I survived so many assassination attempts that I got more bullets in me than 50 Cent.

I did 4 playthroughs with the United States. The first time was when I survived many assassination attempts, and I assume it was because I blew ass as president, ran the deficit up into the multi-trillions (who knew state pensions + retirement = no money?), and everyone was unemployed. But they voted me in for a second term, so who is the joke on now? No really, how did that happen? My political party ceased to exist with my whopping 0% interest in voting at the end of 8 years. I was hoping maybe I could run as a successor or something at least to see the legacy of what I created, but the game ain't that deep.

So I restarted. My next two playthroughs, I took the kid gloves off and tried to force the United States into being the socialist democratic hellscape of my dreams. That ended very poorly for me with my hitting 0% approval and voters yet again. I was starting to believe this shit was rigged.

Finally, I have now hit my stride, slowly moving the overton window over inch by inch, dealing with alcoholism, traffic congestion, and obesity multiple times. We're scarily technologically advanced at this point, and I assume we'll hit "disembodied head president" tech soon. That being said, I still can't figure out how to stop the cyber crimes and crypto is unrealistically booming. My cabinet is filled with sycophants, we're socially liberal as fuck, and somehow NOW I am not getting almost murdered. Did I mention this is my 4th term? I'm a modern day Theodore Roosevelt; y'all better watch out because I'm about to turn left and I don't want to smack you across the face with my big stick.

In all reality, this game captured two things about politics really well. First off, it's boring as fuck. I say that as a lover of spreadsheet simulations. But god damn is there a lot less you can do to help impact anything than you would expect. You can't even make your cabinet folks or even find a variety of people for that matter. Secondly, the game is accurate in that no matter what you do, you're pissing in someone's metaphorical Cheerios and they will want to non-metaphorically kill you.

I will add, I went as far as to pay the discounted eightish dollars to try out the DLC and I gotta say, it didn't add much. I don't recommend buying Democracy 4 to be honest, but if you end up owning it somehow, there ARE worse games you could be playing instead.

The Good:
- The plot was complex, but it actually feels like it worked. Sometimes when you try to reach a certain level of complexity, any sense goes out the window. But the puzzle pieces coming together made sense here.
- The characters had their unique traits that explained how they viewed the world.
- No unexpected lewd images! I like VNs, it's combining a hobby I love (reading) with gaming. I love that and enjoy this format, but I'm not into eroge. This VN not having a "suddenly eroge" moment was nice.

The Bad:
- There needed to be more time spent with the characters, there really wasn't enough to get an attachment to anyone and really only one or two opportunities to make a choice between characters.
- The translation wasn't great. There were times that a character would say something and it would be abrupt or not really make sense. Also plenty of formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors.

In the end, my final assessment of Campus Notes is simply mediocre. Nothing about it stands out as being great, but nothing is so bad to tilt it in the other direction. I think this would have been a good building block for the developer, but 4th Cluster went under years ago so this remains as their only mark on the world.

An interesting play on slasher flicks in the form of VN, with obvious inspiration from Scream. I could feel some of the story beats just from being familiar enough with the genre to anticipate the moves I should make, which I actually liked. Also enjoyed that there is a true ending to the story if you go through every path. I in all honesty didn't hate the story.

I'd also say the characters weren't terrible and looked nice, the background art was good if not a bit generic, and the music was fine. Apparently the art was hand-drawn which is cool and it would explain why characters have some odd proportions in cgs. Like everyone's head looks weird for the most part outside of the standard portraits. However, I also saw the previous VN by this dev used AI for their backgrounds, so I don't know that I trust them saying it was hand-drawn.

And I do want to give compliments on the battery that appears to show a choice's impact. While it didn't matter often, it was still a nice thing to have to make a choice feel less daunting.

There was a lot more bad with this than the good. The most glaring issue with Sunlight Scream is the translation. It is painfully bad in many places, confusing pronouns, verbs, tenses, and outright making up at least one word. Hell, the words "literally raping" were used to describe losing in a video game. Now, I have absolutely used that term in the past to describe losing, but not paired with "literally." I also don't think using dated gamer slang from the mid-2000s is appropriate prose, especially in a 2020s setting and when the topic actually does come into play, literally.

Most of that would be forgivable(ish) if some parts of the story didn't go completely of the rails and made any sense. There is a point where a teacher dies and for some reason it has now fallen on the friendly police officer's shoulders to take the students on a camping trip that was conveniently to be held the next day. Another part has a character reference having blood on their hands (literally) from said officer, many days after the fact.

Additionally, I am really not sure if this is set in a university or high school. Throughout the setting is referred to as university, but the actions of characters, the (albeit relaxed) uniforms, RECESS, and classes make it seem more like high school. I presume the disconnect has to come from the developer being Russian but setting of the story being in the United States. While not a huge deal, it was a distraction.

Finally, the UI had several mishaps where either the wrong character was being shown as talking or was completely missing an indicator. The math test was not hard, but with the options covering the question, it became more difficult. I was expecting actual radio buttons to select on the choices, not a pop-up. And of course there were quite a few instances of text either being repeated in the same text box, or appearing in one and showing again in the next.