VAGUS

I played through this short game twice: once randomized, the second time chronologically! The game is clearly unpolished, and I recognize that the dev said that more work will be done on this game. The dialogue has some mistakes I assume to have appeared through translation, such as small grammatical errors and misspelled words. Some text hasn't been translated at all, such as the mall's floor traversal and Solita's interaction with surveillance both still being in Chinese. Sometimes the collision of walls/objects was off, and the character could be led into the blackness off the game's enclosed screen. Character sprites were occasionally inconsistent, mostly observed through Solita's bangs. The sudden brief text-to-speech of Solita's inner thoughts at the end of the first chapter caught me a bit off-guard, as well as some of the music choices that initially didn't seem to match the scenes... ...but after piecing everything together after my second playthrough, I find I quite like this game, regardless of the aforementioned grievances! Going into this, I was a bit scared that I wouldn't be able to understand anything as I'm rather slow (that's one of the few things I share with 小弟... I still don't know his name), but I was able to comprehend everything just fine! I'm also a big fan of bizarre dystopias, stories that are surreal in nature... while the first playthrough was certainly bizarre because of the scrambled chapters, I find that the sense of wackiness is retained even when played through chronologically. And although my initial expectation was of a story that leaned more into a darker, serious tone, I soon realized that much of it was, in fact, intended to have an ironic humor to it (I clearly forgot this bit from the game description), one that seemed to match the music I had criticized early on for being tonal whiplash. For a game of such short length, the themes were apparent and the characters were amusing. There's always something endearing about games like this, unpolished gems with clear visions behind them. Game over!