
"Dichotomy Illusion" is a Shin Honkaku mystery visual novel that combines real-world entertainment elements with physical locations, utilizing ACGN (Anime, Comics, Games, Novels) subculture knowledge to solve criminal cases and uncover the truth.
Revenue comes from in-game items and microtransactions, which our price-based model doesn't estimate. Copies below reflect the player base, not paid sales.
Media

About
The bisected corpse
split precisely along its central axis and gruesomely suspended from a dilapidated ceiling fan - belonged to a former underground idol and cosplayer who had gained local fame in the commercial district. The bisection occurred during production of a live-action promotional video for an unreleased sequel to a Chinese indie horror game...

Shortly after the bisection incident... severed limbs of a woman began surfacing in niche culture stores across the Commercial District, each bearing bizarre yet distinctly coded terminology comprehensible only to hardcore ACGN enthusiasts...

The cases may seem like closed chapters, all present efforts appearing as futile gestures. Yet when you launch the game and immerse yourself with genuine curiosity, you might seize the hidden truths of these twin tragedies, bearing witness to their ultimate reckoning through digital resurrection.
Character Introduction:
Armchair Detective / Curator

Investigation Aide / Citrus Sugar (IRL Handle: Cheng Zicheng)
Quizmaster, Primary POV / Solaris Custard

Chronicle-Bound Cast:
The bisected cosplayer, a socially challenged indie dev, a reassuring game editor veteran, an opportunistic photographer boyfriend trailing his cosplayer girlfriend for impromptu shoots, and proto-otaku twins whose crude promotional video operations resembled cavemen discovering fire...
Their stories laced with cryptic agendas (a subjective yet imprecise descriptor) during the incident will gradually crystallize through digital ephemera.
Yet this is merely the prologue, nothing but an overture.

Supporting Cast of Chaos:
Elementary schoolers obsessively pinning otome game husbandos on their itabags? The gyaru merch boutique clerk at "Spring Valley" compulsively collecting PokeCough Mon catalogs? A plus-sized staffer in band tees sneaking fancams of indie idols from livehouse control booths? A four-member girl band resembling chromatic warriors from some yuri rock manga (with their cerulean bassist currently AWOL in legendary fashion)...
These gloriously unhinged denizens of the ACGN underworld shall aid the investigation through chaotic means, for critical clues might lurk within their meme-laden otaku-speed diatribes – postmodern hieroglyphs demanding cultural literacy to decode.

Scene Recon Log
In their investigation of the limb abandonment case, Solaris Custard and Citrus Sugar shall conduct "fieldwork" (or more accurately, fish-flopping) at these locations. Beyond the macabre biological evidence, the crime scenes themselves might spark morbid fascination among otaku-crossover socialites – each site functioning as geek pilgrimage grounds where murder-mystery tourism collides with ACGN subcultural ecospheres.
Merch Mausoleum: A resurrected deadmall where ACGN shops wage merchandise warfare amidst peeling posters of last season's waifus
PS5 Purgatory: A luxury plaza's white elephant - that overpriced PlayStation experience zone bleeding yen through its marble floors
Idol Crucible: A sweatbox dungeon vibrating with hardcore wota chants, where dreams of "next Cinderella" dissolve into body odor fog
Venue Vanitas: Livehouse boasting instagrammable neon façade but delivering sonic disappointment worthy of bargain-bin earphones
Collecting merch, grinding co-op achievements, snapping cheki with minor idols, enduring ear-bleeding band covers... Surely these ACGN detours during criminal investigations deserve absolution .
(Unless you claim to despise hanging with bro-coded gloom maidens - though that tsundere protest sounds sus coming from an itabag-toting legend like yourself.)

Core Case Matrix
(Visual evidence redacted per narrative constraints)
Chinese indie horror titles, rhythm games featuring idol project crossovers, that notorious domestic indie publisher, grotesque merch from a 90s mecha IP rife with faction wars and Oedipal mech-pilots, an onion-wielding digital diva, psychotic battle royale mascots reduced to environmental decor, and of course the retro cringe of girl band tropes - all deliberately stitched into the game's fabric like inside jokes carved in radioactive neon.
Should these culturally-coded Easter eggs trigger your neural pathways into involuntary mirth, congratulations on your otaku baptism. Discern the real-world IP correlations, and you might just outpace our protagonists in unraveling this bloodstained tapestry of references.
Genres
Stats
Languages: Simplified Chinese
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 46 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
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This isn't a game. It is a digital e-book/visual novel masquerading as a game on Steam. There isn't any actual gameplay here, just clicking through some of the worst writing to insult the concept of literature. This is the kind of writing that would never be accepted by a real book publisher, leading to this being dumped onto Steam Direct for $100 as if it was a game... it is not. This poorly written e-book takes the plot of a murder mystery and throws in a whole bunch of copyright protected franchises that the developer doesn't have permission to use. The idea is you solve the mystery of a dismembered cosplayers murder and limb distribution... wow, Steam e-book fan-fiction writers have weird fantasies. This e-book works as a Choose Your Own Adventure, but the point stands. Nobody reads a CYOA book and says "What a great game I just played." Books aren't games. Visual novels/e-books are the worst way to try read a book (and they're always written far worse than real books too). Imagine reading your favorite book, be that War and Peace or The Davinci Code (are you ok??), but you have to click the mouse for every single sentence that appears. You'd hate it. It's a garbage way to try read a book... and even if it wasn't, this still isn't a game. Now take that annoying clicking and add utterly cringey high-school anime club dropout writing to it. Real authors are published in print and found on bookshelves. This garbage only ended up on Steam because they paid $100 to self-publish, because let's face it, professional publishers would not only reject this garbage they saw it, they'd take out restraining orders. E-books are just a collection of cringe writing and badly generated character imagery (usually done with a construction kit/image generator). So it might as well be a web page. We don't spend thousands on gaming rigs just to use them for what might as well be reading a website. This failed to appeal to the millions of gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at less than 100 concurrent readers. They couldn't even break three figures. It's a dismal reception and it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. While this garbage cringe e-book has no up-front cost, you can find genuinely professionally written novels and comics at a public library or through websites like Project Gutenberg. Your PC isn't a Kindle, and I can't recommend non-game e-book visual novels to people looking for PC games. It's worth nothing that significant number of positive reviews arrived the around the same time this launched, and that's not typical of the expected review pattern for a product this bad. These 'reviews' come from suspicious, dormant accounts with little activity outside of giving a fake looking thumbs up to this specific product (all with the same kind of wording). There's no hard evidence of review manipulation, but take the postive score with a grain of salt.
Related
Related
Trends
Concurrent players on Steam, sampled daily since tracking started.
Hours played at review time, across 46 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
前地雷妹从精神病院出来之后玩到这个作品了,老实说看到最后店长那段话给我看哭了,结尾作者的话也给我看哭了,我们这群精神病都要好好爱自己,看到也记住活着的意义啊(可能有点太矫情了orz
整体玩起来挺有意思的,二次元浓度拉满,真的各种各样的梗。喜欢画风,但剧情比较混沌。
最大的亮点是完全现实的故事背景,用了非常多的近几年的、现实的游戏梗、动画梗、网络烂梗,作为一个玩过不少游戏、对游戏圈子算是有点熟悉的玩家,的确能产生一种可以真实发生在这个世界的幻觉。同时作者也没说错,不能算本格推理游戏,cg基本不能提供信息,文笔打磨不够、提供的信息不精准,也没有记录线索的功能,更像是悬疑小故事。整个故事的很多逻辑不是正常人能理解的,但戏剧性倒是足够了,逻辑让步于戏剧性是没问题的。对于熟悉网络梗、熟悉游戏圈(特别是熟悉pjsk)、了解一些亚文化的玩家,玩着会有更好的体验;不熟悉这些玩意的就不太推荐了
作为一个免费游戏,质量好得离谱了,尤其还是个大学生做的?! 真假混杂的叙述带来不断的反转(作者实在太会用诡述了,看爽了),游戏和现实的联系更是带来一种奇妙独特的体验。 音乐和音效以及画面都带来了很好的沉浸感(尤其是分尸过程那里),ui也很有风格且十分贴合主题,喜欢! 剧情方面,涉及到动机的部分因为有了解过一丢丢相关所以感觉可以接受,有了这层接受就觉得整体还是十分通顺的 还有不得不提的就是,当时看到店前他的立牌时我简直太他妈惊喜和意外了,刚好前两天还是我和他的生日啊,世是马!
剧本大体上我还是可以理解的,抛去一些描写内容和叙事手法之外是一个玩了感觉不算白白浪费时间的剧本,最大的不满(超过50%)在于作者可不可以付钱给我的眼睛 它真的好痛
[h1] 二次元浓度拉满,推理结果离谱♥ [/h1] 免费本格推理视觉小说,21个成就,3-4小时通关。剧情本身足够猎奇——COWSER被分尸,肢体上写满二次元黑话,玩家一边跑线下谷店和Livehouse一边破案,确实是写给阿宅的本格谜语书。 然而乐子是真的多,混沌也是真的混。大量梗和当梗杂糅在一起,必须对亚文化语境烂熟于心才能抓住线索,否则全程隔着一层纱猜谜,错过核心信息。美术确实眼前一亮,但高饱和色调和光影切换堪称“光污染”,极其辣眼睛。推理的最终解很混沌,人物的动机和案件收尾缺乏逻辑支撑,犯罪倾向过于抽象,完全是翻车级烂尾。 综上,如果是好这口的深度二次元,当个免费猎奇小品尝一口还算值;否则建议绕道。 [h1] 山远近,路横斜,青旗沽酒有人家。 -- 鹧鸪天·陌上柔桑破嫩芽 辛弃疾♥ [/h1]
没法说对这样的故事谈上喜欢,大量二次元烂梗黑话,不推荐
二次元确实害人。想看二次元梗黑话的值得一玩,美术也很加分,剧情再打磨一下就更好了
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.