Abulia

I came to this game out of pure curiosity—not from the YouTube channel, not from a Discord, but truly out of the random chance of my recommended games. This game explores some heavy themes of self-deprecation, mental illness, and homicidal tendencies with a basic understanding of how indie games can represent that. However, that is where my praise ends. This has the skeleton of a good indie game ripped directly from Omori, Undertale, and other RPG Maker psychological games. But ultimately, it falls short on most fronts—partially due to this being a new game dev, but partly due to poor writing. Starting from the least offensive issue, the typing-based "combat" is a creative concept at first, but with no instructions, no tutorial, no direction, and attack patterns that are way too similar, every fight feels exactly the same. Sometimes, due to how it's coded, you'll get a battle where you type the same answer 4–5 times in a row. (Though me and my friends did get a chuckle out of the 6th "vomit" I had to type.) I'm not going to complain about the repetitive singular battle song throughout the entire game because it's not a bad song, but an individual boss fight theme would do wonders for the sonic variety. My true irritation comes from how this game is written. The narrative in this game is... confusing. Not because the concepts are hard to grasp, but rather because, in its attempt to be deep and thoughtful, it ends up being painfully obvious observations about life that most people discover and face around 14–17 years old—except without ever meaningfully resolving that core conflict. [spoiler]You just kinda.... beat up your own brain for having intrusive thoughts in the first place, which feels incredibly disappointing. The game already created characters that represent major sources of mental fatigue (anxiety, self-criticism, pessimistic realism, and so on) *in order* to reason with them face to face... and yet none of them receive meaningful narrative closure. And no, seeing those personas react after the protagonist dies is not closure. It feels more like a fantasy of being appreciated once you’re gone. Unlike Omori, where core beliefs and emotional distortions are actively challenged, this game doesn’t actually disprove or confront those perspectives. It just silences them by force.[/spoiler] This leaves the game feeling unfinished. And I'm not sure if this is a problem with the writing or the person writing it, but that's not a solution. And therefore not a good ending. A minor complaint goes to the grammar, which isn't a huge problem because translation is a difficult job as is, and it's written like English may not be the creator's first language. But objectively, in a typing-based game, finding grammar errors during combat really doesn't help the problems that already exist within the game loop. This is coming from someone who loves indie games, who's battled with trauma-induced schizophrenia and diagnosed depression, and who's spent years writing for video games just like this: this creator has promise. They understand the basics of how the genre works, and they have some decent artistic skill. As part of a team? This creator could go places. But would I recommend playing this milestone in their career? Not unless you're looking for a half-finished experience. Or you're a huge fan of Filipe D. Rey.