TL;DR: Can't really recommend this one, but yes, I played through this nukige for the story, and for me it wasn't really that worth sitting through the extreme content for the few moments where it did something interesting. I could barely tolerate it, despite having rodeoed with extreme visual novels before in the search for the Good Story, and I know most people would not, so my score has settled on a 1.5.

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If a somewhat mediocre thriller, the key word here being mediocre, with charming characters and a philosophical palette full of literary references sounds like it's worth sitting through nonstop random and grotesque depictions of horrible rape that constantly come out of nowhere, ruining the pace and being entirely, revoltingly, and disgustingly masturbatory, then I suppose I'd say check this out, but if anything about that sounds even mildly offputting, it's best to skip this one and save yourself the trouble. There are plenty of other good visual novels I'd recommend instead way before I'd suggest diving into this one.

Somewhat regret playing through this, but I bought into the hype and kamige status. I just had to see it through in the hope that something worthy of all the immense suffering, both of the characters and of myself, would finally reveal itself at the end and make the whole thing come together. When those moments happened, they fell flat for me.

And yes, I have been all over the Internet reading various interpretations that try to give deeper context to the disgusting sexualization, but I think it's important to remember that this game was developed first and foremost as a nukige. It was designed to be masturbated to, and the story is built around giving those scenes external context. If the primary function of this does nothing for me, then contextualizing it in post probably isn't going to work either.

At the end of the day, I read many hours of horrifying content that wasn't solely intended to be horrifying, but also to get someone off, and I didn't like it that much as a result. I don't even really feel right about having read it. It just doesn't sit with me. I like to think I have a pretty high tolerance for extreme content, and can often look past it and just acknowledge that it simply isn't for me, focusing my perspective on the other things that the work does successfully elsewhere, but I think writing scenes that make rape "sexy" is where I have to draw the line in a strictly moral sense. This game doesn't just commit this sin once, but over and over, to the point that I don't want to go back and try to count every rape scene just to put the information in this review. It's easily over ten, if not fifteen. Fuck that.

Reviewed on Jul 17, 2020


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