Pros: Really good art! The character sprites and especially the grayscale CGs are fantastic - much higher quality than I see or expect not just in RPG Maker games, but in indie projects in general. Some of the color CGs look a bit strange in terms of shading, but even those are far from bad. Catherine's voice acting isn't bad, either.
Cons: Oh, Lord have mercy. Everything else.
(Some of my description of the writing has some light spoilers, but major spoilers are marked.)
The writing is. Boy it is not the best. I don't say this because of the typos, though there are plenty (which range from the small, like a missing comma here and there, to the medium-but-understandable, like some odd verb usage that suggests the writer is not a native English speaker, to the downright embarrassing, like misspelling a character's name in her own profile), but because of its "ow the edge" genericism that I've found in a dozen other bad horror RPG Maker games like it. You know - overly on-the-nose and oft-predictable writing, loads of cheap jumpscares, oddly specific letters and diary entries left in improbable places (you ever write in your diary about how you're about to do some cannibalism or how your mom tells you to stab people to death?), absurdly evil dialogue from villainous characters ("I don't care about your baby" is such a funny thing to say), etc. However, though horror RPGs like this often suffer this way, Stitched has two problems not even those do.
One, a lot of this game feels suspiciously similar to Mad Father, with a couple changes made to make it slightly to the left. The homeless girl, taken in by a wealthy family as a maid, and protecting the daughter wandering a building of horrors that she knows were committed by her father's cruel experiments in a vaguely 19th-century setting? (Which is even funnier, because this game has things like "houses with multiple maids" and "commuter trains that look like they run on steam like the Polar Express", with Catherine attending boarding school and all the characters wearing very old-fashioned clothing - Fi is out here in a flat cap like a Baker Street Irregular - and yet there are computers and electronic locks??? Absolutely unhinged setting, when and where is this meant to be??) The ending reveals in which (spoilers for both Mad Father and Stitched) [spoiler]the father is turning people into dolls, and the main girl grows up to commit as many atrocities as her father? Which comes out of nowhere in the case of this game, since it requires making Agnes suddenly hate you even if you've been nice to her the whole time, and reveals that the dark figure pursuing you is... you??? Somehow??? Because secretly YOU killed all the factory workers! And just forgot about it somehow! What a twist! Except that you didn't mean to, and the dolls would also attack you, but if that's true then why is there this other evil version of you there...? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is just that you're hallucinating or something.[/spoiler] Sure, the context is different, but Mad Father was a lot more campy and fun, and Aya's youth and naivete also made her reasoning for standing by her obviously immoral father make a lot more sense than this game, which bizarrely seems to be courting sympathy for Catherine's. ("I may not have forgiven my father, but I won't abandon him" - what do you MEAN dog?? He has KILLED HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE??) So more than just being unoriginal, it comes off as derivative in a very specific manner of a better game. (And in terms of another better game it has elements from, Paranoiac by Uri has the same "heart rate health means you'll die of fear" mechanic, with an extremely similar but much-better executed version of Stitched's true ending reveal that [spoiler]the bear was not actually trying to kill Catherine, meaning she died of fear instead of the bear harming her.[/spoiler])
Two, there is the false, offensive, and completely unnecessary denigration of people with narcissistic personality disorder in a note in the prison near the beginning of the game. I'm not a doctor, but I still know that NPD is a highly misunderstood condition, and one thing I definitely don't need a medical degree to know is that symptoms of NPD do not include murder. What the hell?? There's no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mental illness with murder as a symptom! I only kept playing because I wondered if it would be subverted - shown that that was an uninformed opinion by someone setting up an innocent woman to die - but unless that happens in one of the other endings (full disclosure, I could not bear to do the incredibly obnoxious endgame chase scene any more times than I already had to get the endings other than "True Ending?", so if those endings contradict anything I say here, please beat my ass in the comments and I will apologize and amend my review - I just did not like this game enough to keep playing), I certainly saw no evidence of that. It'd be one thing if this were an older game, but this is from 2017. Christ alive, we don't need more fearmongering about mental illness. Shameful. I think I'd be less harsh with this review were it not for this, but because of this I offer no quarter.
As for everything else... the puzzles and other game aspects were fine for the most part, with the exception of that aforementioned obnoxious chase scene, and one part at the beginning of the game - after all, how the hell were you meant to find the 2 of Spades on the bed without knowing to look directly at the pillow, which has no visual cues, and when clicking any other part of the bed shows nothing?? But I could have lived with both things, if I cared about the story, and I just... did not.
In conclusion, the fact that this game's art team seems to have had more people involved than every other facet of the game is very telling on how the game ended up. Would love to see more art like this in something better, though.
