Ohhh this game was SO much fun to stream!
I love the worldbuilding and wild lore drops. The implication that Markiplier exists in this world made me lose my mind. The former school bully having a "bully" poster on the wall? Iconic. The inclusion of JOHN KRAMER?! I was losing my mind. Just a delight and I never knew what to expect next.
Something that was never directly mentioned in the game but I brought up a few times on stream - I'm not sure if it's intentional but it's extremely funny that everyone who has graduated from the torture academy seems to not have a job in torture. Like, i guess it's really not a thriving field, or maybe it doesn't pay very well. Syzmanski and Tussaud both have jobs in the arts (making games and making wax sculptures), and the bully character still lives with his college roommates, so I imagine if he has a job in torture it must not pay all that well. Obviously the students at this school are just in it for the love of the game, and I can't stop thinking about that.
The group project dynamic was really fun, although I was definitely getting frustrated with Harry and Sarah for not pitching ideas. I think that was latent trauma from my own past with group projects... I might be wrong, but I didn't remember getting a deadline for the school project, so while I was playing I was getting STRESSED OUT when they'd only come up with a couple bad ideas each week. Like, Brian, if your life depends on this you CAN'T just say you only have one idea, and it's to use a hydraulic press! I honestly think as a school-project story, the plot was pretty compelling. I liked seeing the gang workshop their ideas, and the final product that the group ended up with was REALLY creative! It made up for all the bad ideas that Brian kept pitching (sorry, I've decided that I'm a Brian hater). It was also very very fun to pitch my OWN torture devices while streaming, and predict what might happen next.
Critique-wise, I would have loved to see character portraits for the other members of the group. For how much Brian and Dale talk, it was surprising that they didn't get a portrait. The portraits that *were* there, though, were REALLY nice, and I loved the art style. I think the inclusion of brief gameplay portions whenever visiting a mentor was nice, and I would have loved to see a bit more of that, to help justify this game existing as a game, and not a novella or a straight visual novel. Seeing this world explored in the style of a classic RPG-maker horror game would be super neat!
Plot-wise, I guess I could say that while I was constantly surprised by the worldbuilding and lore-drops (and the inclusion of so many wild cameos), I wasn't really ever surprised by the actual story. The group works on a project, goes through a couple ideas, and ends on a big fun idea that wins the contest. Even the "terrible fate" that they say will fall to those who fail the final project is kind of exactly what I expected from the start - it's all pretty straightforward. It's definitely not a bad thing to be predictable, and have things go the way you expect, but it might have been nice to see a little more variance with the back-and-forth structure of pitching ideas and meeting with mentors, and an unexpected outcome might have been more interesting.
There was a moment near the end of the game where the characters were talking about Syzmanski and how he came up with his idea for his winning torture device while developing his music machine video game, and I thought there was about to be a MASSIVE meta twist where the creators of this game had created a visual novel about their lives to use as inspiration for their own final project, just like Syzmanski did. Like, maybe the characters were specifically publishing this game about their school in hopes that players would pitch their own torture devices, and they could snag one of those to use for their final project. Obviously that's kind of a crackpot theory, but living in that world for just a second got me excited for a wild twist that didn't come to fruition. That's totally okay, not every game needs a massive twist, but what we have here is pretty straightforward. In the end, the character writing and world building were both really, really superb. I *need* to play the spinoff about William - I think following that perspective and having a tragic outcome would be super interesting, and I could see it having a real emotional throughline.
All in all, I really liked the story of this game! I played the whole thing on stream and I DID do voices, so I'm sorry in advance. i started playing around 20:30