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 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.

I'm gonna be real honest. This is probably one of the most frustrating and low payoff games I've ever played.

For starters, I think it's important for me to note that this is one of those 'millions of ways to die' games like The Witch's House. I haven't played that game, so I can't compare on who does it better. What's important here is that, thankfully, this game made that pretty obvious from the start. In return, I was constantly saving so that if I died from something stupid and unpredictable, I wouldn't be set back too far. This was my downfall.

There's a segment of the game about 20-30 minutes in where you have to choose one of two cups of tea to drink from. The correct one will allow you to pass through fire and the incorrect one... doesn't do anything. It doesn't kill you (this is not mentioned to the player beforehand, mind you). Well, I picked the incorrect one, because like with previous AND future puzzles in this game, the tea puzzle didn't make any sense. It's one of those 'both of these NPCs are telling the truth' logic puzzles, with a literal sign on the wall saying that neither of them are lying. Well it turns out they are lying! I found that out through a walkthrough I had to pull up because I had no idea what to do next. How you're supposed to figure that out, I don't know. I swear, I'm one of those check-everything people, especially in puzzle games like these. Well, maybe not in this game, because it taught me early on that checking everything can lead to you dying from things you didn't see coming! So I WASN'T checking absolutely everything so that I didn't keep having to reset. The REAL problem? You can't reset or undo the choice of tea you made. I saved over my choice, thinking I made the right decision (because I didn't immediately die like in so many other puzzles in this game) and in turn, I softlocked myself. 30 minutes in, now trapped in limbo. I ditched the game for the night and decided I'd try again the next day.

The next day was not much better. After going through the first quarter of the game again to get up to the tea room puzzle, I was pretty annoyed. It was honestly quite smooth sailing from there, give or take, up until this one room that involved a set of stairs and numbers being displayed in a grid in the space around it. The stairway is two rooms long, and each room has a 2x2 grid with numbers in it. I wrote down the numbers (in grid format) on a piece of paper and when I found the place they needed to be put in, I put them in. Now I know that grids can be read in a number of ways. Was I supposed to read them as two separate 2x2's, or one 4x2? Did the columns that stretched between rooms matter more than the rows? Whatever way I tried, I failed. I returned to my walkthrough, and as it turns out, for some reason, they expect you to be reading the numbers in reverse-backwards order, not even true backwards. So not like how you'd read a book (top to bottom, left to right) or like how you read a book backwards (bottom to top, right to left) but bottom to top, left to right. AND the second room comes first, for some reason. Like with the tea puzzle, how the player was supposed to know this, I'm not sure. Again, I wasn't checking absolutely everything in this area because I was tired of randomly dying, because the most random things will kill you out of nowhere, and that's what kind of game this is.

From that point on, I just played through the game with the walkthrough up, because I was genuinely only playing to be able to mark it as 'completed' on here.

In terms of the visuals and story, the variety of artstyles is incredibly cool and unique, and I think it has a very interesting and personal aesthetic that I haven't seen a whole lot in other games, and since it was made in 2015, it was doing the whole 'creepy eyeball pattern' thing long before 2020 Weirdcore happened.

However, cutscenes are atrocious, with character sprites popping in and out as the characters come and go, with dialogue prompts saying things like 'he walks out of the room' only for the character sprite to just disappear. Doing this instead of showing the character walking to the door is just pure laziness in my opinion. ESPECIALLY when you could've at the very least cut to black before removing the sprite. In fact, there's a lot of things that feel like laziness in this game, at least with minor things dialogue and presentation. For example, character talk portraits aren't always removed when action lines happen, so it makes it look like the character is saying the action line. Sprites aren't direction-corrected when entering/exiting warps, so the characters might be facing the wall instead of opposite the door they came from. The main warp hub is a set of massive TV screens, yet for some reason, only one tile out of the six or seven tiles that the each of the screens take up can be interacted with, and this specific tile isn't indicated in any way.

And as for the story... I don't know. It's fine, I guess. I sort of started skimming the dialogue as I got closer to the end of the game because of how frustrated I was. There were multiple cutscenes (including one where you have to wait for a timer to reach 0) I had to do multiple times because of the random dying and improper access to save spots.

One and a half stars for outstanding, incredible music and interesting environment design, but other than that, I'd say don't bother.

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 :-))

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.

Esse jogo foi o primeiro de uma séries de jogos que viriam a se tornar a minha série de jogos favoritos. Mas mesmo sendo o responsável pelo inicio dessa série, ele infelizmente não é tão bom assim quanto os outros, e não entenda a mal, esse jogo ainda é até que bom, talvez se você for familiarizado com jogos de RPG Maker você não vá se incomodar, mas caso seja algo novo pra você, provavelmente não será tão agradável. Mas mesmo assim esse jogo segue tendo uma história muito incrível e ótimos personagens!

Um começo bem legal e instigante para uma "trilogia" de jogos bem reflexivos e emocionantes.
Por ser o primeiro jogo feito pela Dev, é bem simples e até "minimalista" nos quesitos técnicos e artístico, porém a história se destaca e cativa quem joga, sempre dando uma ansiedade de continuar a jogar os outros e entender ou tirar sua conclusão sobre a trama. Uma boa experiência, recomendo, apenas avisando que se for muito sensível esse jogo pode ser um pouco "pesado", se possível jogue na companhia de algum amigo próximo.
Obrigado pela recomendação https://twitter.com/Iamniiko
https://twitter.com/etherane

Mesmo sendo o mais simples dos três episódios (o que faz todo o sentido, já que foi o primeiro a ser desenvolvido) cumpre completamente todo o papel de introdução da história, personagens e universo de Hello Charlotte. Eu vejo muita gente dando uma nota baixa para esse, mas eu simplesmente não consigo. Eu adorei cada detalhe e informação que consegui com esse episódio, mesmo que metade não sirva para nada depois. Pode até ser confuso e às vezes tedioso, mas eu não recomendo pular ou coisa assim, ele é tão curto e bastante necessário. Eu acho que não teria sentido o mesmo com os outros episódios se eu não jogasse esse primeiro. AH a ost é simplesmente perfeita, me deixou impressionado.