My review, from a gay VN enjoyer's perspective:
a great game; makes me think of scorpy socpens' "maybe ill never die becuse am special" tweet. the premise is fun, the chat-app style interface was creatively done, and grim is a great character. also i'm addicted to the wordle clone. i spent so long playing that over and over, leaving poor grim neglected. sorry grim.
I could talk about my general thoughts, which are largely positive, but i want to focus this review on what i call the "gay immersion rating". that is to say—when it comes to VNs that allow you to be gay, i like to give them a grade based on how seamlessly i can be gay. as a bi man who enjoys VNs, i often find myself in situations where a VN will allow me to choose he/him pronouns, but it's often still quite painfully obvious from the way the games are written that the writers intended for the player to be a straight woman. This is often a source of dysphoria for me, since I also happen to be trans.
My criteria is simple: if I can play through a VN multiple times as a man without ever once feeling like I'm playing the game in a way that the writers did not intend me to, it will get a perfect A+ score. I knock the score down for all the times my "gay immersion" is broken, and by different amounts depending on severity. Rarely, I may even give games an S score if they go out of their way for inclusivity. Note that this grade does not reflect on my overall feelings of the game itself—I can really love a game and still give it a low score—it only reflects my feelings on it's success in the inclusivity department.
In this regard, I give this VN a B. It was originally an A-, because while I could still tell that the player was intended to be a woman, for the most part it was largely through minor things such as:
- the customization options (which seemed to either lean largely toward the feminine side in aesthetic, or when they were more masculine, often lacked the same character that the more feminine options had, leaving very few options that balanced the line between "not aesthetically interesting to me" and "too feminine for my taste". The DLC helps in this regard, just a bit)
- the default pronouns being she/her despite the inclusion of neutral pronouns
- and the hilariously unsexy attempt at seductiveness that comes from all instances of "good girl" being replaced with "good guy".
All of which were small signs of inclusivity-as-an-afterthought, yet forgivable due to their fleeting or otherwise mild nature.
However, I had to unfortunately knock it down a letter grade, because on one subsequent playthrough while testing out some choices i hadnt seen, there was a bit where grim actually fully misgendered me—i suppose in the search-and-replace of "she" pronouns, someone missed one. oops.
I still have not played through every possible choice, so I also have no way of guaranteeing there arent any other mistakes in other choices.
still, most of these instances are minor enough that they can be largely ignored, and even the misgendering only happened in one particular choice branch, which i can avoid now that i know where it is. (For those who want to avoid it as well, I will simply advise you not to choose any choices relating to "national championships"...) and while it's not the best i've seen, I've also seen much, much worse from supposedly inclusive VNs. the ability to choose custom adjectives helped quite a bit and was very much appreciated, since I've noticed for a lot of VNs, their inclusivity-as-an-afterthought often gives itself away in the adjectives the writers choose to use for the player. So allowing the player to choose their own adjectives was quite clever—any dysphoria i got was largely offset by the gender euphoria of grim calling me a handsome man.
overall, i did enjoy this game, and do recommend it. I especially recommend getting the DLC, it includes my favorite of the endings and some of the better clothing options. i hope the next dlc lets me give my MC my handsome aquiline nose and facial hair....