itch.io

i downloaded this back almost right after it came out after seeing a multitude of week-one reviews that put a distant pang of fear in my chest about how it would even really affect me to read this. i don't really know how to explain the specific way i got scared to read it. i told a friend of mine, who has since hurt me in ways i am still recovering from and who i talked to about this game literally tonight, that i was going to do it when it felt right to. perhaps that is all overdramatic for a visual novel? perhaps it is not. art is all what you make of it

that ended up being at about 9:30p just two days before a thanksgiving where i'll go get deadnamed by my parents in their third total apartment since the place i grew up in, which makes me think of horrible things that were done to me and that i did to other people and a life that i live with every day even though it is so far behind me today

reading through this was sickening in ways i have never felt over anything that wasn't something i did myself. it has left me with a dry mouth and an empty stomach and an ache in my ribs and a sense of familiarity with parts of my psyche and the psyches of others and the life i lived and the lives those around me lived that has me feeling things i genuinely do not know how to describe. this is a work of fiction that alienates me on the grounds that it feels like it understands a part of me i don't fully get myself, which is a description i'm not even confident in

at the same time i do not like a single character in this vn and yet despite this i like them very much. love them all with my whole heart, even. i am able to see things in them that i see in myself and everyone i know who's like me and it's left my body suffocated, claustrophobic, yet too vast, too exposed, too vulnerable, for my liking too

i do not think i have ever read something like this. i do not think i will ever read something like this. i wish i had it in me to write something like this and by god it's making me want to try to put my heart down on paper too

i think this stuck with me in ways nothing else ever will

one of the single most charming things i have ever played in my life. there was visibly a lot of love and care put into this and it does my heart very good to play it as someone who used to grow up reading big books about all sorts of creatures, real and fictional, just to be able to say i had learned a thing that day. it takes me back to when i was a fourth grader and i would sit and read "guidebooks" about cryptids, or big encyclopedias of all of the pokemon or digimon, just so i could know more. it also just inspires me to create. thank you!

really quite fond of this. what you get to learn of the world is fascinating. the writing is very punchy and immediately gets you in the head of the dandelion gal, including (especially?) when she's upset with herself and her life and her feelings and and her actions the world around her. you get a fantastic sense of the characters and their awful fucked up relationship before they ever say a word to each other. which it makes it it extremely fun to watch when the dynamics of it get flipped on its head very sharply

altogether just sort of an infatuating little jaunt through the miserable lives of two miserable people and their miserable relationship with each other. cathartic in a way that makes you feel kind of gross to be there. also: it's all got fantastic sound design. lovely and extremely evocative art with impressively effective color design. very pretty girls. also it's just good erotica and the gunplay was hot as hell and will be stuck in my head

bonus: "so you're going along with me on the motherly angle, then, little oedipus?" is a line that is gonna replay in my head in my love life. thanks