A downloadable game for Windows.
[I recieved a copy of this game for free]
The game is quite simple art-wise, and that's not necessarily bad, but by the second time you've seen each layout, it's gotten a little old. And for a short game, that is kinda bad.
The music is fine, but the game is marketed for it's music, and that's a little bold for how unremarkable the music actually is. I did enjoy Matt Mulholland's "My Heart Will Go On - Recorder by Candlelight" popping up. It was unexpected and fun. But none of the "lo-fi" was anything special.
Besides art and music, the game is literally just story (it is a VN after all), so I'll first of all mention that in the English version there was either a spelling or grammatical error (more often the latter) in nearly every text box. Getting past that, the dialogue is fairly wooden in most cases, and just odd in others (using Fate as a character, Dr. Fin acting super casual, etc.). As for the story itself, we find an adult man befriending a 15-year-old girl, the girl dying two days later, and the man all torn up about it years later since he feels (erroneously) that he was responsible for all 4 of their parents' death. That might be ok if the girl wasn't written to be completely and totally alone in the world, making the man to be her first and only real friend in her entire life... after knowing each other for an hour at best. Although there is no romance (thank goodness), certain things will still jump out as red flags considering their ages and genders, such as: girl telling man how sweet he is, man giving girl a rose, and the two falling asleep together overlooking a beach... While inherently harmless, these sort of interactions are unnaturally intimate and made me quite uncomfortable.
The story is a tragedy, but I found it difficult to feel any emotion (except perhaps contempt) for the characters since the story is so short and poorly told. I thought the theme of feeling guilt for something that isn't your fault is a theme worth exploration, but it was handled quite clumsily here.
There are the occasional "choices" presented to the reader. As a surprise to no one, they are entirely meaningless.
Story: 0/10 | Images: 2/10 | Music: 3/10
Overall, the main virtue this game possesses is its brevity, although even the short time I spent playing it was, in my opinion, time wasted. And this is from someone who spent no money on the game.
