This is a pretty nice horror mystery Visual Novel. The setting is well-designed, sufficiently creepy, and chock-full of mysteries. The graphical style has a grungy sharpness to it that complements the horror vibes. Be aware, there are jump scares all over this. Most are telegraphed, but a couple did get me, including one that I already knew was there, but my mind was wandering since I was skipping text at the time it popped back out, so f you, author, and well played!
While the story as a whole is quite dark, there are a lot of comedy elements to break it up. I did find the jokes a bit distracting from time to time, but for what it's worth, since humour's a personal thing, more made me smile/laugh rather than cringe. Regardless, the author was obviously going for dark but light-hearted affair, and they largely achieved that goal.
While the story is nothing mind-blowing, there were enough twists and action moments to keep me engaged throughout. The investigative side was the biggest disappointment, this being closer to a pure VN than a detective game. You do get to investigate scenes from time to time, but this largely involves clicking on every hotspot on the screen 2-3 times to exhaust the text boxes before finding the exit hotspot. Beyond that, there's a handful of cerebral minigames that involve putting together the information you've gathered to make the right choice. Should you get them wrong, you go into a death route that eventually throws you back to the title screen with no replay option, which is a bit annoying, especially since some of these death sequences are quite prolonged, but there is a 'jump to next choice box' option in the menu, so it's not too laborious to get back to where you were.
Once the main story's complete, which took me around 10 hours, you then open up a secondary story that's basically a collection of three campfire horror stories. These were quite fun and gave me an extra 5 hours enjoyment, as well as developing a couple of the characters further outside the chaos of the island crisis.
On that character side, there's an intriguing cast of strangers, all of whom have secrets to uncover, and how they all interact with one another and the plot is consistently clever. There's also an unusual sidekick character, an introvert girl with a photogenic memory. She was far and away the most interesting element for me, easily the star of the show, and the voice actress did a fantastic job of portraying her blunt nature throughout. The ongoing frenemy relationship she built with Akira was a particular highlight.
I didn't have any problems on the writing side. The text was clean and easy to read, the unique voices of the characters came through in their word choices, and there wasn't any noticeably unnecessary prose or exposition segments. That said, there could have been a little more nuance in Neneko's voice, her stuttering nature being somewhat overdone, and by that I mean it's a permanent feature, even at the times when we're inside her head. The text was still readable, but it does become a distraction when you're going over ellipsis at the start of every text box in sections where she was the dominant speaker/thinker.
All told though, a worthwhile read at a great price for those who enjoy mystery novels, and it gets bonus points for making the reader think on world some, since we all know islands similar to the one here have existed, and sadly they likely still do.
