It makes me sad, because I enjoyed it quite a lot at times, but I think the game just isn't worth $15. For starters, compared to how story games have worked for the last couple decades, it isn't very user friendly. There's no way to go back a few messages, if you have trouble remembering exactly what is going on. Returning to the most recent choice doesn't show you what you are choosing, just the options, and most of those don't have a clear question the way most VNs would. Worse, text messages don't wait until you click in order to proceed. Especially if the final text isn't from your character, the phone closes before you can read the full text and are ready to move on. I struggle with a disability that makes these sorts of things difficult--things that have not been an issue in the dozens of other VNs I've played.
Second, the story is all over the place. The first few episodes have such a good premise, but falls flat when different characters say different things about the same situation (and I don't mean different POVs, I mean, entirely different facts, which I won't go into because spoilers). It's hard to tell what age the characters are at all. It's supposed to be 2016 and they're in middle school. Some of them talk like adults, and the characters will do things like not know what a jukebox is but also talk about early 00's l33t5p34k. One calls himself a millennial - which is not something someone that age in 2016 would be. Millennial birth years end in 1996, which would mean the youngest a millennial could be by 2016 is twenty. These are kids not yet in high school, far from being in uni.
Most of the time, you have very little choice in what happens. Don't like someone? Too bad, they're not only your friend, but the game will constantly ask if you are in love, and if you say no, you're *still* friends and you talk about missing them all the time. The last episode had my character obsessed with Marcel, someone I didn't willingly interact with at all after he said gay people are weird the second time I talked to him. I get asked out on a date by a girl I had actually grown to really like over the course of a game, and then nothing happens, it's over. A whole chapter devoted to someone I don't give a crap about, and when it is suddenly interesting, it's over, no resolution.
I really did like a lot of the personalities. The representation was amazing. Being able to choose nonbinary pronouns for yourself AND having a nonbinary character? Pretty cool. You're allowed to just *not* date people, too: shout out to my ace friends! And this might be the first game I've ever played where I have seen polyamorous characters that weren't reduced to harem girls in some cishet fantasy hentai.
The music is kind of repetitive.. hearing the same three tunes for 5 hours got really old. There was a vocal track that was really pretty, but.. back to the same music used in the steam trailer. That's it. That's the majority of what you'll hear for the whole play time. There's not much sound effect use, and it isn't even very good at shifting the few tracks it does have to keep up with the tone of the dialogue. It badly needed more music.
The art style is lovely, though. Other than the representation, the art was my favorite. You can tell from the screenshots whether that's your bag. My only complaint there is a few of the scenes used a lot of description when they could have paid for another few stills just to commemorate big in-game moments, but that's not really that unusual in VNs anyway, so it's not like I'd not recommend the game over just that.
I might have given it a meh, if the price were right. If you're interested in the themes, you'll probably enjoy it at least a little, but I recommend waiting for it to go on sale, at least 50% off, for most people.
