Eh? I don't think the ideas this tackles are interesting or even really well explored (gaming as an art form really needs to move beyond the idea of interrogating the player's role in a game's story, what that means for agency for the player and characters, etc. Metal Gear Solid 2 already explored those ideas sufficiently while also tying those ideas to the emotional intentions of the narrative, which this fails to do). This is mostly a self-congratulatory critique of the medium that feels like it's pushing toward something bigger but never truly delivers (almost like how I feel about og Ghost in the Shell, now that I think about it). Feel like this follows in the same vein of modern horror movies whose director's create them because they want to make more "mature" genre fare when a lot of earlier works are far more interesting and mature than their creations. And this is coming from someone who's only played a bit of Higurashi and Tsukuhime but those are clearly superior works in terms of conveying the horror and off-kilter emotions attempted here.

It's attempting to deliver on the same dreamlike, in-between state of being that, say, the ending of Mulholland Drive delivers. And this is not to say that it really even compares to that, but its intentions are similar and the little mechanical/visual tricks it pulls to sell that narrative descent are genuinely neat, if surface level. But perhaps I'm just easily amused by those sorts of things, I love amorphous narrative modes; starting as one thing and then becoming another, which is something that I think should be explored mechanically more in games. Why not have a visual novel abruptly turn into a first-person adventure game in the middle to sell a certain emotion? But that's a difficult shift to achieve and would require someone of far more interesting thematic and mechanical sensibilities to be making games. Doki Doki Literature Club is child's play compared to whatever that would result in.