appear but aren't the main characters. I just wanna see what they do when they meet each other for the first time in years, both of them having changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable.
Thank you so much for making this game.