It's hard to say much about this story without spoiling something, partially because it's so short, and partially because the parts that are the most impactful are probably the most consequential to the narrative. If you're worried about experiencing the story blind and haven't yet, go play it now. It took me roughly 3.5 hours.

That being said, I'm going to mark the review as a spoiler but I'll try to avoid directly spoiling huge plot points, other than the setting, characters, and their general dispositions. The worst thing I will spoil in this review is a particular comment by one of the characters towards the end of the story, indirectly quoted, which refers back to their own disposition before and during the narrative.

To get the less thoughtful stuff out of the way: the music is well handled, the art is great for its purpose. I played the non-HD version which meant some struggling with old school menus and such, but was pleased that it still basically worked out of the box. The save system deleted my save once, but I started more cautiously returning to menu before closing the game and that seemed to help. Overall, the presentation and functionality of the VN is good.

I felt compelled to write this review, when I haven't written one in awhile, primarily because of a theme in the story. Hoshino Yumemi is a robot who has been tasked with operating and watching over a planetarium for an indefinite amount of time, and has a limited set of abilities. She is not aware that the world outside has been devastated and is in a post-apocalyptic ruin. Everything that she can do, and that she seems capable of understanding, mostly revolve around the planetarium and her years of experience working in the planetarium, both pre-and-post-apocalypse.

Yet she seems to be capable of understanding more, of being more, and therein I guess lies a large portion of our/my sympathy for this robot girl (aside from the natural sympathetic response humans have to things that seem sentient or human). If her planetarium conditioning was all she was capable of and was never capable of being anything else, she would just be a morbid reminder of the abandoning of the place by humans, similar to the journal-containing and building-servicing functioning computers of Fallout. That quality Yumemi has of seeming to be capable of more inspires pity, and hope, neither of which the protagonist seems to have felt for a long time.

In that way, the narrative seems to use the both of them to communicate something human within us. We're aligned with the protagonist, and in a way we feel responsible for Hoshino Yumemi. Especially as adults, most of us have become a little disillusioned with the world by now, and Yumemi's child-like love for her simple home, as well as interest in learning about people, helping them, and showing them the stars, are sort of like our inner-child in a way. We (and the protagonist) find that inner-child (and he, Yumemi) to be an annoying distraction but not one without charm. She's stuck in a mindset we can see past the edges of easily. She talks too much, has too much curiosity. She can't just be quiet and let us work, and she can't really seem to help much either. Yet, she shows the protagonist a natural beauty in a way they've never really been able to enjoy it, not just metaphorically but literally.

And yet there's a tragedy to the simplicity of her existence and it's one that operates within many of us too. Towards the end (here comes the small spoiler), Yumemi reveals that in her long years of standing in the planetarium waiting, she has wondered frequently when the humans would return, and could only come to the conclusion that they would not. However, being her usual anxious self with her limited abilities, she determines this to be a flaw, and spends time trying to find it and fix it, but cannot. This is a running theme to some degree in the story: although Yumemi is generally happy-go-lucky, she seems greatly embarrassed about her social mistakes, and explains several of her flaws with an abashed reference to her being a "Bargain Edition" model.

I was very sympathetic to this particular point. There is something of a phenomenon in people that have a certain anxious mindset wherein whenever they are confused about something, frightened about something, they turn the problem inwards and try to find the solution. Desperate for a sense of control over the situation, they determine that they are the ones that are broken, and try to find what's the matter inside of them and fix it, or they just blame themselves. In this case, Yumemi had every right to believe humans would never return, and the fact that one did is truly an unexpected, random occurrence given the circumstances. Yet given nobody to talk to, and no understanding of the world but the one she has with her limited abilities and scope, her only response was to take responsibility for this lack of faith in humanity. To try to find the flaw, and fix it. And she failed, for what one must assume was a very long time, because the flaw didn't exist. She had come to assume she was broken in ways that were undetectable and irreparable.

I don't want to moralize about the situation, and so I leave you to draw your own reflections from that, as the VN does. Yumemi is something of a tragic figure from beginning to end, but she also maintains a certain childish wonder and hopefulness throughout. She's a machine built for survival in an environment that no longer exists, much like all of us. Life having outstripped our evolution, we now have to cope with all our flaws and our limited scope of immediate biological responses to the world around us. One might say that the failure to do that by humans is what came before in the narrative that allowed the situation in the main narrative to exist, and so in a way, the protagonist may be given hope by Yumemi because she presents a sort of second chance to save the innocence of humanity in our self-created environment that has become hostile to it.

All in all, there are a lot of fascinating themes in the VN, and it was a good little story. If you have 3.5 hours, and some ten bucks for the HD version, it seems well worth it.

Anyway, I wish you luck always in tending to your inner-child and learning how to navigate this world with your limited scope and abilities. Don't forget to look at the stars while we all still can.