WAAGGHH! Okay I just actually set aside the time to play this. You're killing me here.
My expectations going in: "well, it uses hand-painted animation cels, so my hipster sensibilities will be appeased, and it's gay, so that gives it points. beyond that we'll see"
What I got: the single most healing experience I've had in a long ass time. Playing this actually made me consider going to a convention this summer. It has been 4 years since the last time I went to a convention. I have never felt so seen by a game.
[Also the fact that the font + color makes it looks like old subtitles.... absolutely impeccable...]
The fluff was so cute it had me making scrunched Kermit face the whole time, but really I just keep coming back to how painfully relatable this all was. What a delightful story and a brilliant idea to literally use animation cels as your medium to tell it. This is straight up one of the best VN's I've played, obviously it's relatively short but it's like a short story as opposed to a novel—it's exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story it needs to tell.
Absolutely fantastic shit, I'm inflicting this on every single other old tired gay ex-cosplayer I know [I know many of them]