This is cute, sweet and comes from a fairly genuine place about experiences with being a NEET and how crushing, lonely and entrapping that lifestyle can feel. It's not gonna blow your mind but for me at least, having been a NEET a few times not necessarily out of full choice (anxiety/severe suicidal depression didn't help), a lot of what she said hit home for me for some things I still deal with or have dealt with and a lot made me think of how far I've come from a lot of ways I used to be and things I've better accepted about myself now too.

As someone who grew up something of a child of the internet and mid to late 2000's 4chan internet culture I feel like it touches on a lot of that shit without feeling annoying as fuck and without glorifying the shit out of being terminally online.

Yeah it's wish fulfillment like a number of VN's can be but who gives a fuck, I don't think that necessarily makes something lesser, especially if used to still get something across with what it's trying to do. It's a cute and fun time, ya'll just mean lol.

yea its like 15 min long and throwing out a fairly vapid caricature without much else there. i think its audience is meant to have the effect of "theyre just like me!! wow so terminally online poisoned and subculture" but nah i promise you everyone mods 3dses and tweets about blahajs these days lol. though the dismiss yourself shirt is new. idk you actually honestly could make something half-decent that actually bites off the stuff this attempts, theres just nothing here really. dont misconstrue that as me saying thisd be better if it referenced more obscure shit btw, im happy without more ready player ones and neptunias or whatever. this isnt morally contemptible just sorta nothing

anyway the REAL reason im posting abt some throwaway thing is bc im still ultimately disappointed at how much its caught on to call things fed jobs (jokingly?) like in the top review here. come on lol. nothing about this actually comes across as "how do you do fellow kids" to me or whatever the rationale was there. i promise youre allowed to make inoffensively mid itch io vns without Doing Covert Ops, and we should reserve the actual cia accusations for like unhinged astroturfed political claims and not reduce it to this

Low opinion here not because I'm some NEET-phobic conservative but because nameless (and, curiously, genderless) protagonists dating people as a way of 'knowing' grosses me out. There's a lot about how standardized this specific format of short RENPY dategame has become to the point that ends up making games like Milk Outside and Doki Literature Club seem like these astounding subversions outliers to the genre. However to whatever extent that can even said to be true, it would mostly be because short 1 night date Visual Novels are almost at odds with themselves. Why does the nameless protagonist named 'you' go on the date. Why depict this world with intense visual depth but have a faceless dissociated protagonist?

Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?

To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET

The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.

While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.

The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.

A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.

The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.

Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.

I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.

It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.

All memes aside this game has become one of my favorites of all time not only for helping me trhoug my journey of accepting being a trans girl, but for making me fall in love with the artstyle, every detail in the backgrounds, Kara, the artist, the ost, Kara, the references to everything just made me connect more and more to grow interested in how was and is Kara's to find that i have the same ideologys, preferences and thoughts of her. I can't even begin to imagine the full version of the game but i just hope that Hitsuji keeps making stuff of this kind because i'll always know that is going to be amazing. PD: Sorry if something is bad written english is not my first lenguage.

To start, I should address I am slightly biased; I've been following the artist for a while, I love their work, please don't that that dissuade you from the rest of my review I just thought it was worth mentioning.
Despite my generally pessimistic outlook on anything that; references in-jokes to my favorite forums of basket weavers, uses lingo from such, or appeals to the 'literally me' in those such as you or I. I still found this to be a really charming and cute VN, while the music and sfx aren't on the level of one of the classics I still found myself compelled to see what else the game had to offer through it's short albiet well drawn and charming runs. Kara's dialogue and mannerisms are very cute and relatable to myself and I'm sure many others: while that may be off putting to some, as stated in my reasoning prior, I understand. Although, a majority of the talk surrounding this game is just making some base level insult or statement without anything constructive to add in my opinion is the wrong way to go about reviewing something, especially on a game that touches on some clearly close subjects for most, if not all players. My point is; don't get so upset over some artists making a joke that's been parroted for the last fifteen years on a gun larp forum. Art changes with the times, and it's about time we saw someone who's life and passions just so happened to line up with those of you and I, and decided to give a lil wink and nudge. Basically, it's a niche game bro, only you and I are gonna play it, don't get so upset the cute neet is making a glowie joke. Plus this reminds me of a date i had with a sweet lil neet :)

the gaming equivalent to a teacher hanging a 2010 white impact text meme on the wall. great, now ive related to the sweaty gamer xD 4chan nerdy femcel girl and have been baited hook line and sinker. and no, I will not buy your redbubble merch and follow your twitter, and subscribe to your patreon for you silly nsfw posts, I would rather look in the mirror and have a Crying Dysphoric Date Night™ thank you very much.

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I haven't played the game, but oh my god I fucking wish the concept of gate keeping media was an actual thing that worked and not so boogey man used by annoying people to own the heckin CHUDs.

It would be one thing if females on tik tok who never seen a penis got into shows like Lain, EVA and Watamote and just enjoyed, but my god you "femcels" are so fucking annoying.

Edit:
Just for the record, incels are as annoying as femcels.