Black Closet

It´s a fun and interesting game that I definitely recommend but know that the plot got progressively less interesting for me. The writing is really solid, surprisingly so. I´m a writer myself and have generally very annoyingly high standards and this game fully sold me on the characters and the setting. It has some of the best "awkwardly getting to know someone" dialogue I have ever seen. It has the most interesting take on a "mysterious" type girl I have seen in a long time and from what little I was able to see from the other girls, they were all super solid, fun and interesting. I really liked the character I got to play as, even if I wasn´t able to name her. She was convincingly strong and ruthless. I really enjoyed the choices you get to make in the game as well as the gameplay. I don´t regret buying this game, it was a fun experience! That being said, I´m just not finishing this game. My biggest critique is that [spoiler] after the harvest festival, the game decides that you´re done with talking to other people and makes you talk to one girl forever. It´s miserable because I really enjoyed the variety from before. The game also tries to sell you on a frankly quite poorly done mystery. I feel like the writer themself wasn´t very enthusiastic about writing this part and felt insecure about some of the plot holes. I would recommend the whole “write a story you´d want to read” thing for their next game because they´re clearly very talented but I feel like they just kind of went with the first idea and weren´t very enthusiastic about it. I feel like the game made so many interesting points about this elite school that cares about its reputation and how that cultivates isolation and incompetence in terms of teaching kids about household chores and how it can discourage fun and individuality and breeds hostility and gossiping and judgement and how extreme the staff can be to protect the school and not the students- and yet all these rich people are still human being that try to be kind! But then the plot is that one stalker in a spooky mask threatens to harm only one girl and then they don´t even kill her. I would have cared way more if a whole group showed up, all wearing masks, and if they threatened the student body in general, saying they would poison the lunches or something. There were so many more interesting choices that could have been made here. I´m annoying so here is a more interesting plot: What if the community surrounding this rich school caused them problems? Maybe there is poverty in the community and there was a protest or something and it makes the school crack down even further on students being able to leave. Maybe people start going a little stir crazy. And if you want a mystery, what if every two months a different girl became a traitor? What if the school slowly became more and more violent, seemingly for no reason? What if people kept disappearing and then reappearing with nobody acknowledging that they were ever gone, including the students themselves? Hell, what if the mask society was a group of angry, abused communist students that are threatening to put a bomb under the school? [/spoiler] It just didn´t live up to the quality of the previous writing and that´s okay, like I said, I have really high standards and I´m also not a teenager. Maybe I´m not the target audience here.