6days

Note: I played this game in Japanese. I really enjoyed my time with this game. I like the grainy look of the graphics, the music is relaxing, the town is small but charming with the design of the streets and houses, and the characters, while they don't have much to say were decent enough and did have some humorous lines to entice a chuckle out of me. The storyline and gameplay is very simple. You are a hit and run patient at the hospital and are trying to recount your past. You play as a young version of the MC as an elementary student whose classmates start disappearing and you try to gather clues around the town to figure out who's behind it. It's not really a horror game, it's pretty chill for the most part. Along the way, you can collect collectable stickers by buying them at the store, and using jelly or honey to catch bugs, there are 10 stickers and 10 bugs. You get another item as a reward for obtaining all of them. It's not much of a reward but the fun is in trying to collect them. The game takes place across 6 days, each day beginning with you going to school and having to answer a series of questions from science to music. It affects how much allowance money your mother gives you the next day. There are also "paper plays", which is a form of Japanese street theater. Basically, they are short, slideshow horror stories you can watch in game. They include AI images if that is of concern to you. It is a short game, true to the description it took me about 3 hours to get through it. There isn't much to do, but I enjoyed the atmosphere, music, characters, and graphics, and it was a great way to spend an evening with a shorter experience. As for the flaws, the most obvious and glaring would be the stuttering that happens while you are simply walking through town, and especially whenever the camera perspective changes. It's only a bit annoying and doesn't interfere with the game too much until near the end when you need to run away, and it was tricky for me at first with the camera going crazy but I got through it. The game is very low resolution and only 13gbs, so idk why it's performing this way. Poor optimization, I guess. The English translation, like many games of this type, is not great. It's absolutely atrocious. Two of the characters names above their speech bubbles (but not in the actual bubbles themselves) aren't even "spelled" correctly, their names are literally some random scientific names like "traditional japanese oak silkmoth (Antheraea yamamai)" like wtf?? lol the scientific names of some flowers (I think, I haven't googled them to see what they mean), like "aranthea" or something, it's extremely bizarre. I've never seen anything like it. I'm fluent in Japanese so I played most of it in Japanese, and I feel sorry for people who have to play it in English. The exams you take in class as mentioned in the first paragraph are also nonsensical in English, and often get cut off so you can't read the whole sentence. The major issue with the game however is that it is broken. I was not able to fully complete the game because it always freezes during the final cutscene. There are 4 endings and I only managed to officially obtain the 3rd which is the worst ending where you "did nothing to help". Every other ending freezes before the cutscene can finish. And my computer's fans start going crazy too when this happens. The game becomes unresponsive and the only way to close it is from the taskbar. I'm not an expert on PCs but it seems the game is doing something my PC doesn't like. I've replayed the endings multiple times to see if they would work after a reload but nope. At one point I even started a New Game to see if that would fix it, and the game froze during the opening cutscene! Which didn't happen my first time through. In fact, I ran into even more bugs the more I played and replayed the game, including dialogue not loading so I was stuck staring at NPCs, or the game randomly resetting to the beginning of the day. The bugs were not consistent and did not trigger in the same spots every time. So yeah, idk if I can recommend this game. It's pretty cool, if bare-boned, and it would kill a few hours nicely. Just be warned that you may not be able to finish it. Maybe you'll have better luck with the endings working than I did. I hope the creator adds a patch to fix the issue. I wouldn't mind going through it again to see the endings personally. Also there was another weird glitch as well, on the last day if you stay out past 18:00/6 o'clock the game tries to progress to a 7th day, and it just presents you with one of the exams you take in school but the text is all jumbled up and again, the game becomes unresponsive. Seems the developer didn't plan for players staying out late on the last day of the game? Overall I do like the game and its atmosphere, it just needs a lot of cleanup, and I hope to see another game like this from the developer in the future.