Manna for Our Malices is a Visual Novel that's a mashup between generic high school anime setting, X-files style conspiracies, and Groundhog Day time loops - and I think it's interesting enough that it managed to succeed in spite of itself. A "delinquent" girl is murdered on her way home from school, only to find out she's repeating the same day over and over. She investigates the paranormal occurrences around her in an attempt to stay alive. Getting criticisms out of the way: First, the art is bad. Really bad. Second, the dialogue and characterizations, especially of the main character, are unrelatable and unbelievable. That said, the dev did a decent job of taking sci-fi/occult themes that are common in western entertainment (esoteric secret societies, cold-war type government experiments into physic powers, extra-dimensional alien entities) and applying them in a different setting (Japanese high school). I like the time loop mechanic, encouraging you to make slightly different choices on each loop so you can eventually solve the puzzle. It took me just under 3 hours to reach the good end. If you can tolerate the art and look past the cringy dialogue, you might just find the underlying story and looping, clue-hunting gameplay surprisingly entertaining.

This is a currently in development and unfinished interactive experience comprised of a collection of mini-games. The current play time is around 10 minutes. Each game is inspired by and interacts with a specific bgm track that the dev composed. Two of the three currently playable mini-games have scoring functions, but the dev hasn't yet implemented the planned "reason" for the scoring. Despite its very unfinished state, I really enjoyed what's there. The music tracks used for bgm are stylistically different and well done. The way the mini games for two of the games incorporate elements of the music in place of sound effects is a unique feature that I don't see very often (example: coins appearing whenever chimes sound in the music). The other playable track is actually a song, where the lyrics take the place of the MC's internal monologue during the events of that mini-game. It's a very creative project and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

I don't normally play games in this genre, but it had me hooked after the first timeloop. Ran into some minor UI annoyances, and some polish issues and a couple of weird bugs, but the developer was responsive and I am impressed with the game despite them. None of them were deal breakers.

Very high brow content, but for the targeted audience this is fantastic.