Smartly-designed and smartly-written. Timeloop games feel like they've become a bit of a trope recently, but what surprised me here was how much it has to say with it and how well-executed it is.

Getting a 35-hour RPG out of a single dungeon the player has to repeatedly loop through has so much room for things to go wrong, for it to become tedious for all the wrong reasons, and I'm shocked it works this well. The writing is sharp, interesting enough I convinced myself I'd keep reading it every time, then eventually I started zoning out and skipping it exactly the same way the main character diegetically is as he's getting increasingly distant from reality for having seen it so many times. Mechanically it doesn't change too much, but enough things open up to make repeated trips through the one dungeon feel different in a way that still keeps it interesting while still giving you the diegetic tedium of repeating the same steps over and over.

If I have any real complaints, it's just that the ending is a bit too neat and tidy. The buildup to the ending is increasingly harrowing and tense, but the climax feels like it's over in a blink. It just doesn't quite feel like it's spent enough time on its consequences or on the experience of its entire cast.

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.