reminds me heavily of Iain Reid’s novels, of which everything I’ve read from him I rlly love. distinct normalcy in both of these creators works where they’ve made these worlds that seem so mundane and average just w a few sci-fi elements thrown into worlds that are otherwise just like our own and then by the end delving fully into horror/sci-fi. idk I’ve said how much I dislike lynch’s work on here before and for plenty of reasons but def one of the things I hate most about his work is how obvious it is that his worlds and characters are off and off or strange in a way that isn’t rlly believable at all and so for me both the horror and social commentary of his work falls flat for me every single time.
was stunned by this, mostly by its art direction it’s rlly beautiful and so tonally and visually it’s own thing, fucking obtuse and a little bit annoying as a game though but I think that’s okay :-))

I've heard amazing things about episode 3, so I decided to try the first one out... and it was alright. There's some really neat art you see during moments such as deaths. They were definitely the highlight for me (the parody stuff was neat, too). Otherwise, the setting and story felt quirky, but not really in an interesting sense. The game was rather short (only taking me about an hour to beat), so I can't be too harsh on it, but I found myself rather bored. The puzzles sometimes felt like the only way to solve them was to just interact with every item. Although I am pretty excited to play the rest, here's to hoping the next one is better!

Extra: Charlotte is a cute main character, and I'm interested to see where she goes.

loved how much etherane loves kurt vonnegut. not only the writing is reminiscent, but some concepts of deity and existentialism that vonnegut works with can be seen here! of course is the first in a trilogy and it feels very introductory so i can't go deeper into themes. i believe that it is probably a type of work that it gets better as its world is contextualized in later installments. anyway! i really loved the writing and the characters seem very interesting, felix is a beloved already and charlotte is very cute! also the soundtrack really sets up the traggic/melancholic mood throught the game. the contextualization of the playable character as a "puppet" and the player as "the puppeter" is genuinely genius and makes you think that videogames are perhaps more close to theater than cinema, idk. anyway. just thoughts!

The player insert in this being named "Seth" is so fucked up.
It's like if my full legal name was "Big Dick".

This game uses a bunch of royalty free music and they dead-ass use kevin macleod minecraft tutorial music at one part.

Really funny looking at the rating disparity between this game and the rest of the series. This being a 3.3 and the third game having a 4.3 and being in the top 200 games on this site lol. If this is the kinda mid one then i am incredibly excited to check out the rest because i really loved this!

Puzzle design does kinda suck. Every puzzle boiling down to "Count! Now count in a different order! Add it all together now!"

Good entry into the "RPG maker horror game where you play as a little girl and guide a confused twink along with you" genre.

i find myself endeared to this weird glitchy surreal world, with its opaque theology and its cutesy inhabitants. i really love the art style, and all the individual images that come up during bad endings or cutscenes.

there are frustrating moments, for sure. save as often as you possibly can, because you never know when you'll examine something and immediately die. opened the wrong door? immediate death! i don't mind that sort of thing, once i know it's that type of game. additionally, there's a maze with a bunch of enemies with random movement patterns, and if they touch you you have to start over from before a scene where you need to select the right dialogue options, but it's just that one area so keep pressing on. i recommend looking up a guide (there's one on steam for ep1 and ep2, just have that open if you start feeling annoyed, it's very light on spoilers).

should you play this game? if you've played and enjoyed yume nikki and the games it inspired, and you find yourself drawn to the art style, absolutely. if you played nier automata and were delighted by ending k, absolutely. if you grew up in the newgrounds/deviantart/invader zim/keenspot era, absolutely. plus, it's free, and the other eps are only a couple dollars.

i'm looking forward to playing the rest!

Mostly just settled at a lukewarm for me throughout most of it. It had a pretty strong sense of atmosphere and I liked the OST a lot, plus there were a couple scenes I really liked, but didn't really have much outside of that: The main relationship between Charlotte and Felix felt really scarce for how much weight the game puts on it, the meta elements feel really on the nose (having me supposed to be a character in the game really loses it's impact when I have such a rigid set of things I can do), and while I can't say this is these are the worst puzzles I've seen in a RPGMaker game (thank u the crooked man) it's certainly up there. I was mostly ambivalent about the art or the particular writing style. Game got a couple chuckles out of me, which is more than most games I guess.

I really hated that ending tho.

i'm of the understanding that the later episodes will provide a level of self-reflection on the artist's part and i certainly don't mean to shit on anyone for the sake of making art. with that said, i found this first episode of hello charlotte largely full of itself despite having a tiny runtime with which it essentially serves to throw "emotional" gutpunches at you for characters you've known for half the length of an average blockbuster, constantly throwing rudimentary puzzles and unfair deathtraps at you, and opts for loredumping and nudge-nudge fourth wall breaks instead of actually forming a relationship between player and character, character and environment, or character and character. i walked away from this first episode largely unsure of what the purpose or point of what i'd just played was, and was reminded of a lot of earlier, more competent rpgmaker works from ages before this came out. i did like the "awkward dimension's" art and i will admit some pieces of spritework felt space funeral-esque but this wholesome bean!!! style rpgmaker protag has never done anything for me and hello charlotte isn't on any better footing with me thus far on that level. i'll keep an open mind, and regardless, i don't regret paying for this game because i'd rather see independent and expressive work, even that i don't like, see funding and support.

I play a lot of shorter games because I lack the commitment for a sprawling 200-hour experience, but the problem with playing lots of shorter games is that a lot of them feel shallow. Hello Charlotte does not have that problem, and instead fleshes out a beautiful world in the under 2 hours I spent playing it. Aside from the worldbuilding, the writing and art are incredible and the protagonists are genuinely memorable and interesting (again not something I usually expect from a short game). Overall this is definitely something you need to check out if you’re looking for a short, free game and I’m very excited to play the sequel.

Has really cool vibes and striking visual style, but ultimately I found it to be shallow. Narrative feels like quirky, edgy randomness for randomness sake, without a clearly defined characters, theme or a point through most of the storyline. There is an idea behind it, apparently, and I think I quite like it. I like the concept of a whole story and its world being a surreal mirror or a character's psyche - but in this state it feels like an ineffective cliché, because aforementioned fixation on edgy randomness prevents these ideas from saying anything meaningful, or form a compelling narrative experience.

And gameplay consists of obnoxious puzzles with instant death traps. It was not interesting to explore this game's world.

But I really do like the vibes.

“Congratulations” BANG

Simple and juvenile in a delightful way. Hello Charlotte oozes the honesty of an author that has yet to find their voice but understands the language of a world inherently hostile, so to make it surreal yet comprehensible with just enough imagery.

It’s a fast paced, short tale of being always journeying and always unwelcome, of being terrified by what may warp us in something different, of junk food, gods and teddy bears

I’m glad that people connected with Charlotte later on, but I miss something that got lost since this first game. May sound typical for this kind of RPG maker games, but to me the game is entirely about the peculiar and imaginative perception of the world from Charlotte’s view in videogame language.

If I’m allowed to make a guess, I’m pretty sure that most people who grew up with videogames being quite present in their lives have dreamt in videogame terms (specially as children, but also as adults), even daydreaming about them. Something similar must have happened with cinema and TV (camera angles, cuts and such being present in dreams and even when recalling memories) and Hello Charlotte has a lot of this new influence on perception. Her imaginary friend is someone never present that may seem (and may be) a fourth wall breaking reference to the player or just her thinking that she’s a videogame character. The multiple deaths act more as what ifs, what if the world ended if I touch this, what if the scary bear impales me. It may seem insensitive to think about these images, but to me it’s kind of liberating from the perspective of Charlotte, just her letting her mind express herself and experiment knowing that a bad end can always be rewinded.

What’s interesting about the mixed perception between videogames and real life is the point that I miss in the next two games. This perception happens (partially) as a way to connect very designed, even standardized simple rules and the bigger complexities of the real world. Think about little kids asking about “who are the good and bad guys” like if everything was a cartoon, not out of bad intent, but to try and grasp something unknown to them on their terms. The first Hello Charlotte is a quite well achived abstract adventure in the conventional sense with a lot of personal quirks in its presentation that lets glances at Charlotte’s deepest worries. If I’m allowed to take a picky example, Episode 2 represents Charlotte social troubles in school through RPG Maker standard combats. The first game is the imagination running free while still being inevitably attached to who Charlotte is and her life, the second one feels like a failed attempt to represent social anxiety in those terms, ignoring both the way that is really perceived and how the imagination tries to make some sense out of it.

My biggest shame is that the dreamy yet way less abstract influence in the next games does come occasionally incredibly close to my dreamy perceptions, apart from the cinema and videogames presence. The mix between everyday places with something always off, but something that seems normal unless you stop to think about it, and the meaning that such small changes carry (like everything about the school structure, for instance think about how the way to it requires the students to take a mortal drop into a mattress, a process that makes sense but only under a specific non sensical logic). In some way, a perfect match about videogames' constant failures at replicating reality by nature and yet the convincing sense that their obvious fakeness brings. I appreciate the attempts to try to have more focused thematic ideas later on, but while I never found my footing in those, I always yearned for that more natural expression of intuition from the subconscious. Charlotte lets herself see without noticing while dreaming of being herself.

sexy fweged recommended this to me as part of this list thanks dude

what the fuck
end of the review

no ok fr im not entirely sure what i played right now and im even less competent to explain what this game is about but we will try anyway because we are very brave on this day

hello charlotte ep 1 of 3 ? or maybe more idk i saw some other games when looking for hello charlotte so either the page is tricking me or theres actually more of this abstract artsy indie (?) project but anyway revolves around charlotte looking for food because shes v hungry (can relate) and somehow gets into a continuum limbo of TV channels and audiovisual distortions in the world around her umh that escalated p quickly id say

anyway after getting to know her housemates a loli doctor with a gas mask because ? (UPDATE im playing the second episode and i just realised hes a man what the actual fuck people why did i think he was a loli this says a lot about me) a sebastian michaelis looking fella and a breaking bad radioactive costume methhead charlotte gets to babysit tsundere rude boy and show him the surroundings and then shes like what the fuck im so tired can you leave me alone and then he leaves and then he vanishes and then you enter a TV until you get into a teddy bear house (weird twist + bad dungeon and cheap deaths)

then she gets into a silent film like environment finds felix and just goes through some more boring puzzles about numberssssss (theres a lot of them because apparently thats the only kind of stuff they can put in a rpgmaker game) and then like get into a labyrinth or whatever find some strange people in particular umh spider looking they/them and then VERY BIG FAT JUICY SPOILERS AHEAD felix gets decapitated im so sorry tsudere guy but anyway frei (the spider looking being) goes to charlotte and is like ok well you just need to change channel then she changes channel (whatever the fuck that means) felix is now alive you try to get the fuck out but a maze needs one of the 2 to be left behind

if you choose felix hes gonna get killed like a fucking stupid ass bitch by a ? thing girlie i have no idea and then its a bad ending buuuuut if you choose charlotte a masked guy possesses her for a period of time that feels like 3 mins and kills the same being that killed felix then shes normal again and everyone is safe so you just get out of this place and get into another world called the slaughterhouse v funny now for some reason felix is like umh shouldnt pythias (as if i know what that is) be around here boom theyre all dead apart from like 2 or something anyway theyre like godlike entities but after the coming of the oracle (another divine entity that isnt shown for now) theyre all trash now anyway they get into the last room and the oracle is in a fucking tv screen going on and on about how this world is dying etc etc so charlotte accepts them in her mind and they are now the same thing and then she tells this to the umbrella man going oh umbrella man aint that fun girlie . you literally took an entity of a plane far superior to your understanding into your narrow and obtuse mind why the fuck you laughing anyway everyones happy lets go to sleep the end

now this is like surface level story but charlotte is actually a puppet which is like a being controlled by a puppeteer which is yes the player but its also a separate entity called seth ? that also appears in the very last scene and the bad ending ? so am i seth what are the implications here

anyway yeah they get all the time into this 4th wall breaking stuff and also the writing and interactions are kinda making fun of the rpgmaker tropes which is cool theyre self aware of the medium theyre coming out of so at least i can commend them on that

ok well in all seriousness the story is what it is i dont think its that particularly groundbreaking or interesting but for a game that took me probably less than a hour ? its serviceable and lures you into the world

as a rpgmaker game the gameplay is standard rpgmaker stuff that we all know and love/despise so i wont get into that dangerous territory but i will talk about the stuff that i loved about this little game

first and foremost the art is AMAZING OH MY GOOOOOOOD its just ughhhhhhh i love the little illustrations here every characters icon has so many expressions and different sprites and honestly for an rpgmaker game thats not to be taken for granted like its just fine fine work and in general i just like this art style a lot

the thing that actually pulled me into the experience was the atmospheric and abstract nature of this world charlottes living in that feels like a big ass simulation made just for her i have no idea if thats the route that theyre gonna take for the next episode but if they do i knew it all along

still everything feels very evocative and esoteric in some ways from the characters just spawning out of nowhere to vanishing into thin hair and the equally claustrophobic yet agoraphobic rooms and halls and sceneries and stuff the world feels simultaneously vast and minuscule and time is stopped in a repeating and endless loop

i saw a nice effort that was put into the subtle world building elements that characterise this world (the oracle ? the pythia slaughter ? the puppet/puppeteer relationships ? the different channels/worlds ?) i know theyre preparing something big for the second episode i just know it i cant wait to play it tbh backloggd people say its better so should i trust them

aside from that i also listened to some killer tracks that i wasnt expecting at all honestly they really surprised me with this one i felt it was gonna be like chill ambient/dark music and instead they delivered some stuff i really liked . it was scarce and it was short but i can see a lot of potential in there

anyhow cute little game for a cute little hour im gonna play the second game next so be assured to see me again talking about this white haired girl with mental issues

also bomb cover art

i feel like that entity just sitting around in blood and felix telling you not to touch it was actually the most disturbing stuff in the game why the fuck would you lemme see experimentation on animals just like that

the bad ending with the teddy bear skewering charlotte was actually kind of hilarious im sorry

zapping but make it abstract and scary

some parts kind of reminded me of yume nikki (has never played yume nikki)

the fact that the ink princess story is unfinished is something that the developers will have to talk about with my lawyer because i cant believe they just left me there wondering what the fuck this ink princess is up to in paper kingdom so as soon as i know who you are trust you will be dealt with . period period