It took me longer than I was hoping it would take me to get to this one. Even though visual novel games have never been my forte I did enjoy this one.
As always the voice acting was phenomenal, possibly the best in the jam. I especially liked the robots voice, it reminded me of a cyborg Homer Simpson. Plus the way MC stands out as a completely average sounding guy amongst the more theatrical characters is quite nice.
The dialogue was also pretty funny, and I loved how each character reacted to each of the rooms in their own unique way. And the writing in general I found enjoyable, the "A machine-y stomping came stomping" line sounds like a parody of Edgar Allan Poe. I definitely feel like I missed a joke when the siblings spoke what I'm assuming is Japanese, but then of course the joke was that nobody understood what they said. And I don't wanna spoil it here but I liked how the continuity was kept intact with the difference between MC's abilities and the other 3 player characters.
And while I liked the voice acting and writing I did find myself basically skipping a lot on the later runs in an attempt to unlock the epilogue. The skip option made this not too bad, but the random outcome did make it more tedious, though the random outcome I think counts for the "So Bad Its Good" aspect of the game.
The music I think was highly effective in giving a rather mysterious and sinister feel to the game. Like I thought I was gonna be playing Saw as a visual novel. The sound effects sprinkled throughout were nice, and definitely spiced up what's otherwise a barren game effects-wise.
As for playing the game itself there isn't much in the way of actual gameplay, I think maybe 3 or 4 choices throughout the entirety of a run? Understandably a lot less branching can practically be done when implementing so much content in terms of writing and voice acting. Though in my experience, a lack of gameplay comes with the territory of visual novels.
I definitely think its so bad its good, though I don't think its as goodbad as a number of other games in this years jam. Though that being said there are also a number of games I don't think were so bad its good at all, so it still stands a fair a bit above several others. Of course the voice acting adds a lot of production value so that's definitely a bonus, but uh I'm guessing you weren't expecting to score too many points in graphics anyways lol.
Good work once again!