The voice acting is good, really good even. But, overall its just sort of...uninteresting? Western visual novels have this tact where they all try to be metatextual but don't really understand why the metatextual elements of stuff like Umineko or Subarashiki Hibi work, and here its basically just set dressing.

If you try to contrast it with something like Stanley Parable however, you come into the problem where that game actively had things it wanted to talk about with regards to how video games function--this by function of being a standard visual novel can't do this, so it tries to play off the emotion of the leads which brings you back to the first problem.

Its not bad outright, but its just dull and sort of lacking in things to say.

slaughter's I don't like shit I don't go outside, completely bleak and begging for (divine?) retribution to some unknowable crime. idk, probably the crime of being born. an apple from ribbik's tree of mixing slaughter with other gameplay elements, namely platforming, but this isn't the "oops!!!🤭 looks like you missed your jump! here's a teleport to restart ;)" nintenyearold platforming of other wads this is the "nigga fuck you" platforming of olde. maps 01 and 02 are aerial exercises of performing skates & figure eights around eroded neogothic pillars; i thought alot of NES sidescrollers and their derivatives in how benjogami will ask you to route yourself around projectiles, enemy bodies, and vertical gaps in quick succession. except, of course, the trick here being that all enemies are always moving towards you in a doom map, so the option to grind out muscle memory and timing is taken away, and now the requirement is left and right brain knowledge of which direction you need to be going at what speed and pastoral intuition on how you standing behind a wall for two seconds will herd the cyberdemon you can't see and the 12 cacodemons you can't see together to infight with each other. a notebook of Newtonian laws and velocity formulas in one hand and Joseph's shepherd crook in the other, real corpus callosum gaming.

it's claustrophobic and light on breathing room, felt like i needed a damn O2 mask by the time I hit map 03, which of course feeds into the visual work--this is by far benjogami's most striking WAD (not light praise, of the slaughter all-stars he's in the upper tier of aesthetics), undarkening Romero's brown into a low pH value bile of oranges & purples & neons. i love the Babylonian towers of toxins that serve as background to the action here too--depending on whether your philosophy says stalactite or stalagmite it's either god pissing on us or us sending our piss back to god. map 04 is otherworldly, vaguely resembling something akin to ribbik's frog & toad series but drenched in venom and supercharged with electricity. i had many (i.e. 1) drafts of words of map 04 prior to this and i could just not capture it's appeal or how it makes me feel, one of the rare things i feel that just goes beyond my aesthetic appreciation and into the sublime. realllly good shit man