Ann is great. If you know me, I am very big into RPG maker games. Not as big as other people, but definitely big. Anyway, when I saw people repping this free RPG maker game on Steam. I was like "Yooooo I HAVE to try it!" I was also intrigued by the fact that this is the first niche RPG maker game that had animated cutscenes-- that looked EXTREMELY well drawn. So yeah:

Brief Description
Ann is about this girl who starts school at this Art Academy. The academy has a rule that you cannot stay in the building after it locks up for the night. Ann finds herself snoozing while getting some classwork done, stays in the school, and gets transported to a mysterious world of monsters inside a distorted version of the school...

Pros
-Very well-drawn short animated cutscenes WITH SOUND!! (Wow!) I eat this up. Props to the creator. This is the main part of the game that makes it unique and enticing
-Neat little story. I like the characters (except for one). I like the character development of the Security Guard even if predictable a teensy bit (and kinda spoiled by an achievement I peeked at). Really wholesome interactions between them. Overall enjoyable experience playing
-There were neat little puzzles that were not too hard at all. I like that for what this game was going for.
-Polished. No glitches or anything. The writing was fine (a little corny and unrealistic) from what I remember and no grammar mistakes that jumped out at me
-Has some pretty neat easter eggs which I have looked up on YouTube because I unfortunately cannot be assed

Cons
-This game I think is trying to be scary. It is an RPG maker horror game, but I did not feel spooked playing it I am not going to lie.
-Chase Scenes Galore that sometimes require FRAME PERFECT PATHING TO COMPLETE! This sucks. I hate this if overused in an RPGmaker game. It is not fun and is just a way to make the game longer. None of the chase scenes were scary either so it did not really add to what the game was trying to be. They were not unbeatable, but definitely can steer a person away.
-The story is a pro and a con. The con part is that it has an overused villain trope that honestly can have more depth. I just did not like what they did with the character overall-- feels silly and unnecessary
-The actual character dialogue sprites of the game were a little goofy. They were great! But it did not have nearly as much shading or anything compared to animation cutscenes (which usually is the other way around?). You are staring at the sprites the entirety of the game so I figured it would be a little more detailed.
-The environment was okay. I am not sure if it was regular assets from RPG maker, but yeah It didn't really have any specific, original style aside from the characters.

Ann was great for a free game. Pretty damn great. I would recommend this game to RPG maker game fans. Those who have not dived into the RPG maker game genre or are skeptical about it, I probably wouldn't push them to give it a shot. It is a neat little short game, a great experience playing, but it is not for everyone. A good 2-3 hour game.

This is a cool little RPG Maker game! It kept me engaged the whole time, had fun segments throughout, with solid music and story! The highlight of the game are the animated sequences, which are beautifully done and genuinely caught me off guard with their quality. I think it would've been cool if Rong Rong himself animated them, though...

It's a very short game, I beat it and got all achievements in under 3 hours. So, if you want to kill that amount of time, this game is a very solid way of doing that, especially seeing as it's free! For what it is, very good!!!

For a free game, Rong Rong's "Ann" deserves more recognition and kudos for what it offers.

"Ann" is the story of a lonely art student, Ann, who gets trapped in her school after falling asleep working on her final project. The school is haunted, cursed, and it desires a new soul to add to its ranks.

As Ann makes her way through this tower of terror, she encounters a friendly Security Guard, as well as some playful (yet dangerous) ghosts possessing all sorts of inanimate objects.

Will you discover the mystery behind the curse on this school?

I played "Ann" for about an hour and a half via mouse and keyboard. The controls are very simple, but the puzzles and chase sequences proved challenging. Try, try, try again is the only strategy one can incorporate in a game such as this.

There are cutscenes in this game, and they're very well done! Fully animated cutscenes with artwork that nearly made me jump out of my seat more than a few times! I truly enjoyed these animated sequences, well done to the animation team.

"Ann" is a free game, but it provides so much more than most free games out there. I will definitely be checking out Rong Rong's games in the future. Please, give this game a try and spread the word!

Ann was kind of a disappointment, honestly. The only thing this game has going for it is some relatively nice animated cutscenes, though the art quality can be kind of hit and miss. Besides that, it feels like this game was attempting to be a tribute to RPG Maker horror (or perhaps just Ib in general), that completely fails to capture what made any of its predecessors special and ends up feeling like a poor imitation. A very unfortunate waste of effort when it feels like there definitely could've been more done here.

Ann is a free 2021 RPG Maker horror game, that while being free, is entirely solid.

The game really harkens back to old RPG Maker classic games, and same with its artstyle, it really nails that old atmosphere of an old RPG Maker horror. It does have a convoluted story, that really didn't need to be as long as it was.

Lots of the twists in this game weren't really needed, the stuff with the Principal wasn't necessarily needed for a game like this. They should have kept it as a PG-13 ish kiddie horror adventure, which is what it feels like a lot of the time, since its not scary at all, and almost more comedic.

The game's good though, and for being free, it's quite worth it, especially since it is about 2 hours long in length, its a game you should check out.

Overall: 7/10

maybe not the person to ask since this is very much in nostalgic conversation with older games that i am not familiar with! but i could not find a way into this for the most part. could have either reigned in the general tone so the big reveals arent so underwhelming, or increased the intensity of the big reveals. some potentially interesting threads about the toxic need to put Competitiveness in educational spaces (which ultimately serve those in power rather then being any kind of meritocracy), might be some Real Art School Baggage on display, but its all a bit light and airy to me. a few passes of thoughtfulness away from being interesting or a few passes of edginess away from being impactful. this all applies to when u actually Get to the revelations, the leadup is just a bunch of weirdly unimaginative art direction, puzzles ive seen too many times in other games, and weirdly precise demands on use of rpgmaker's grid movement for chase scenes. my lack of nostalgic fondness for either gives me just about nothing in the play experience. the emotional thread with the security guard goes off alright, but the borderline saccharine way things are resolved in the true ending makes me wonder: is this whole thing a bit too Toothless to capture the Famously Edgy rpgmaker horror scene its nostalgic for, or was all that stuff itself pretty toothless and this is par for the course? idk. weird experience for me, mostly unfruitful.

This game is a big pot of strange to me. The story is pretty good, although it isn't really until the end that things really pick up. I'd say the best environment is in the sewing room, I love the wood walls and the way they contrast with the blue carper. The music is also really great. The ambient track in the area you first play as the security in is my favorite.

There are a lot of design issues with it, even simple things that I feel like could've been fixed very quickly. I'm just gonna list them off here instead of going super in depth on them, though.
- The autosaves slot takes up the first/top slot on the list of saves. Despite this, when you hit 'continue' your cursor defaults to the second slot (aka the first manual save slot). And because this is one of those die-a-lot games, you get the urge to spam enter to try again. However, the autosave often saves at further points than your manual save does, which you might not realize during multi-room chase sequences where it saves every room. So you end up having to replay a lot more than you realize if you don't select the autosave every time you die.
- Relatedly, the autosave has the potential to save over your progress if you trigger it in a further room -> die -> select manual save slot -> respawn earlier -> step on the (invisible) save trigger on accident.
- Last point on autosaves, despite the autosave feature clearly being triggered by some sort of event tile, there's at least one room where it saves before an unskippable cutscene in the middle of a chase sequence where it does nothing but show you what to interact with. This made dying in this room all the more painful as the cutscene plays every time you load the save.
- The first chase scene in the game literally has you wait by the exit for one of the monsters to move. It moves in a specific pattern so it won't chase you, so you just have to stand and wait for it to move while all these other monsters are running around you.
- There is no visual or clear distinction between enemies that move randomly, enemies that move in a specific pattern, and enemies that chase you. This makes traversing areas with hordes of enemies very confusing as you have little to no room to build strategy.

Finally, the art is really well made, but the talk sprites give off this weird feeling that they were... traced from 3D models? I don't know how to describe it. It's like the shapes and forms are solid, as is the coloring, but the lines are shaky, and the eyes in particular look really weird anatomically. And I know it's an anime art style but I mean like, eyes being vastly different sizes when it's clearly meant to be a perspective shot but it isn't being portrayed properly. I think this is the first time where I've played a game where the overworld sprites portrayed the characters with more detail and uniqueness than the talk portraits.

this is game 5/71 from my backlog!

well, this was short.
i suppose i could've gotten the other endings, but i just got ending 2 and said bye bye, this game is very cool, i guess, but it doesn't have too much going for it other than being another rpgmaker horror game, of which there are better ones out there, not that this one is bad or anything

funnily enough, i played this game long ago, and from there i started following the artist, so it is cool to see their artwork in a game, even if it's an average game.

also, the character portrait for the security guard looks goofy af

For a free game, I can't be too hard on it. The character designs, animated cutscenes, and some puzzles are all great and unique, but I feel that they spent too much time trying to expand the titular character for very little payoff. The setting is also honestly done better in Ib, the arts and music school aesthetic has so much potential but most areas are mundane. It's still enjoyable nonetheless, and you don't lose anything for playing it, but a lot of what it does well is done better in other games.