Spoilers
I played this a while earlier, but I was thinking about it and it’s settled into my mind that this story is about a person who is cripplingly afraid of making the wrong decision presented in a game where seemingly innocuous decisions actually just kill him in ways that the player (and character) could not have predicted. Choices in games having effects that don’t follow logically is usually something kind of upsetting for me as a player. Like how some games have convoluted criteria to making sure certain characters survive the narrative where you couldn’t possibly have understood at the time you made the decision to turn right or left at the fork in the road that it would cause your best friend to choke on their dinner or not. In Daring Choices, there’s no way to tell that eating the toast first will kill you, but it’s so silly and so early in the game (a VN with a skip function, so you don’t have to battle your way through hordes of aliens to get to the choice again) and the consequence (death) is so close to the decision that it doesn’t feel like the game is being unfair.Similarly, choosing to ask Theo out or not shouldn’t, by in-universe logic, save or not save you from being stabbed to death in the hallway, but for someone who’s constantly scared of making decisions, maybe each decision he makes feels like something that could possibly have unpredictable and fatal consequences.
With deciding whether or not to sit next to the gossiping girls on the bus, it’s the character deciding to stand up for himself and then immediately getting punished for it. In this case, however, it’s by something he sort of predicted (he didn’t want to hear them gossip—though not because of the content, but the tone).
And then the decision with Theo is pretty clearly rewarded with choosing to ask him out getting you the good ending. It’s not that he asks Theo out (something he’s scared of doing) and then something horrible happens. Plus we don’t see him worried about dying, so I guess the framework I’ve been talking about doesn’t line up perfectly with the events of the game.
It was fun, though, seeing him choke on toast, and watching him get viciously murdered outside the classroom. My interest was piqued when I got the bad end from the bus and found that there was new dialogue about feeling deja vu. I saw that there was a horror tag, and the game description is kind of cryptic, so it started going in the direction I was hoping for. When I finished all the paths, though, I was hoping that the deja vu element would’ve been explored more.
Still, there’s only so much you can cram in a Novembear game jam. The main character wants to ask Theo out and then does or doesn’t.
I liked the bad ends, which are funny and spectacular. I enjoyed Beth as a character. She and her boyfriend drive home the fact that our poor bear is boyfriendless because he can’t muster the nerve to ask out Theo. It’s good to have someone challenge the protagonist like this.