Found out about this game through its inclusion in SiIvaGunner's absolutely incredible Shop Fusion Collab video game music mashup video, and finally got around to playing it myself since it's included in the ongoing (at time of writing) Palestinian Relief Bundle on itch. (The game itself is free anyway but the included soundtrack, artbook, and other extras are not.)

First things first, despite the title, this is a standalone experience. My first point of comparison would be The Stanley Parable Demonstration, since they're both very meta games where characters break the 4th wall to "demo" their game for you, only there is a real The Stanley Parable that TSP Demonstration exists to sell you on, whereas MetaWare High School (Demo) exists purely for its own sake (though the creator has expressed interest in doing more with MetaWare in some form eventually.)

Anyway, the conceit of the game is that it's a visual novel where the characters (and indeed, everyone in their world) are aware that they are inhabitants of a visual novel, or more specifically, of a demo of some hypothetical "full version" of their visual novel, which leads to jokes about unfinished assets and characters panicking about needing to not waste time because demos are short and so on. What the characters aren't sure of is what exactly their visual novel is supposed to be about (in particular, there's some division over whether it's a dating sim or not), and while they never get any concrete answers, in practice the meat of the game is simply in the varying attitudes of the characters towards the artificial and unfinished nature of their existence and their reactions to the presence of the player that their reality exists in service of. I'm a sucker for this kind of existential meta stuff, so I found it all pretty interesting. It's also just a very funny game; I especially enjoyed the game's habit of treating its own presentation hyper-literally, which leads to a bunch of absurd gags, most notably around the stylistic choice to draw the characters without eyes.

A lovely little first-person puzzle game about working out the optimal conditions needed to make different types of flowers bloom. I found it a bit on the easy side, and I’m not sure how I feel about the decision to not let you freely view any clues you found (instead forcing you to track them down all over again once you’ve worked out what information you need), but I enjoyed my time with it. I particularly liked that despite the relaxed, cozy, Wholesome Games-ness of it all, the narrative had some unexpected bite to it in the form of some infuriatingly condescending 19th century misogyny.

Lil Gator Game is basically what you would get if you took A Short Hike (short and cute hazard-free 3D platformer on an island with anthropomorphic animals, Breath of the Wild’s climbing mechanics, an optional pixelated graphics filter, and an ending that wants to tug at your heartstrings a lil bit) and added like 20% more BOTW to it in the form of a sword and shield (though the “enemies” are all harmless cardboard standees), shield-surfing (complete with front-flip animation), a “glider”, and theming the game as a bunch of kids’ attempt to play make-believe Zelda in real life. Thankfully, I really liked A Short Hike, so even though this was mostly just more of that (albeit from a different developer), I had a great time playing this to completion in one sitting.