Fuck around and find out is the prerogative of this game, and honestly it's really fun to do so.

The Narrator is just so entertaining, whoever voiced him should be given a medal. His sheer confusion and panic and varying levels of hostility to the player is really fun to sit through, elevating this walking simulator to a good time.

Plus, it can get really damn clever. I'm surprised at how many ideas there were for this game.

Flat Eye is a little shopkeeping/visual novel hybrid, covering themes of technology, capitalism, and identity. The shopkeeping is chill and satisfying, executes nicely upon most of the building/management conventions you'd expect, with an interesting added layer of supply-lines that must me hooked up to one another to keep things working.

The visual novel side, however... fuck. The writing is insufferable. I'm a queer person who is in love with a queer person and surrounds myself with queer people. But when I look at a little tumblr ass red nose lookin character strolling into my shop and I think to myself "Yeah they're gonna be nonbinary arent they" and then they are, and they start soapboxing about fatphobia and patriarchy, it's like. Yeah buddy. I know. Find a more interesting/nuanced way to say it. It's just full of tactless cringe like that. It's the most twitter adorkable millenial version of identity politics, satirical writing, and pseudo-black-mirrory situational drama. And it's all pretty much unskippable, like you have to interact with all these dorks to keep the game moving. I had to drop it because of this. It's a bummer that in your game about how human interaction has more value than capital - your capital-building simulation is good and your human interactions are fuckin annoying.

Whatever your first impression is, that the art is gorgeous, that the subject matter is alarming, or that the story is not as grandiose as other AliceSoft games I highly recommend giving Dohna Dohna an honest chance. It had had many surprisingly thoughtful moments, and I have the sense that the authors cared about what they were writing.

The cyberpunk elements are light, but the theme addresses certain niches within the genre (eg. the commodification of human life) in a stand-out way. What most holds it back is that due to a strained development history, certain plot threads weren't fully developed. But this is a character driven game over a plot driven game, and the character writing is still top notch.

Also, the localization is amazing. I've talked to Shiravune's loc producer, and he has such a deep understanding of this work and made some perfect choices. It's extremely faithful and preserves meaning of subtle details.

The game gets better with each playthrough, you'll notice more and more small things that foreshadow or call back to certain developments, and things take on new meaning. It's pretty meticulous and I constantly notice new character details!

It's one of the most polished eroge ever, in the UI, the gameplay flow, and overall design. On a first playthrough, the difficulty is just right IMO. The music is full of bangers in a variety of EDM genres. It's relaxing (despite being emotionally challenging at times) and a great 'white noise' game.

Those coming for a fun cyberpunk-lite rebel romp with vanilla H will find it, but those coming for something darker will also find it, and a player is free to choose to what degree they engage with that content. NSFW can also be turned off if you want, but...

I'd recommend a playthrough where you don't raise any heroine's feeling level at all until first getting their bad ends in the second half. It changes their Feeling events in such a way that shows its true morally salient character as a game about this type of violence. Some of it is surprisingly gentle and left me speechless. Even though these scenes are difficult to access, I encourage people to read them before making final judgments.

Violent scenes in this game are usually written from the perspective of the victim and focus on their emotional experiences, which is probably the most important thing to keep in mind. Some things, for example, an instance where a character was written as basically dissociating, and an abuser was written in a realistic way, gave me pause. Characters struggle with a lot of authentic PTSD related emotions that I was personally able to recognize, and they are told compassionate and healing things.

FWIW, the moral argument is not that 'its not that bad because there are worse people doing worse things', and certainly not that 'SV is okay.' instead, it presents a cycle of violence and raises questions about the factors which perpetuate it and why someone would be capable of such a thing. The one clear thing it does is condemn abuse, but it leaves the reader to ponder it's events and the meaning of them

They aren't ALL perfect, and it IS ero... but genuine effort was made (that didn't have to be), and I really appreciated it. In fiction, a reader can explore their emotions about these topics in a safe and controlled way to ask themselves tough questions. Stories are one way obfuscated issues like abuse can be brought to light. The medium does not effect the value of that message, and I also think that a whole work can be both serious and enjoyable, and that the two are not mutually exclusive.

The explicit scenes highlight the discrepancy between the abusers selfish, lustful acts of domination and degradation and the victims experience of extreme trauma, the lack of empathy that makes something healthy, safe, loving rather than violent. These scenes are contrasted pretty expressly with the consensual scenes.

The heroines own trauma usually directly calls into question the type of abuse their clan is involved in through Kuma, and he tries to show them compassion while at the same time ruining the lives of others, and its a compelling point of conflict.

Both sides of the game work together perfectly when all of the content is experienced, so don't skip it! It's my favorite work of fiction ever, it genuinely suprised me, and i will never forget it.

If you're interested in what I touched on, I wrote this essay that elaborates on it:
https://fuwanovel.net/2023/08/why-dohna-dohna-matters/

There isn't any way I can separate this game from my own extremely personal emotional investment in it and I don't particularly want to air all of that out in public forum for strangers' viewing pleasure, so I'll keep it short:

Lobotomy Corporation's subject matter and primary themes are particularly pertinent to my own life and the kind of person I am, and in that regard it's the story I've been searching for for as long as I've been alive. I've never seen my own point of view on the matter reflected so clearly and wholly before.

It's a laborious experience, but a worthwhile one.

Unreasonably cruel by design, completely decrepit and crusty as an entirely grounded virtue, and still earnestly unplayable no matter how much I or it tries to justify that as part of its core thesis. And that's soooo cool. The surface levels of its completely aware corporate, deterministic, and hellish analogues for depressive and nihilistic thought that you quite literally ascend out of is MORE than worth the thorns, but not for me. Nope. I got several days in before the realization that metagaming would be an encouraged straight-faced requirement and that's when I knew I would never get through this without hotkeyed console commands every single day so I committed the immutable sin of just... watching/reading my way to victory. Sorry! My "reviews" are glorified blogposts anyway, so it's nothing new. And I personally just don't accept this kind of design altogether, especially in the later days of this game.

I still hold so much respect for it though, both in terms of encapsulating such a stark but brutally real depiction of life through its particular lens, and grounding it all in such a way that all of the complex layers can be easily peeled back to the same pathos core. Kind of difficult to dance around a lot of the elements here without spoiling, there's quite a few character cuts that go for the throat on various levels of "how does one find that strength to continue" here that I'm going to think about a lot. I couldn't delve that much into the detail anyways, I've lived privileged, I have not been in the depths of darkness that walk the hallways here. I will say as my single form of criticism to the story that its philosophical quandaries aren't exactly hitting high above the clouds, and I don't mean that in terms of vs. philosophy I mean that the highest highs here don't hit so hard, another victim of the gameplay making you largely senseless to it but also because the pacing kind of crams some of that in all at once.

On the other hand, the music mmmmmmmmmm. Awake in Death, When It Rains, Second Trumpet are incredible. The aesthetic is lovely too, with immaculate detail that's super suitable. If nothing else I'm committed to anything Project Moon comes up with (god I'm really going to get another gacha huh) simply for its irrefutable direction over every single one of its elements, even if this game is barely managing to make its initial mechanical concepts meet by sheer tedium.

To sort of address a last elephant in the room, I'm not going to say that if you are curious you should go down the same path as me. You will ABSOLUTELY most certainly be filtered at some point to like, 90-95% of the people I know who read the shit I write, but you should try to persevere as far as you can. I think at the least everyone should like, TRY, this, to understand the full scope of what the fuck Lobotomy Corporation has in store for you.

lend me 50,000 yen

aesthetically very reminiscent of jrpgs of its contemporary from the late 90s with a cool as fxck aesthetic ala racing lagoon. chapter select is depicted as dj deck cant get any cooler than that. the way the assets are put together throughout the vn with the portraits of the characters, backgrounds, and dialogue placed/layered throughout the screen gives off the feeling of a real time evidence board mixed with surveillance recordings; fitting for a story about solving crimes. plot being broken up by cases with an accompanying evidence report chapter is a good way for the story to maintain mystery while also delivering just enough information so the player isn't too lost. it is almost like the player themselves is also a detective trying to figure it all out. it got to the point where i became one of the characters with how seamless i would wake up and log on to the computer to read my emails and feed my pet turtle. dialogue got me actually laughing out loud and the ost is effective. however, its age shows with how clunky the controls were during the exploration and puzzle bits which took a bit to get used to but became second nature eventually. i welcomed how slow the game was sometimes but i do understand that it is not for everybody. imperfect game but the imperfect can be considered perfect by virtue of its imperfection (lol) so thank you Grasshopper Manufacture Inc. recommend if u wanna be cool tho cuz only cool people played this game