After School Murder Club!!

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a visual novel that I hold near and dear to my heart. i played this game for the first time streaming and i am so happy i came upon it. the inclusivity in options for name and gender melted my heart (i am nonbinary for reference) the plot is unique, the character designs are lovely and the fact it as a passion project for the dev truly shows in the game play! one of the best free games i have played in a good while

This is a free Visual Novel about a high school kid and his new friends. It has cartoon graphics, mainly in an anime style, but with a few scenes that look hand-drawn. The story says there are 3 different endings, so there is some replayability. There are no controls. You just read text, and click to go to the next page/picture. The game should take you between 3.5 to 4.0 hours. You play as a total loser starting his first day at a new high school because his dad's job transferrerd him to this location. This kid whines a lot about how unpopular he was at his last high school, and he has apparently always been a loser. He is not too smart, has no life ambition, skips classes, and has this obsession with randomly streaking around school and town. He has absolutely no talent in sports, music, video games, or anything else. He has no friends, and tries desperately for people to like him. He carries around an extremely odd object as his lucky charm, and even talks to it. He says his family often ignores him, sometimes does not feed him, goes on trips without him, and gives him hand-me-down electronics from his step-sister. However, things are looking up for the protagonist at this new school. He joins an after school club, and is making some friends. They hang out a lot and have fun doing things like going out to eat, going to the beach, and engaging in group streaking. He experiences many new things through his friends like learning how to draw, playing co-op video games, and drinking coffee. The story is meant to be a comedy, and did get a few chuckles out of me here and there. Overall though, I felt it was trying way too hard to be funny, and that often made it not funny. The story has both conversation and action choices. Supposedly your choices matter, but I only played through once so I can not confirm how much they matter, or even if they matter at all. According to the Store Page, one of the choices you can make is your gender, but I was never given that choice. At the beginning of the story, I was only asked to input a first name and a last name. Later on, at various points in the story, I was asked to input my age, the name of my step-sister, and whether I considered my step-sister to be more like an angel or more like a devil. The Store Page also falsely claims that 1 character is shown "[i]with faded self-harm scars, which are not mentioned in dialogue or narration. Trigger warnings are provided in-game before the character's appearance, and the scenes involving them can be skipped.[/i]". I don't know if I could have skipped those scenes or not, but there was certainly NOT a trigger warning in advance. The Store Page makes yet another untrue claim that there is "[i]non-sexual nudity[/i]". No, there is not. There is a girl who takes her top off, but 1 boob is covered by her arm, and 1 boob is covered by a piece of toast, so there is nothing to see. When the characters go streaking, it is stated in the dialogue, but not shown. Also, there are no trading cards or Point Shop items available. There are achievements, but it does not matter because they are all broken. This was brought to the dev's attention way back in December of 2023. The dev commented that a Ren'Py update may have broken something, and that was the end of it. No fix ever came. I experienced 1 glitch a couple of times where the conversation went backwards for a few scenes, and then forward again.