Railroad Tracks

Midget exploring abandonded low resolution school building simulator. 10/10

Recommend ONLY for hardcore Yume Nikki heads - and even then, with heavy caveats. (Ignore my playtime; I played the itch version.) This is basically a YNFG. Several of these reviews kinda get mad at a musical for having too much singing. That said, for a YNFG, it's a very, very sparse one. No effects, no puzzles, no chasers, no unique interactions, no sleeping and waking. If you like 'em for the exploration and the atmosphere, you stand a good chance of liking this one. If it's for anything mechanical, turn back now. Instead of effects you collect "memories", which serve as free-use warps to where you got them. Maps are, as a general rule, RIDICULOUSLY oversized with nothing to fill them. In many cases it's clear they were designed referencing the RPG Maker XP editor on a 1080p monitor, not the game window or the player walkspeed, creating an effect in gameplay somewhat like a camera zoomed in too far on a sloth. Within an hour I cracked it open in RMXP and patched it to double my speed; I strongly recommend you do the same to make the walking bearable. The game isn't encrypted or even missing its project file, so at least it's easy enough. There is an unnecessarily long fadeout between every map. Long paths lead to dead ends. The music is often randomly generated MIDI files. There are about a million collision errors to let you out of bounds - in fact, I found multiple points where the "inside" and "outside" of maps simply dovetailed together, allowing me out of bounds through a dev-forgotten pathway. And yet - there's charm! Is it Stockholm syndrome? Arguably. It doesn't hurt that the single mechanic present in the game can save you if you get stuck outside the walls, forming something almost akin to a gameplay loop for boundary breakers. I really do think there's a lot here to love or at least get lost in - even if it would have benefited from a lot more YN-style mechanics. And faster damn default walkspeed.