This is, unfortunately, just... not a very good game. I have to congratulate the developer for making a game in the first place, doing that is hard and even a game like this probably took them a lot of effort. But it's not a very enjoyable experience in almost every possible aspect.
Firstly, the story is... I don't even know. It's regular, basic "scary haunted EXE" game fanfare and it's given in such little chunks that the player doesn't feel enticed to learn more or get interested. There is something slightly interesting going on, from what little I could gather about the events that happen during the game, that kind of feel like a half-assed way of commentating on animal abuse and humanity's callousness towards animals (and even then I don't think that's really the focus considering the game seems to highlight the suicide and mental health warnings more. although props for giving profits to mental health)
Speaking of the game itself, the gameplay amounts to pressing the arrow keys upwards, and spacebar every once in a while. The battles, which SHOULD be the most important part of a Pokemon-like horror game, are simply button mashers in which you press space to either win or forward the game with no variation other than MAYBE going into the item menu a few times. There's even a skip fight option in the items menu during some repetitive fights, and while I appreciate it, it's like if you slapped a singular piece of paper onto a gaping wound. It just doesn't fix the problem, and instead ends up highlighting it more. Some mildly interesting concepts are played with during the few loops that have to do with confusion, but other than that it's rather uninteresting. It would be much better if the game even tried to have the battles be less-railroady, maybe adding a "growl"-like move so you can choose to faint yourself and get on different routes, or even having the battles be more strategic in which spamming the spacebar isn't a guarantee move forward. The gameplay outside of battles isn't much better, it's pressing up on the arrow key, getting into the previously mentioned fights, and essentially a lot of you doing the same thing over and over and over again. I get that it's a Groundhog's Day thing, but games like In Stars and Time have done gameplay that involves loops fine. The minute I finished the game and saw "secrets found" I genuinely audibly groaned because I didn't want to play any more of the damn game. I was begging for it to be over already by the like, 6th or so loop, I lost count because none of the loops really stick out enough and when they do they're almost immediately repeated in the same exact fashion again with a miniscule difference like "this time you stab the beast" or "this time when you go to stab the beast it stabs you instead!!!"
The graphics. God, the graphics. I don't mean to be mean, but god. The game attempts to emulate GBA Pokemon games without any sense of direction or understanding of the rules of pixel art. Almost every sprite is infected with mixels and misaligned pixels, and are also directly traced off of regular Pokemon sprites. I have no idea if that's even legal. It's very clear that the beasts like Yalabret and Guiylt are straight up copying Mightyena and Weedle respectively. The game having pixel art doesn't work in its favor due to the gore being barely scary and amounting to a bunch of red strokes and splashes all over a sprite. The breathing is kind of creepy, though. I will give it that. The surrounding sprite, not so much.
Finally, the horror. It's not good. The game isn't scary, full stop. The only time I jumped was during a trope in bad horror games that I can only describe as the "comedian goes around tickling the audience to make them laugh" error, in which the game thinks that startling you with loud noises and jumpscares is equivalent to a game genuinely making you nervous or terrified about your surroundings. Compare with Five Nights at Freddy's, for example. The first game's horror doesn't rely on the jumpscares. The horror comes from the atmosphere and general dread of the animatronics coming to your office and being trapped with them until 6AM. The jumpscares there are more punishments for letting the dread get to you. I actually found myself genuinely laughing at some moments because most of this game trying to be scary only comes off as something I'd see in a Sonic .EXE fangame on Scratch. Also, going back to the jumpscares, the LOUDNESS. I'm the type of person to like playing games on speaker and low volume and one of the jumpscare noises was still almost ear-blasting and I had to crank the volume down to a level where I could barely even hear the regular music just to make sure I didn't wake anyone in the house up with the following (they pull this at least one more time, by the way.)
I'm sad this game just sucks because the idea of a game based off those misleading Pokemon horror mobile ads is something a lot of people probably wanted. It's also got potential in some of the moments I mentioned before. It's just that as it stands, unless some massive overhaul happens (or the creator updates it, I think I saw them talk about that in the discussions), I do not recommend this game. I hope the developer understands where they went wrong with this thing because I understand not everyone's gonna be making masterpieces on their first go, but still. It's not funny bad. It's not scary good. It's mediocre bad. And that's the worst kind of bad a game can be.
