A fun Visual Novel / Dungeon Crawler, the concept is neat enough for the novelty to propel you forward as you get to know some hot weapons, and by the the time you've acclimated there is probably at least one person who intrigues you enough to keep going and figure them out.

I was surprised how much the focus on dating and flirting rather than romance enabled me to make more on-the-fly roleplaying decisions than I usually would in a visual novel where I might normally be tempted to try and steer towards a 'route'. Even the strictly platonic paths had a lot of playful energy to them, for example I had no interest in dating K-pop boy but he was fun for friendly snuggles.

Gameplay is perfectly serviceable, you can pretty clearly see the DNA of games like Bastian here, lacks the polish that later exemplars of the style like Hades would show but its fun and engaging (though I wish enemies had clear wind-up frames so combat was less memorizing how long enemies had between attacks and could instead be more reactive and fluid)

Be warned that a major, unavoidable part of this game is dealing with a creep who stalks you, kidnaps people, and is just in general the Worst kind of guy. I actually liked that the game went there, and found myself first trying to politely turn him down, then defuse him, and then just try and shoot him down outright at every opportunity, it felt really natural, even if he gets a little cartoonishly jerky.

Also, cannot be overstated how good the music is, phenomenal.

Reviewed on Aug 18, 2021


Comments