How can I explain this game without spoiling any of its content...

Imagine you have a cake. It's pink and white and layered with strawberries so you kind of already know what to expect. Sure, there are some hints of chocolate icing here and there that suggests there might be a little bit more to it, but overall it seems quite simple.
And sure enough it is. You take a bite here, and another forkfull there, and all you can taste is the sweetness of the strawberry and the light fluffiness of the cream. The chocolate icing makes its way onto your tongue every now and then, but it's all within the realms of expectations. You decide to push forward a little more, dig in a little deeper.
But something's wrong, and you sure did not anticipate this. Thick caramel sauce starts oozing out from the centre, dragging little chunks of honeycomb with it. You realise that the strawberry and vanilla cream you've been tasting all this time has been but a pretense for what it really hid inside. You try to soak up the caramel with the outer layer of the cake, but it's no use; eventually the caramel drenches everything into mushy, sticky mess. And boy, is it glorious.
You come into the experience expecting something light, but you come out having swallowed the heaviest dessert you've ever had. And the combination somehow works.

Definitely should play this game without reading any spoilers.

The game is free but the therapy is not

i wanted a dating sim but i got depression good game

...The game's free, but...


Let's just say you don't pay with money...

Came for girls, left with depression

I'm not Oki-Doki after playing Doki-Doki.

It’s not free; you just don’t pay with money

It takes 5 hours to beat the game.

But a life to forget.

More of an emotional review

It's amazing how this game went from a tropey dating sim to meta horror to a surprisingly heartwarming ending, especially with the golden ending. I went in expecting to get spooked. What I didn't expect was to actually feel for these characters, who only ever scared you because of the machinations of a sympathetic villain.

More than anything, this game made me sad. I think that's what the creator intended. We're presented with this cliche dating sim harem scenario, a perfect example of male wish fulfilment. However, despite some pretty generic character archetypes, I still found them more and more compelling as I spent time with them and discovered the drama they were concealing.

Then just as you're getting comfortable, the twist in tone you always expected finally arrives, and yes, it's unsettling and creepy and may even make you jump, but it doesn't stop giving you something to engage with beyond the sheer shock value of those scares. And when we learn the truth behind the horror, we realize it was never really a horror game, but a dating sim turned on its head by an AI painfully aware of the outside world.

It's hard to pin down exactly how it's made me feel. I was left with this unfilled yearning for the sort of interpersonal drama and growth the game teased in its first two acts. I guess what resonated most with me is that this sort of synthetic, yet beautiful interpersonal scenario can only exist in a simulated environment. It's meant to be tantalizing, it's meant to play on your desires, but if the characters were to ever become aware of the reality of their existence, they'd be shaken to their cores.

But this is less about the experience of those characters, considering the actual AI in this game is nowhere near complex enough to produce self-awareness. It's what those characters show us about the boundaries between us and our beloved simulations that really matters. It shows us not only yearning for something more than we can experience in our day-to-day lives, but being discontent with the very fabric of our reality.

And maybe that really is still a kind of horror.

The game isn't free to play, you just don't pay with money