itch.io

thank you so much! i got way too into imagining the role swap lol, its one of my favorite genres of fic so im glad it sounded compelling. sarah is on another plane of being self-defeating truly. thank you for reading!

thank you very much! i appreciate the nb lesbian shout especially… nb lesbians I Love You. i’m glad the different art styles worked, working on this project made me forget i had lost all my how to draw anime chops from middle school lol. thank you again for reading 🙇‍♂️

THANK YOU SO MUCH again for this incredibly nice comment and also you listening to me writhe around as i wrote this lol. you were such a huge help and im really grateful. the note on yearning is so on point. sarah… do u ever yearn…

wow, amazing. a deeply brutal read. after i reached the end i went back and read through all the stories again… feeling it all click together horribly. really great work.

i think this also used the medium really well- little touches like the way you styled hellen’s text (and when it lost that stylization), the different colored text in the novel narration… it’s a simple presentation with a great deal of polish.

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you’ve truly performed an amazing feat to get me to hate the student as much as the teacher in this scenario. the end scene where they’re both remembering their idealized chrys… even with their dueling narratives we’ll never know what she was thinking. why she took her own life, how she felt about these two women… it’s so heartbreaking.

i also loved the way you depicted stephanie unraveling, the way she described herself and all her movements until they were out of her control… i don’t know if we ever reached something real inside. thank you for sharing.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!! the epic highs and lows of [checks notes] toxic yuri vn. repression so deep you don’t even feel it… a great way to put it. thank you for reading.

it’s a valuable lesson to learn for sure lol. thank you for reading!

thank you very much! it was fun to figure out the best way to depict that :)

extremely beautiful and an almost meditative read, even as it dealt with some harrowing subject matter with a careful touch. i feel like ill need to revisit this one to string it all together, but i was really struck by how much you have to give of yourself of a sport to be truly great- or even just mediocre- and how maybe more than any industry, your identity is a calculation. a data point for others to rank you by.

i get in the pool biweekly and swim very slow laps. i imagine i’ll think of this vn whenever i do from now on. thank you for sharing.

thank you so much!!! i fear this seems to be a common experience LOL

really enjoying the refrain of the last few comments being SARAH NOOO. sarah no indeed.

thank you so much for your incredibly kind words. YAY FOR SWIM SCENE LOVE, i know you are the swimming expert so i am honored 🙇

thank you (?) for this comment!! been a while since i’ve had someone cursing me out as praise in the comments, brings back my fanfic memories. all jokes aside, i’m really glad this game captured that feeling of mundane misery. it’s a pretty familiar pain for me and one that feels difficult to talk about without immediately making it smaller and smaller, as sarah does throughout the story. it’s a feeling that gets so familiar that you can’t imagine anything else… hopefully one day sarah can find her way out of it. thank you so much for playing.

god thank you so much!!!! i love your work, i appreciate your words so immensely. especially on the art, i wasn’t sure about it stylistically so hearing that you liked them means a lot… im so glad the pacing was good, i was really worried that the early scenes would drag too much before the toxic yuri got Toxic, so im so glad that it still felt worthwhile to read through. thank you very much again. <3

THANK YOU!!! i was mostly writing stupid shit that made me laugh so im glad that it worked and was funny for someone who wasn’t me.

i really appreciate what you wrote abt their dynamic– it wasn’t a theme that i had planned but one that really naturally emerged and i found really interesting to explore. though graye isn’t from the ‘past’ per se i think a lot about how people of different eras would think about our world today and the wondrous things we take for granted… and the not-so-good things about living in today, too.

honestly i think any blorbo appearing irl is a huge nightmare LOL i don’t know if i would handle it any better than sarah. well… some things i would probably handle a bit better. thank you for taking the time to read and write such kind words, im a big fan of your work so im very honored.

YESSS.. thank you so much >:))))

yeah so basically this is awesome

i loved this so much. i don’t know much about baseball (online gay person shocker) so it was really interesting to read about the history of the scorecard. i went and looked up some actual scorecards after this, really cool. and i loved how you explored them as self expression and interwove them with the characters in this vn. gorgeous. your work has such specificity and interest in so many things that i think many people don’t focus on, if that makes sense. and i think how you explore those things is so cool.

SPOILERS

both ys and yams were sympathetic to me even with all their flaws… even as they refused to understand each other at the end. a relationship between a college student and a bitter lawyer is doomed from the outset, even more so when they can only talk through baseball. even the scorecards couldn’t help them reach each other in the end. gorgeous work. thank you for sharing.

god this was so fucking sick. of course the technical aspects are amazing- i gasped a few times, i think when you first move in the 3D environments and then when you have to actually navigate yourself– but just every part was so good and interesting. loved the art, loved the music, loved the weirdo girls in this. awesome!!!!!!

the lore was very interesting and i was super curious to know more… i would have been interested in some kind of glossary or compendium but i can see that ruining some of the mystique too. hard to know where to come down on when it comes to The Lore.

SPOILERS

I really got a big chuckle out of the vibe shift from rachel being like ‘wow omg lori is so scary and im just like a Normal Girl’ to her becoming the biggest freak alive. from being possessed (?) or something else (?)… who can say. but it was extremely funny. poor lori!!! the last act was so grueling and shocking in the best way… poor lori. didnt think it could get worse than a girl throwing up on her mid coitus but actually yeah it definitely could. i really felt like i was going to get jump scared in the final scene where lori is trying to sneak out of that room… chills.

one complaint i will mention is i did have to try the escape last section a few times– this is possibly an issue with me playing this on steam deck and mapping my game pad to WASD but i felt like i was mashing pretty insistently and i still got got. second time i was pretty close to to the end of the sequence too which did make me wonder if it was legitimately the end of the game. it was a really cool sequence and drove home the desperation but maybe the timing could be a bit more forgiving.

ok i am back. this is so incredibly cool, presentation both simple and incredibly ornate. i know it was framed as such with the acts but i really felt like i was watching a play. kagamitsuki’s epic monologues made me feel like i was sitting in silence in a theater… such a cool experience. gorgeous art. i loved their mutual obsession, kagamitsuki’s hatred… the world you crafted was so intriguing too. i wanted to know more!! my only wish was a history log so i could refresh on some Lore (though i didnt need it as much as i thought i would), but i imagine that would have been difficult to implement in this. thank you for sharing.

I think I got it working! I’ll outline what I did so if anyone else on Mac has this problem they can give it a try.

For clarification, I found I actually have a x64 processor. But I had tried clicking on all of them and nothing happened.

First, I found the one that fit my processor (thank you Quora). I right clicked it and clicked ‘Archive Utility’.

Apple blocks you from opening it. I then went to Privacy and Security Settings and clicked ‘Open Anyway’. (you’ll notice it says ‘universal’ in this screenshot instead of x64 but that’s just because I was repeating the process for the screenshot lol)

Archive Utility then creates a package that ends in the file extension cpgz. I opened it and it created the file as an executable.

I was then able to run the executable! I don’t have time to sit and play through it right now but I’ll report back if I have any issues :>

YOWIE!!! really fantastic work here. it’s clear you had something To Say with this work and i think you said it very well. it’s really great to watch this feeling of creeping dread emerge into the horrifying conclusion of this relationship. the most horrible slow boiling of a frog possible. the presentation was also insanely polished, i thought all the different frames and set pieces you had worked really well.

SPOILERS

i was going to start this comment with ‘anita i think we gotta kill this guy’ but uhhh situation Handled. poor anita. though i can’t help but feel some relief for her, too.

i also thought the final conclusion of anita just saying she wants to fucking read some yaoi was hilarious and interesting especially in the context of the jam. of course it was one of sunny’s hangups but it was fascinating that it was the one that it ended on. not sure i have something to Say About It but i am chewing on it.

thank you for sharing! i very much enjoyed it.

this is Nuts. poor meadow. yui when i catch you…………. thank you for sharing this slow motion disaster. gorgeous art and presentation

hi there, this looks beautiful and i rly want to play it!! but for some reason when I unzip it on mac it doesn’t actually let me run anything? it treats it as a document and i need to select an application to open it. am i missing something? thanks in advance :’o

thank you so much mado! i’m excited to dive into your work for the same reason. crazy how much online life affects us all.

thank you very much for both taking the time to comment and for beta reading! shared experience on the block letters lol. i too love fictional anime discourse <3

WHEW. devastating read. i haven’t read a piece of interactive fiction formatted like this before and i found it really effective and arresting. poor aria. the endless measuring of the right way to be trans or queer..!! no way to win.

––spoilers—

i also really liked the dive into her mirror’s experience at that party. even though she’s clearly awful i liked how it did humanize her… in a way. and then. and then! so awful (/pos). thank you for sharing.

congrats on finishing up and submitting! i think the little polishes you added to the UI enhanced the game a lot since i beta read. core is great regardless- pavlov’s dog is such a great framing device. poor fia!!!

OWIE!!!!! this was so great. i loved the presentation of this, specifically the transition from childhood from adulthood. such an effective way to do it that made my stomach hurt. immediately understood the kind of person danica was and hers struggles. did howl at the ‘it’s not [x] but also [x]’. evilly pitch perfect ai speak that works to confirm dani’s biases… but i still feel pathos for snowy despite it all bc she’s a cute kitty. bravo!!!!

thank you very much! ^_^

thanks so much! sorry for the delayed response, itch didnt tell me about pending comments. i think you could probably categorize the endings as ‘full success’, ‘partial success’, ‘failure’, and ‘not getting anything at all’. however there is one ending besides this! ;-)

thank you! sorry for the delayed response, itch didnt tell me about pending comments. i think you could probably categorize the endings as ‘full success’, ‘partial success’, ‘failure’, and ‘not getting anything at all’. however there is one ending besides this! ;-)

sorry for the delayed response, your post was flagged as pending and itch didnt alert me. you can open your inventory by pressing I and when you hover over an item, click drop.

hi, sorry I just replied to this! Your post was flagged as pending and didn’t alert me. This is a bug I found a while ago and am hoping to patch soon, but you can reload the game to fix it. Sorry for the issue!

whew. hoping this doesnt sound like a neg but I am astounded by how much this does with so little. soothing and upsetting repetition. poor dahlia. this is very good. thank you for making it.

creature would want you to live <3

Thank you! Do you mean like automatically centering over it? That’s a good suggestion.

thank you very much!!!

thank you very much! this feedback is incredibly logical and somehow never occurred to me LOL. i think i was thinking of it more as a puzzle to try and get all the items in budget, more than just re-running an errand. but i definitely could have framed that differently so that it would make more sense. thanks for playing and leaving a comment!!

thank you!!

wonderful! gorgeous illustration, prose, music, excellent use of photography for this collage-style moment. this game holds so much tenderness for people of the past, and i loved doll-frame-story as a way to explore the people who weren’t truly in the story. i also love the historical-except approach… the strange, matter-of-fact magic of a place where the snow never melts, and the trees that hold dolls inside. fantastical, made practical by the question of, ‘but how do we make any damn money off of this?’. and what that question means for our two leads. really lovely story. thank you for sharing.

thank you very much! 🙇‍♂️

I am pretty dang stuck on level 22 lol, hoping to crack it but wanted to leave a comment now! love the art and story crumbs so far, this gives me old RPGmaker vibes in the best way. great little puzzles although i am uh Bad at them lol. looking forward to seeing what this grows into! <3 thank you for sharing.