While the atmosphere, mystery, and general sense of unease during the first few hours was enough to get me interested, Chaos Head never really capitalized on those elements in a meaningful way. The mystery never actually goes anywhere, the tension in the atmosphere soon gives way to some sort of shitty chuunibyou power fantasy, and none of the ideas or concepts at play ever get more than a surface level analysis (and most don't even end up mattering to the overall narrative).
Very little of what Chaos Head does past its first 3-4 hours really felt worth experiencing. The delusions are painfully underdeveloped as a mechanic and just feel like a way the game can do whatever it needs to move the story forward, the side characters may have one or two interesting aspects about them but rarely contribute in a meaningful way outside of the one chapter where they play a role, and the main character's schtick of being a paranoid shut-in is interesting at first but quickly runs out of steam.
But what brings this from mediocre to outright bad is just how badly Chaos Head manages to botch its pacing. The game has its two main routes (though one is essentially just an infodump for clearing up loose ends that never got explained elsewhere) as well as an additional route for each of its heroines. You need to get through all of these before you can unlock the true ending, effectively requiring 8 playthroughs. But the game makes doing this such a monumental pain because of how they are spread out.
The two main routes are simple enough. You just gotta get through the story and make specific choices each time. But what's especially annoying is the 6 character-specific routes since the point at which you 'enter' a route is near the very beginning of the game but everything is the same until quite late into the game, meaning (barring a small handful of extra scenes) you need to spend 20-30 minutes per route just skipping through text you have already read. And this is made even worse by the fact that the skip function is very finnicky, stalling the game whenever it reaches a choice, often not skipping certain voice lines for unclear reasons thus slowing down the speed at which you can get through the game, and refusing to skip certain scenes entirely because one line changed even though 99% of the scene is exactly what you've seen before.
Put that together and you're looking at around 15% of your total playtime being nothing but skipping scenes and a very large chunk of the rest of the story being very poorly paced for other reasons. Get through all of that and you can finally get to the true ending... which literally turns out to be one extra scene that adds no meaningful details about anything that happened in the story. I genuinely feel like 15 hours of my time was wasted in the hopes that something towards the end might reignite the interesting stuff the game was doing at first. Some sort of twist or extra detail that might compensate for the game's other shortcomings. But that was not to be.
So yeah... I wouldn't bother. The few areas that Chaos Head did well never really mattered while its flaws grow ever worse as the story goes on. I really can't think of a good reason why I might recommend this to somebody because even somebody who is interested in the premise and has low standards for everything else would still probably walk away disappointed.
Very little of what Chaos Head does past its first 3-4 hours really felt worth experiencing. The delusions are painfully underdeveloped as a mechanic and just feel like a way the game can do whatever it needs to move the story forward, the side characters may have one or two interesting aspects about them but rarely contribute in a meaningful way outside of the one chapter where they play a role, and the main character's schtick of being a paranoid shut-in is interesting at first but quickly runs out of steam.
But what brings this from mediocre to outright bad is just how badly Chaos Head manages to botch its pacing. The game has its two main routes (though one is essentially just an infodump for clearing up loose ends that never got explained elsewhere) as well as an additional route for each of its heroines. You need to get through all of these before you can unlock the true ending, effectively requiring 8 playthroughs. But the game makes doing this such a monumental pain because of how they are spread out.
The two main routes are simple enough. You just gotta get through the story and make specific choices each time. But what's especially annoying is the 6 character-specific routes since the point at which you 'enter' a route is near the very beginning of the game but everything is the same until quite late into the game, meaning (barring a small handful of extra scenes) you need to spend 20-30 minutes per route just skipping through text you have already read. And this is made even worse by the fact that the skip function is very finnicky, stalling the game whenever it reaches a choice, often not skipping certain voice lines for unclear reasons thus slowing down the speed at which you can get through the game, and refusing to skip certain scenes entirely because one line changed even though 99% of the scene is exactly what you've seen before.
Put that together and you're looking at around 15% of your total playtime being nothing but skipping scenes and a very large chunk of the rest of the story being very poorly paced for other reasons. Get through all of that and you can finally get to the true ending... which literally turns out to be one extra scene that adds no meaningful details about anything that happened in the story. I genuinely feel like 15 hours of my time was wasted in the hopes that something towards the end might reignite the interesting stuff the game was doing at first. Some sort of twist or extra detail that might compensate for the game's other shortcomings. But that was not to be.
So yeah... I wouldn't bother. The few areas that Chaos Head did well never really mattered while its flaws grow ever worse as the story goes on. I really can't think of a good reason why I might recommend this to somebody because even somebody who is interested in the premise and has low standards for everything else would still probably walk away disappointed.