itch.io

This was lots of fun! I think I actually liked it better than the original it gets so lonely here, for pacing reasons: it feels more focusedly-told, with its shorter length and differently-laid-out branch-structure leaving less room for the story's progression to sag towards the middle.

One interface-question: when I was at the point of 100%-completion-as-best-I-could-tell—I made it to the point of (spoilers in rot13) univat gur abgrf haybpxrq va gur tnyyrel, naq hcba fgnegvat gur tnzr ntnva orvat noyr gb sbetrg rirelguvat va beqre gb erfrg tnzr-fgngr—the music gallery listed only seven tracks as playable, despite there being eight interface-slots for them. (The seven BGM tracks from throughout the main story, but not the credits-music.) Is this indicative of my having missed things more broadly, such that I should poke around more to find hidden corners of things that I missed on my initial passes?

(Also, somewhat-implicitly-spoilery fun theory I had during the middle parts of the story: for a decent chunk of the story I was thinking that gur znva punenpgref jrer obgu Ebfrggr, va fbzr fbeg bs gvzr-ybbc bs ure jvgpu-frys chfuvat ure abajvgpu-frys gb ybir ure hagvy riraghnyyl ure abajvgpu-frys jbhyq orpbzr n jvgpu naq yrg ure jvgpu-frys trg gb or gur nzarfvnp abajvgpu sbe n juvyr. This is not exactly what happened, but it was a fun possibility to imagine while it remained plausible!)

I enjoyed this a lot! The characters and their interactions and relationships were fun, and also had a very interesting sense of underlying tension to them, where things were clearly going well on the whole but they were never purely and uncomplicatedly nice and free-of-stakes; it was very good. (I feel kind of bad for Saori! I hope she and Chisato can keep making progress repairing their relationship as time goes on.) And I enjoyed the period-piece-ness of it; the reminders of what computers and their surrounding culture were like in Ye Olde Dayes were pleasantly nostalgic, and the brief homage to the oldschool NScripter interface was unexpected and delightful.

Also, the portrayal of the creative process itself felt both on-point and... kind of inspirational for me, in my capacity as someone who has an eternal cycle of creative-projects-in-progress none of which ever get finished? I feel like it'd benefit me to pursue a process more resembling Saku and Chisato's process here, with their mix of scoping-down of the project and intense focus on it after determining a reasonable scope. I'm pretty seriously considering trying to spend today on my current creative-project-in-progress, in fact, while this story is still fresh in my memory and thus at its peak of power inspiration-wise!

Thanks!

The downloads seem to be for the beta. Are the files just misnamed, and actually for the finished game?

I got the full game without first playing the demo, to avoid spoilers. Having now finished the full game, I'm interested in going back to play the demo and see the demo-exclusive prologue and chibi sprites. However, the demo's download link seems to be missing; the only download offered under the "Download demo" header of the game's page is for the 18+ patch. This applies both when I'm logged into itch and when I view it from a logged-out tab, so I'm pretty sure it's equally missing for people who haven't already bought the main game, which seems like even more of a problem than its inaccessibility to me as someone who already has.

I'm having a very similar issue, but at the very beginning of the story. As soon as the visuals cut to Eysenfeld, the game performance drops to a crawl with maybe one or two frames per second; and then, when I try to advance the text, it continues runnning at a crawl for maybe another second or two and then freezes entirely and doesn't continue. I've tried the scene in version 1.0, and then in 1.1 with the anti-patch in the game directory, and then 1.1 with the anti-patch deleted, and the failure happened in exactly the same way in exactly the same place regardless of those details.

(And I'm also on Windows 10 64-bit.)

Update: I did a bunch of fiddling around trying to fix it, and after several unsuccessful bits of trial-and-error, I found something definitive: the issue happens when I'm using my CPU's integrated graphics processor (which, incidentally, I hadn't realized was my laptop's default, and wow that explains some things in retrospect), but when I switch over to an actual GPU suddenly it runs fine. Moreover, at that point it runs fine even with the anti-patch. Hopefully this is helpful.