(i put some hot tips on playing chulip at the end of this review and i beg you to look at them, if nothing else here, if you are planning to play this!!!!)

moon, chulip's predecessor that laid the foundation for its general gameplay and writing style, is a game about "love" in a broad sense. you must observe people, hear their thoughts on things/others, give items, and practice good timing and patience while each tick of the timer brings you closer to "death". you give "love" and in turn receive it as a kind of experience, which as it accumulates allows the player-character to persist in the world for lengthier periods of time. the idea behind this "levelling up" with love, to extend this life timer, is that love is what drives us to exist at the most fundamental level.

moon ties its passivity of the player into a critique on rpgs' getting experience through violence and its obfuscation of that violence, and forms much of its identity around this. despite some uneven execution, i do think its statement of intent that comes out of this critique, taken more broadly a thesis on what we take from games in general, makes moon an incredibly passionate game in own right. but its kind of passivity presents its own problems to me; you become an intangible ghost in moon's world, impervious to all its elements EXCEPT for time. it presents its own challenges for the player through with the concept of passing time, but because its only really the timer and being patient enough you'll have to worry about (and you practically forget about the timer once your love level is high enough), i do feel like there's some lack of complexity to moon's definition of "love" past this. this lack unfortunately lends itself to simplistic woobified arguments for moon that arent totally its fault, that its a cutesy escapist sim patterned after animal crossing, revolutionary just because its non-violent, smoothing out the complexities and contradictions that do exist within the game.

yoshiro kimura, one of moon's three main designers and the one responsible for the bulk of its script, would go on to found punchline and create its first game, chulip, after suffering a health crisis and travelling the world (not sure in which order, but i think both inform this game's figurative/literal troubles of the heart and its internationalism, respectively). chulip is one of three spiritual sequels to moon along with giftpia (by moon designer kenichi nishi's skip inc) and endonesia (by moon designer taro kudo's vanpool), all three of which lift moon's "love" gathering mechanic but ditch the rpg critique to utilize it for stories about growing up and adolescence...at least from what i can tell, because only chulip has an english translation. i believe giftpia is about considering what path one takes to realize they are an adult, and i believe endonesia frames adulthood as an understanding of one's own emotions and rejecting escapism, but i'd love to be able to understand their text fully someday and see for myself. the point is, all of them take moon's bedrock and mechanically and narratively add their own spin and layers of complexity beyond that original game's meta, genre-defying statement.

chulip frames adolescence as "learning how one can attain happiness"...which can be interchangibly interpreted as attaining love, since the game revolves around getting kisses and all, but happiness is the operative word that comes up time and time again. its a harsh world, one of artists unhappy that their dreaming days are long gone or contending with leaving them behind, working adults unhappily fighting over scraps of money no one can get, lovers unhappily separated by death that came too soon, workers unhappy to be stuck in dead end jobs in perpetuity, people with secret passions and vices unhappy that they cant be known, students of life so unhappy that they shut themselves off from the world, so on. the main goal is attaining a lasting happiness in winning over a girl you saw in your dreams, and to do that you need to strengthen, i.e. "level up", your heart by getting practice kisses from everyone else in the game.

to make the player understand the world as one that tests happiness, to take them out of complacency that stems from being nothing more than an observer, moon's timer is replaced with hp, heart points. same basic idea as health but damage is not just physical (though it often is), but emotional too: when you get yelled at, overhear a snicker at something you did wrong, pick up a gross RNG poopie out the trash, you take damage. a game over in chulip is not becoming starved of energy like in moon, but becoming heartbroken. chulip teaches that finding happiness is a difficult journey that requires a vulnerability to pain that moon largely shields you from. you must learn how to deal with being hurt, sometimes to the point of wanting to give up, much like its underground residents seem to have. but even they have moments where they want to come out and be happy. thus the game is not just about comfortably observing examples of love in the world, but exposing yourself to an often unkind world to find happiness, to both enjoy the smaller moments and to become closer to a revelation of oneself.

so the elephant in the room: chulip's reputation. that it wastes the players time constantly, that its puzzles are cryptic to the highest degree and its never clear what to do, and that its viciously eager to hurt the player in many different ways until they die and lose progress. even people who found something to love in moon--itself a time wasting, highly cryptic game--would say chulip has worse design. moon can be accepted for its supposed wholesomeness, but then chulip by comparison is downright abusive for daring to be a cute game about gaining love from others that then has you taking figurative and literal blows from them constantly, and discouraging exploration when the most harmless seeming, insignificant interaction might hide an unwelcome, barbed wire surprise. i have heard all this, considered it carefully, and decided i am far too in love with chulip's whole being to care or even think of most of it as actually bad. i cant think of this game as truly mean-spirited when it sincerely makes me laugh, humbles me, and has this aura that kept me from ever being mad at it for too long. its entire essence envelops me, making everything it throws at me feel utterly right with what it kind of experience it is.

im playing the trangressive design card here somewhat, one usually used for more self-serious, "cooler" experiences in which theres no real question about their intentionality--pathologic, nier/drakengard, certain kill the past games spring to mind. its wasting time is inherited from moon, both sharing an unconventional design element in having the player feel time go by passively, so that even boredom adds color to a world as it turns with or without you (though chulip having no timer makes waiting around by itself less of a problem, the one "non-stressful" edge over moon). i find its even more cryptic puzzles are actually more fitting than moon's, or any other adventure game i can think of, because its obtuseness is so over the top and specific to itself when taken altogether that it feels hilariously in tune with the strange and opaque nature of the characters and the world. same can be said for its threats to your health from every corner; im drawn into the world when it strikes back, not simply out of some dour sense of brutal reality, but because its jokes hit that much harder when you mechanically feel the punchline (heyyo). im not saying all of this is intentional, though i think more of it is than its been given credit--dont even get me started on the factory as a simulation of grueling tedious work--but it doesn't matter to me when so much of what might not be intended just works so magically for me. all of it adds up to become THE single best work of comedy ive ever found in games, slapstick with uncanny timing, bewildering beyond belief in its impish way.

not to mention that this is a love-de-lic like we are talking about; an airtight clockwork construction of character-based narrative design with an incredible level of detail to discover on your own, genuinely deserving of greater appreciation. will always love the planning out of what to do that happens in my head with every daily commute to different areas, working my way through the showa-era diorama of long life town with its lovely rustic atmosphere. its mundane ritualisticness got nailed into me as i played and became insanely endearing; getting up, passing michelle beside the empty lot dream girl is living in, going under the train tracks where that fortune teller is, walking by the fountain up the stairs to the station, buying a ticket from the two-faced man and then waiting for the train...soothes my autistic brain like nothing else. the goddamn SOUNDTRACK and SOUND DESIGN is taniguchi arguably at his very best, full of variations on that one theme of the entire world of the game thats seemingly composed to be perfect biding-your-time music. AND its a game so tantalizingly bursting with secrets that i have played it and replayed it often these past 5 years, and in all these years, i have only been able to go a few months at most before i find or hear about something i never found before. not kidding, i literally found something new the week before i wrote this. ok full on rambling at this point ill wrap up

im too stubborn to make concessions, or to fall back on ironic appreciation. i love chulip immeasurably, it epitomizes so many of the feelings within games that i want to explore most, as a singular and highly considered vision within the medium that ALSO reveals this medium's tendency towards fraught, confused architecture. an intricate piece of simply spoken poetry with a wonderful rhythm of life to it, yet brutally and hilariously esoteric as can be. looking back on an embarrassing temporary defeat and laughing, listen to the sounds of your hometown at night, speaking honestly and being true to yourself to others, all of these have happiness in them. the rules of love are the rules of the universe, the rules of the universe are the rules of long life town.

SOME TIPS:

- im not going to say you wont need a walkthrough and i dont blame people for using one BUT dont assume this game wont give any hints on how to do anything. i would say to try a walkthrough only when you feel like youve exhausted your options, especially if it isnt related to an underground resident or the "main quest". when you need a guide i recommend using the fandom wiki for help, as gamefaqs is ocassionally misleading.

- tying into the above, i cannot stress enough that the third rule of love suzuki mentions is extremely, EXTREMELY important. you follow that rule by showing items and name cards to people in long life town, you can buy blank business cards from the shop next to the train station. if you engaged with moon's name cards/item showing system, you probably understand, but id argue its even more crucial in this game. take in and learn as much as you can.

- the english localization makes the game playable but it is incomplete and downright bugged in places (i still love how its deadpan delivery makes everything feel extra bizarre, even if things were translated too bluntly). the worst offender is that it left out a major hint for a main quest, which ill tell you about here: you'll find a computer that displays a message onscreen, that message is "dempou soccer".

- save often. in new areas, prioritize kissing residents who clean toilets. this game can kill you easily especially early on, tread carefully until you have more hp and health items to recup from blows.