God knows why I played this game. Curiosity, probably. Koumuin Yamete, Ana o Horu Koto ni Shimashita (公務員辞めて、穴を掘ることにしました) The title sounds like a joke, and that’s exactly what it is: a 4399-tier doujin minigame. I don’t know if the old “Chengguang” platform is even still alive, but this is the kind of thing that would only exist on a site like that. The game is short. Our thoroughly goofy-looking protagonist ditches his shut-in wife at home to dig a hole by the front door, and ends up in another world. There are multiple endings—one where you dig down, come back up, and find your wife has run off with someone else; one where you tunnel through time and space. But the whole thing is just snark and shitposting, so you’re not expecting anything actually interesting out of it. And the “jokes” in this game are genuinely hard for me to parse. Maybe it’s because I’m not a young Japanese person, but my face the entire time was the old-man-staring-at-his-phone meme: “What the fuck is this? What’s supposed to be funny here?”

Dayglacia no Rashinban (デイグラシアの羅針盤) is a doujin game by the circle Catalyst, first released around 2015. In December 2018 it got a graphical upgrade, an OP2, and a port to Nintendo Switch.

I’d originally planned to take my physics teacher out for Japanese food, but when I drove over the place was closed… I should’ve figured it out when nobody picked up the phone number listed on Meituan. Miscalculated. And somehow Meituan was still selling group-buy vouchers for the place — should I be snarking that everyone at Meituan is too busy lifting weights and riding bikes? So we decided on the hot pot place next door. Once we’d eaten most of the hot pot, my physics teacher started talking about her hobbies.