What makes this game so great? ( to you )

[Andrew R]

This is one of my favorite games of 2021. ( so far )

And I own some pretty great PS4 & 5 games. For me, this game has heart. The characters, the story, you are invested and WANT to know what happens next. :)

Would like to see the devs on here more.

[bascalibur]

I mean there is something to be said for the music and general artistic choices throughout the game. It's all very well made and memorable. That's really only face value though. When it comes to the real substance and why I personally like the game I think it all comes down to the realistic portrayal of relationships and the mental health issues that each of the individual characters struggle with.

[DR. DEADHEAD]

Not gonna lie, if it weren't for me liking the art style I most likely would've never cared to check the game out. As immature as it may seem, I really value a game's visuals (not graphical wise but if it's pretty to me) to the point it's the deciding factor of whether or not a game sticks with me.
That said, the script being surprisingly digestible for a cast filled with kids helped me sympathize with the characters more and want to keep going. The humor brightens up the game amidst its themes and also encourages me to explore more because I wanna see what other dialogue the characters have. The battles are really engaging and I enjoy playing around the emotion statuses. And finally, the fact it's an rpg, which I think works extremely well for it. It's a genre I really love but haven't played much of because fantasy-based settings with serious tones being the standard kinda pushes me away from most of them.
Oddly enough being someone who experiences depression and anxiety themselves, and is often isolated for a very long time, those aspects of the story didn't strike a chord with me and I'd say are what I was interested in the least while playing for the first time.

TLDR; The art, dialogue, tolerable characters, humor, and combat.

[LV-04 "Leelee"]

The really cute characters and how destabilizing the endgame tonal whiplash is. The end is going to stick in my head for years.

[lessthanoff]

Pretty much everything, for me, which is rare when it comes to games. I love the art style; the combat mechanics are interesting and fun; the music is phenomenal; there is plenty of side content and secrets to find; the characters feel like real people and are very well-written; the story, while simple on paper, is extremely well-executed and took me through such a roller coaster of emotions, unlike anything I've ever experienced in a game.

One detail that I especially appreciated though, which few games seem to bother with, was weaving player input and the narrative together to tell its story, rather than relying only on exposition or cut scenes.

The best example I can point to for what I mean (and this is a major spoiler, so I will mark it as such -- don't read this unless you have completed the game) is near the end, where we find out that Sunny was the one who killed Mari, and that he and Basil hung her to make it appear as a suicide. Instead of just giving this information to us as some exposition dump, or showing it in a cut scene, the game forces the player to pick up the photos of it happening, frame by frame, and makes the player put the pictures in order within the photo album to tell the story of what happened. The player, in a sense, is almost forced to participate in the horrible event, and feels much more engaged in the reveal, compared to if they had just watched it happen in a cut scene, or read it as text. And all of this is conveyed without a single line of exposition. The player knows everything that happened through the process of putting these photos in the album alone. I personally think stuff like this needs to be in way more games.

Overall, this is probably the best game I've ever played.

[Andrew R]

The quality certainly speaks for itself. :)

I realize the dev/s can't respond to every single thread on here but would love to hear what inspired them and their response to this little game that became a big hit.