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Behind the rough exterior, I can sense how the author (the hat?) put a lot of love and care into the story. What shines for me are the flawed characters you meet. No one is perfect, but they are all trying to make their best of the lives they are given.  I also like that the player character has a fleshed out story on their own, making the different paths more tragic or bittersweet.

On a sidenote, I'm gonna try out the hamburger recipe next week.

Thank you @purplehat-productions for making this game.

Induction

Penlight changed my life and will change yours, too. Just look at the pretty lights and take a deep breath in… Just kidding, this is not one of those games that tries to hypnotize the player. But I must say, having read hundreds of stories in my lifetime, there has only been one other story that touched me on such a personal level. So in a way, I was not kidding: Penlight changed my life. Now I know that there are other people out there who share my complicated fascination for hypnosis and put their heart into creating such a wonderful piece of media. For me, the world got just a little brighter knowing that. If you were looking for an unbiased review, I must disappoint you, this is going to be my love letter to Penlight. In my opinion, one criterion for a great story is, that it is robust against spoilers. The story doesn’t need cheap twists to make you care about the characters and their development. If you have not noticed already, I think that Penlight is such a story, so there will be a lot of spoilers in my review and I won’t feel bad about them.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

Villain Routes

As an avid reader of mind control stories, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what would happen: Lonely guy learns hypnosis and now his life has been turned around. He can have Tsundere-chan, class representative-chan or even mysterious girl-chan as a girlfriend/slave. He can also have all three of them and try to take over the world. Reading this kind of story was starting to frustrate me. From my personal experience, having someone like that is just exhausting, there is no love to be had in such a relationship. You always have to take care of them because you worry about what happens when you are not around.And here is where penlight separates itself from all the other stories: It lets the player go down these paths, but gives them a realistic ending. The second yandere personality you created in Sayori will ruin your life, Nozomi’s inability to say no takes away every interesting part of her character and trying to mind control the whole town will just leave you empty, void, unloved and lonely. This was the kind of story that I have been waiting for. One that would show the realistic consequences of those scenarios. But these “villain/delusion”-routes are just the beginning. Let me now talk about the parts that this game so good for me.

We have to stop this

There are three routes that connected to me on a personal level. Let’s talk about the first one: The “Nozomi, we have to stop this”-route. This route is special in a sense that the protagonist, in a hypnosis themed game, willingly gives up on hypnosis and still gets a wholesome ending. This route feels like it mirrows my own journey with hypnosis. To me, most hypnosis stories just devolved into making one party helpless, stupid, horny and dependent. And honestly, I was starting to realize that was just not my thing at all. Kyon realizes the same thing and decides to stop. The decisions Kyon took on that route, would be those I would take if I were in that situation. It is a route that represented me as a person. And I never thought a visual novel could do that. That is one of the many strengths of Penlight: The personality and character of Kyon adapts to the choices you make until the point where it felt like you are Kyon. I could imagine myself sitting there and playing board games with these fictional characters, having the time of my life.

Wholesome Routes

So let’s talk about the second special route. As I said, I was almost about to give up on hypnosis because I felt like there just was not anything for me. If I wanted to make a comparison, As a comparison: I was always interested in ice cream but every shop I went just sold ice cream that didn’t fit my taste. That is, until I played the Sayori doll route. I finally found the ice cream I was looking for, and it tasted amazing. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit overdramatic here, but this route was the hypnosis I was craving. The one where it helps people. I will never forget the smile on Sayori’s face at the end when it is “doll time”. (Oh, by the way. Credits to the artist as well! The art for this game looks gorgeous, and I love the character designs.) I don’t know, the idea to be able to relax in an instant to take a breath from all the stress and tension in the world… It just, I guess, awakened something in me. I think that is why hypnosis has been so interesting to me. Because it can be used to alleviate people, amplify their strengths to become even greater versions of themselves. Reading this made me realize that I am not alone with that idea. And this realization just made my day.

Delusion

Before I want to go into my last and my favorite route, I want to go into another theme the visual novel touches. The theme of delusion, where Kyon screws up unwillingly but does not own up to his mistakes. I hated them at first. After I gave Sayori a second personality, things went awry, and I was frustrated because in my mind I did nothing wrong but got punished regardless. It just felt unfair. But after playing through all the routes, I realize that it was also one of the main themes of the story. It wants to tell the reader how dangerous even innocent looking suggestions might seem. It certainly drove the message home, so in that sense, it succeded. I would have been nice to get some kind of warning before thought. How should I have known for example that ticklish hands would lead to semi-torturing a classmate for a whole day? I was not comfortable with that.

Looking forward to

But that is truly just a minor complaint. Another one I have seen here very often is the fact that the story is unfinished. Here I must also say that I lied in the beginning which route represents myself the most. The one that I wante the most is an unfinished one: I tried pressing the button: “Let’s take turns hypnotizing each other” until my phone almost broke. At that time, I was quite disappointed when I realized that this route was unfinished. Here it was, the story I waited for since I got interested in hypnosis. The story that brings magic to the real world. The story where two people are having fun limited only by the creativity of their minds. Just imagine the possibilities! You could make each other invisible and try to play tag. This story… does not exist… yet. But now this route became my favorite route. Because I have something to look forward to, some place where I can let my imagination run wild and even create my own fanfiction. (If the author allows it) From what I gathered, the story gets a new update every 28 days, and I am looking forward to those updates. The Discord community certainly seems very lively in discussing new ideas. It is just such fun to imagine the possibilities and directions the story of Nozomi and friends will continue to develop in the future. Maybe I’ll even try to add my two cents on the Discord channel. It is certainly scary to interact with strangers on the internet, but reading this story might have given me the courage to do so.

Final words

Sooo… that has been my review. Or was it? Maybe I just tricked you into reading my life story, who knows? Anyway, If you are still thinking about playing this game: You read a 1000-word review, just play the visual novel, goddammit. It's wholesome, the characters are great and distinguisable, the art and the music are just wonderful. Or don't play it. It is certainly not for everyone. If I go back to my ice cream comparison: Penlight is a great but also very special ice cream shop. If you like ice cream, you’ll probably find something to your liking. Except that some kinds of ice cream are a lot less sweet than those from your usual ice cream dealer. But the ice cream has been made with such a passion that you’ll still enjoy it. And if you are not into ice cream… That’s still fine, everyone has their own tastes! And if you are a developer, the author, the artist or really anyone who contributed this game. Thank you so much for this wonderful game! It was an experience like no other and I can appreciate the amount of effort, time and love that must have been put into it. If any of you creators responded to this review. It would certainly make my day!