My Loving Wife

⠀

My Loving Wife is clearly inspired by Doki Doki Literature Club, in fact the other game is cheekily referenced at one point. Unfortunately it doesn't have enough of it's own thing going on to truly warrant playing it over the OG. My Loving Wife is just not very scary or emotionally engrossing, fumbling the very things the made Doki Doki so inspirational. First off, the aesthetics. The backgrounds are generic but it can be argued that text-based games aren't exactly revered for their settings. Elements that visual novels usually value however are distinctive character sprites and speaking styles, and this one really is nothing special there. Your wife is as distinctive as a DeviantArt self-insert OC, and the character's voices are so similar you have to keep up with the name captions to not get confused. The story is both boring and weird. No major spoilers in this review, suffice it to say it goes for a self-aware fourth wall break like Doki Doki but it just doesn't land. The twist comes almost out of nowhere and our wife never shows signs of malice or has convincing reasons to become homicidal, and yet she does, to our MC's and our consternation. The conversation out in cyberspace is where the writing really falls apart. Our wife is basically incapable of being thought provoking or creepy, just rambling and reminding us (the player) to treat people nicely in an overly naggy manner. Visual novels are by their nature linear, making up for that fact by including a dizzy array of intricate choices, making replay value very high and no two playthroughs exactly alike. In My Loving Wife the linearity is so blatant you get the picture of a good, neutral, and bad path (in that order!) from your very first decision. In a word, this is not good. There are some spelling errors, which in the grand scheme of things are not that bad. Also, why do the sound settings have a toggle for voice volume if there is no voice acting? Kind of an odd detail. I can't recommend this game because it is not a well made visual novel. With a rewrite it could probably make a good parody of the genre, and the horror subgenre in particular, but as a serious item it is sorely lacking.