Fun but unexceptional little RPG Maker adventure game. I've played a lot of "deduce your own murder" types of games, and there aren't really any surprises here, but I had a good time anyway.

I think the best, most distinctive feature for me here is its very smart use of RPG Maker-style space. The thing that sets apart RPG Maker adventure games is the player's relationship to the space they're in. Direct control and RPG-style area layouts means the player gets a more physical connection to the space they're in compared to, say, a point and click style game. Constraining the player to a single endlessly-looping screen is a pretty clever take on this style of space, and helps the game make an impact it might otherwise not have. The use of outlined NPC characters, without any details, might be cribbed directly from Palette but it still does a good job of communicating the player character's alienation from other characters around him even as he needs a connection with them to solve his personal mystery.

Pretty sweet little game. Given the horror framing I wasn't expecting the side stories to focus on heartwarming plots like Bear's Restaurant.

Like a lot of Odencat's games, I feel like the focus on the ensemble cast means no one gets quite the amount of characterization they need for their personal stories to be fully developed. Between this, Bear's Restaurant, and Fishing Paradiso, I'm also starting to feel like there's an uncomfortable pattern with how young women get treated. Women being shallow and into fashion is a bit too much of a recurring trope. I don't think it's intended to be mean-spirited but it comes across that way anyway.

Cute, sweet little game. Not much to it, but I enjoyed my time with it. The romance between the two main characters was understated in an honestly pretty sweet way - it's nice having a game about characters who are already in love instead of focusing on the "will they / won't they" sometimes.

I'm a sucker for incremental games, and while this is a very simple one, it still got its hooks in me for awhile. I see what they were going for with "growing flowers" and "story about a struggling flowershop owner" as the two halves of the game, but they don't really thematically connect. When I reached the scene where the main character begs her parents for money, I felt immediately taken out of the game because I had more money than I was able to spend at that point. Likewise, when she experiences the financial crush of the parents demanding the money back, I would have been able to pay it back without even thinking about it. It doesn't seem like the pacing of the incremental game portion was really considered; the way it communicates elements of the main character's life doesn't fit in with the story at all.

I feel like this suffers from the "fanfic syndrome" where "Japan" is functionally America with a couple cliched cultral details sprinkled on top. It's not clear to me why this was set in Japan to be honest; aside from zoning that let you put a flower shop, apartment, and rooftop garden in a single building, nothing felt especially Japanese about it.

I've seen a lot of "story told in a phone UI" games at this point, but doing it in a hook up app is a nice touch. Appreciated the physicality of forcing the player to actually type in all of the player character's messages.

A lot of the characterization is pretty basic, for the main characters as much as extras, and it largely doesn't feel like it landed for me.

I see what it was going for, but I don't think the story really gelled. I can't tell if I got the real ending or if it just glitched out, because the final fade out for a story scene seemed to just end without a real conclusion or thematic throughline.

Really, really interesting mechnically dense social backstab-em-up.

As a country woman engaged to a minor baron, you move to Paris on the eve of the revolution only to find out he's disappeared and left you to your own devices. If you're going to climb the social ladder clearly you're going to have to do it all yourself.

The gameplay is surprisingly open-ended for a game with such a fixed gameplay loop. Every day you can do exactly one action and then go to bed (relatable!), be that going to a party to build relationships and collect gossip; selling gossip for money; or hanging around Paris to build your influence. There's a lot of different ways you can approach it, and having seen a friend play the game with very different outcomes, it's clear you have a lot of freedom to approach the game.

The writing is pretty shallow, and your relationships with pretty much everyone are purely transactional. In a purely story-focused game that'd be a problem, but here it's thematic. Of course your relationships are transactional, of course you're interacting with people purely to get your way. If the story outcomes of your actions feel shallow, it's because that's how you the player and you the player character are engaging with them. I'd be nervous about playing one of the developers' other pure-story visual novels if the writing is like this game, but in this setup it works really well. I haven't gotten deep into any of the romance plots yet but I'm worried that the writing wouldn't be able to support them, though.

Really cute little game. This is basically exactly what I hoped Playdate would be - short and sweet, unique, the kind of thing people might not take a chance on but given a platform where it can shine. The writing's maybe a little too twee for my tastes sometimes, but it's fun and I chuckled at a lot of it. Cranking to focus photos is perfect. Loved it.

My copy came unpatched so I played without a few clarity improvements, so I got stuck in a few places. I didn't realize the park existed for a long time, so I wasted a lot of time trying to photo birds in the forest that you can't possibly do with the starter camera. Looks like it's a bit clearer if you play the latest version.

I'm an Andes Komeji stan now.

Really, really liked this. I appreciate how much time the cast gets to breathe, how much I get to appreciate and care about everyone. The mystery plotting was just as interesting as the last game; played this with Jessica and Aura around, so we got to keep sharing our theories the whole time. I was a bit disappointed first at the more linear story structure, but it all clicked why it was that way late in the game - and that twist was fantastic.

PC release is a lot more stable than the original game.

Some of the most Uchikoshi-ass Uchikoshi here. The kind of game where you just want to keep notes the whole way through to keep track of your theories and waht you've figured out.

Compared to AI, the characterization feels a bit weak. Maybe it's the escape game format that means that no one has a chance to really develop as a character outside the core events. The actual mystery plotting is satisfyingly tight though.

I can't even imagine playing this on any platform that's not a DS. The end game twist depends on it.

This is a game I wish I'd liked more than I did.

At its heart it's an ensemble cast RPG Maker adventure game like Mousebusters and Bear's Restaurant. The addition of fishing is pretty cute, but it has the effect of padding the total length out much longer than those two games... without adding much more story. The result is that many of the side stories only have about as much characterization as those games, but it's stretched thin over a much longer period of gameplay time. It also makes the characterization a bit more explicitly transactional than in their previous games; it feels weird to have a story about becoming genuine friends with people, but only because you fulfilled their requests to give them literally dozens of specific fish over the course of the game.

None of the side stories are especially deep this time around, but I appreciated that Dave gets some much-needed characterization that makes him more than the cheap joke he was in Bear's Restaurant. The South American native character is a crude stereotype though, something that feels really out of character for a studio that's usually done a good job of treating its international casts with respect.

The fishing gameplay is a bit shallow but pretty cute. However, this is the first time Odencat experimented with free to play monetization and it felt wrong. Players can pay to play without ads, like in their previous games. Even if you do, though, you still get prompted frequently to watch an ad in order to increase the amount of in-game currency you earn. It's distracting, and makes you feel as though if you pay to remove ads but don't use that system, you're going to fall behind in the level curve. It's a really weird experience for what's meant to be a relaxing game.