i cannot fathom how anyone can play this all the way through and claim it’s the haters that are wrong. this isn’t silent hill, this isn’t even P.T.— this is a first person snoozefest that throws all subtlety out the window in favor of a poorly acted, milquetoast melodrama that claims to touch on the subject of suicide and depression but is so scattered and unsure of what it’s trying to say the end of the game is basically “uhh don’t kill yourself actually, here’s the suicide hotline”. there was an interesting segment that intelligently and creatively painted a picture regarding generational trauma and familial abuse, but is dropped just as quickly as it’s introduced.

the gameplay is abysmal, walking around the same corridor over and over barely interacting with anything before being thrown into a chase sequence that can only be described as lightly jogging from an enemy that is slower than you and making obvious turns less you turn into a dead end and experience a boring one-shot kill animation that does not change once throughout the whole game. every chase segment is poorly thought out especially the last one, none of them are challenging, but the monster will be on the other side of doors as you open them so it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to complete a nightmare segment without having to restart at least once.

the short message is lazy, dramatic, surface level, and entirely carried by its asset and lighting artists as well as what little Masahiro Ito contributed to the presentation. Konami is testing the waters to see what new gen fans are willing to accept from this defunct, creatively bankrupt franchise and this P.T. rip off walking sim is not what people should want or expect from Silent Hill.

this is the game i turned off comments for because i am Not here to get yelled at by sweaty-ass D&D shills and tiktok girlypops who love a problematic white man.

lemme be clear homie. 150 hours in this game. i have played it to hell and back (lol), and i loved a lot of it. but the shine starts wearing off around hour 120, especially as you start to notice that your interest always drops off at one specific point in the game. yes. it was act 3. you've heard everyone talk about it.

what larian did here whips, let's just get that absolutely clear. as far as the RPG landscape is concerned, they took a mold that was frankly mistreated as hell for a very long time (hi Bioware) and completely reshaped it. shit's rad. it's fun. it's awesome. half the appeal of it now is how much the cast seems to have loved working on it, and how communicative the devs have been about supporting it.

and like, the most i'm going to say about the story? act 3 tanks it for me. it just does. acts 1 and 2 were polished to such an insane degree that to go from that to the clown car of cliches and mixed messaging about the urgency of it all just gave me a bit of whiplash.

that's really all i'm going to say about story issues because i'm going to be That Guy and start talking about the queerness of this game. yes. we are going to talk about the romances. we are also going to talk about that genital slider.

larian took that RPG mold and reshaped it, but i think they maybe should've just broken it altogether. i've been a longtime believer that romances are handled pretty terribly in this vein of games and they shouldn't be in them as just more video game shit to min-max for achievements. if the romance isn't baked into the story itself, cut it. don't act like fanfiction and spotify playlists don't exist to fill in the blanks, bitch.

but back to the point, this game really, really makes romance a priority in such a strange way. having a romantic relationship isn't baked into the plot for tav, but you can't build friendships or to show your party members any amount of physical or verbal affection without it being not just romantic, but sexual.
i think it's such a bizarre choice. you can't cuddle karlach, who's in your corner from the word go, and who's been literally unable to touch anyone without hurting them for A While, without wanting to have sex with her? you can't goof off and dance with wyll without him asking you out the night after? i personally would die if i lived in a world where no platonic love existed, or was so unheard of that to have Big Fun and A Hug means y'all need to start planning your wedding yesterday. whack.

i also just couldn't stop thinking that all the romances were written with a savior complex in mind. besides astarion's added interactions in dark urge playthroughs, i couldn't really come up with anything specific that anyone else did for tav. it was kind of just always them helping the party members enough to date them. i understand that these kinds of games tend to be created for the savior complex shit, but we can surely do better, be a little more honest? but this part verges so hard into nitpicking that i, personally, would probably not include in a formal review. i just don't really care much for one-sided relationships in my life, and not in the media i consume unless it's in there for a reason.

my final queer nitpick is that i don't want anyone on this earth to go around their whole lives thinking that BG3 changed the fuckin game with queer rep. don't think i didn't notice that every single party member is cisgender, and don't think i didn't notice that if i played a transgender character, they would be mirroring my exact discomfort of being the only trans person in a room full of people because i would not find any other friend in my party who understood me in that way. this weeeird, weird burgeoning trend with mainstream RPGs where you get to mix and match pronouns and genitals feels like old navy's jank-ass gender-neutral clothing line. it's weak, it's pandering, and it's shallow. truly, i could not give a smaller shit if your game lets me choose pronouns or whether or not i decide i want to piss sitting or standing up this playthrough. i care about seeing characters like me who are literally just out here trying to vibe like everybody else. i don't know why that has to be such a huge ask, or why people don't seem to understand it when they are asked.

all in all, sure, play the D&D game. it helped me understand the 5e system more than any DM explaining it to me ever could. the voice acting is perfect. the voice actors are all suspiciously hot themselves. the mo-cap adds a sense of depth to characters that used to only exist in players' imaginations. it does shlocky fantasy pulp like no other. its memes are endlessly funny. it's a good game and i look forward to seeing how it influences future games in this genre. it's a good game. it's just not groundbreaking.

jesus fucking christ.

OKAY actual review (spoilers at the very end):
I think NSO has kind of decent ideas (the throughline seems to be “the endless cycle of chasing clout is bad and mentally ill people should get help instead of turning to the internet to cope”) but a lot of the endings are like, “Woah!! That was craaaazy! Wasn’t that fucked up?” And then they all just end without really even saying much or trying to elaborate on any kind of point. As someone who went out of her way to get the endings all boy did it make me mad to grind for some of them that were only a couple sentences long before abruptly ending jesus lol.

There isn’t even an ending that feels like you can truly win. And that’s not bad, I’m cool with an ending that’s a bit of a downer or things don’t go as planned/you don’t “win”, but NSO doesn’t have any real story to justify these endings or make them satisfying in their own right (and it makes less sense that this kind of thing exists in a raising sim where the whole point of the genre is to Raise Or Lower Number And Win). In the endings where KAngel gets tons of subs, she can dump you and then get into a scandal herself, break the internet, feel empty that she’s made it this far, kill herself onstream, etc etc. And I think I would be fine with some of these if they had anything to actually say or made the loss feel important. They jump right into the shock or weird stuff and then immediately end it with some fuckin textbox like “ohhhh she’s soooo fucked up what did you dooooo”! Like maybe I would like some of these more if they went on for more than 30 seconds and had some closure/thoughts to leave you with!!!

In my head I compared NSO a lot to Doki Doki Literature Club because that's a pretty popular game that also appeals to NSO’s audience of “Yeah this game looks cute and has a cute girl in it …. But be careful. It’s FUCKED UP”. But DDLC has the upper hand because you spend a lot of time getting to know the characters and see their arcs before they suddenly do the big horror twist, and after that every horror moment is carefully placed until it crescendos into the ending sequence. With NSO, there isn't really a story for you to get to know Ame with, you can learn more about her but you can really only bond with her on a surface level (taking her out, sex, playing games) before they start spamming you with horror stuff back to back with little to no breaks. You never share a truly deep moment or a moment that would legit make me go, “Oh wow, I really care about her”. As a result, whenever the game does freaky horror metanarrative-breaking things it’s just, “Oh wow!” in the moment and then it immediately ends, and that's it.

That’s kind of another thing, I just don’t like Ame. Menhera girls just really put me off, it’s one of those things that I think are popular because it’s Japanese/anime. Like the same girls that will go “i wanna die i hate myself im horny im lonely im manipulating people i want money blahbblahblah” also exist in SPADES on Tumblr and Twitter in English/America and everyone can’t stand those type of people (myself included). I just dont like self pitying “I’m so fucked up” manipulative people with mental illness especially when using it to get undeserved sympathy money/things from others. It just annoys me so much. Call it a mix of personal experience and I am mentally ill so I can weigh in on this a little. So when creepy things happen to Ame I just don’t really care. When she’s annoying I get annoyed. When she’s talking about how P-chan isn’t good I just roll my eyes. And I don’t even hate her, like I don’t want to ruin her life or anything, because she isn’t real so it wouldn’t matter. I just want her to like go away and get serious help. This is why the “hospitalize her enough and she becomes normal” ending rules in my opinion.

And THEN… Possibly my most lukewarm take ever, but I just don’t like stories that focus on the need to get likes/followers. I’m really weirded out by people who only care about this. It just feels so vapid and like not a real goal at all, to be obsessed with that kinda thing (one could say this is the point of NSO, but again I feel like the story is lacking and does not speak well on this point).

And she wants all of this shit in a month which is just laughable. Like yeah try getting a million subs in a month I’m sure that will work out for you. When she guilts you for not being able to get her that many followers it’s just fucking stupid, like girl you have been at this for 30 days and you’re an independent streamer. You’re lucky to even have 500 followers. On god plz stop.

I think it’s not impossible to have a good game critiquing the internet, it’s a less popular game but the game Buried Stars (game about 5 kpop stars being stuck in a collapsing building) does a very good job of both telling a compelling story while also weaving in what fame/ followers/internet can do to change people and influence their choices in the moment. Though that game is more about showbiz, it definitely has strong critiques of some of the same things that NSO failed to try to say, because you can grow with the characters and find out deeper things about them and learn on a deeper level how everything affects them. Meanwhile Ame is just constantly in comically high highs and low lows and you can only exchange a couple of messages with her a day, never having a meaningful talk.

And hey! Spoiler time. The twist that P-chan isn’t real is just stupid if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. Who was she having sex with the whole time to the point of making the screen shake (finger blasting queen I guess)? Who was she at the amusement park with and kissing in the ending where she has her livestream outside? Who was walking around in her house and making noise during her livestream where she was talking about mysterious things and even said “Teehee I didn’t tell P-chan I was streaming so they were walking around!” after the stream? In the Labor ending you’re messaging from the computer while she’s away at work and doesn’t come home, what, is she actually at home typing on her computer and just ignoring her own texts to herself then? What about the endings where she blocks you from viewing her page, bro you made the fucking guy up you don’t have to block them they ain’t real they can’t actually see your post anyways!!!! I could literally go on and on but it’s a twist that exists just to be a twist. It doesn’t need to be there and the more you think about it the less sense it makes within the context of the entire rest of the game.

I do not like menhera girls, I do not like plots about chasing after clout, I do not like the lack of writing this game had. I suppose I am out of the target audience for the first two points but overall I feel like a good game should be able to pull you in regardless if you’re not necessarily a huge fan of some of its elements, because it does something good with those elements. This game has nothing to say except internet be crazy and mentally ill people be crazy too, and even then it can’t even be fucking bothered to say that half the time, it just shows you a fucked up anime girl who’s bloody and saying mean things and then it just ends. What an absolute waste.

the opening montage of Up really destroyed a whole generation's concept of effective nonverbal storytelling by making them think a parade of prefab domestic clichés embellished with flavorless Milestone clipart set to overbearing music is in any way sophisticated or interesting huh

this girl is a tasteless unfuckable dweeb and i wish her all the worst. the way she's simultaneously a self-insert wish fulfillment character AND the most hapless and bland cozycore dork imaginable is really dark tbh. inexcusable taste in stuffed animals! stop decorating with your diploma already you absolute MONSTER!!! When a sappy celeste-adjacent chiptune ballad plays as it's revealed via context clues that she came into her own after a trip to Japan (and returned w/ a bevvy of basic tourist kiosk tchotchkes) and now feels confident enough to explore rockabilly-lite fashion...hell. It's all so flavorless and antiseptic--she is 30 where the hell is her hitachi wand and why CANT i stuff her horrid garb into the closet in the ideal organizational format--the pile? the subject here is so unpalatable that i honestly would have preferred they scrap the whole progressing narrative concept entirely (esp. when its used in such an unambitious way that communicates very little beyond trite sentimentality; life has its ups and downs, #gratitude, don't make time for haters who dull your shine, the more things change the more they stay the same, when god throws out a mug he buys you a wacom tablet) and instead present a medley of varying rooms/spaces occupying a plethora of subjects, aesthetics, and experiences, but also idt the same devs who chose this protag have anywhere near the worldliness or savvy to attempt something like that. impressive amount of unique isometric assets and cool implementation of foley though!