Another day like any other. My little sister comes to wake me up, same as always. “Big sis, breakfast is ready. Time to get up.” I’m a guy, but my sister has always called me “big sis.” “Hey, is it really okay to keep calling you that?” Just as my sister leaves, a figure slips out from beside me — a girl with black hair, asking me that. Actually, this “girl” is a cat. And not just a cat — a cat god. A cat god who also happens to be my savior. It all started two weeks ago.

A few days ago I saw someone on Reddit (r/visualnovels) recommending this game. It’s a galgame on Steam called Doki Doki Literature Club!. Of course, when it was recommended I noticed the tag: Psychological Horror. I could sort of guess what that meant. This game, made by non-Japanese gaijin imitating a Japanese-style galgame, looks all harmonious and beautiful on the Steam page, but inside it’s probably a scam. There might be some “depressing” elements in there. “Depressing” — how depressing can you get? The heroine suddenly dies, suddenly loses her head, suddenly goes yandere, suddenly chops you up. That’s about the limit. At most it’s blood splattering all over the screen. What haven’t I seen? So curiosity made me download this free game and click “Start.” After a thrilling adventure, I repeatedly confirmed that the game had really, truly “End"ed, and only then did my heart settle back down. I let out a long sigh… Let me shamelessly brag for a moment. As a forever-alone otaku who’s been single since 2013, who’s too old to find a partner and keeps failing at arranged dates, I’ve played nearly several hundred galgames over these four years and written over a hundred impression posts. For a while I was playing galgames almost indiscriminately. Among them were plenty with crazy plot twists and horror content, but I was immune to almost all of them. Even that Sakura no Mori † Dreamers with evil spirits all over the screen, Honoakari no Toki no Hate Yori with blood-spraying zombies everywhere, the sudden hanging in Midori no Umi, the dismembered limbs in Hakoniwa Logic — all small stuff. Games like Clockup’s are even more whatever. I just smirk, completely unfazed. Out of all the games I’ve played, only two actually scared me. One was the sudden decapitated-head CG that pops up in 3days. The other… is this game. Doki Doki Literature Club!. There’s only one reason it scared me: it was sudden, way too sudden, no preparation whatsoever. Looking back after finishing it, I can say clearly: overall, Doki Doki Literature Club! is not a romance sim. It’s more like a horror game. Yeah, don’t be fooled by all the promotional material or the people in the comments saying how interesting it is. This really is a horror game. At the start it repeatedly emphasizes: if you have a weak mental constitution, don’t play; if you’re a kid, don’t play; if you’re a scaredy-cat, don’t play. That sentence is serious, not a joke! I know a lot of young folks can’t handle even a little “cruelty” in a galgame. I’ve seen people get spooked by the music in Hatsuyuki Sakura, people devastated because the little sister dies in Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai, people who can’t take how tragic the mermaid princess is in Suisou Ginka no Istoria, and people who want to mail razor blades to Niijima Yuu because the heroine in a story-within-a-story doesn’t get a happy ending in Majo Koi Nikki. For those people, stay the hell away from this game. It is not a romance game. It’s a horror game, a horror metagame in the same style as Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi.

I played サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ last year, and my takeaway at the time was: strong opening, decent premise, peaks early and then nosedives, rushed ending. I remember the promo OP being absolutely insane. The buildup before the OP hits is done perfectly—basically the protagonist falls in love for the first time, confesses to the girl he likes, Madoka, and then the very next moment, because he wasn’t paying attention, she gets killed by a serial killer. His rage, despair, regret—all of it explodes the moment that blazing OP kicks in. Hell of an opening. I won’t get into the rest of the game. It’s a textbook high-open-low-walk. The protagonist starts randomly chasing the killer who murdered his girlfriend, randomly joins a few organizations, solves a few random haunted-house incidents around town, and the plot gets more and more psychedelic. The killer turns out to be a psycho, also bisexual, then the killer himself starts randomly getting superpowers, and the protagonist gets a parasite… This kind of escalation reminds me of a ghost story I read in high school. The mystery setup was solid, then suddenly the protagonist gains Taoist powers and starts having superpowered xianxia battles with all sorts of ghosts. I literally spat out my drink. It went from mystery to melodramatic wuxia, massive disappointment. Same with サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. Massive disappointment. Great start, then it turned into a mess. After that, the scenario writer for サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ, Go Nii… oh wait, Mr. Go, went off to write other games. Still heavy horror stuff, but no longer the “dream diving” of the original サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. The game called 仄暗き時の果てより tells a story of aliens and Cthulhu-style time travel. It was actually okay, but I was starting to feel fatigue with Mr. Go’s approach of “not enough plot? add ketchup.” Then サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 was announced as a sequel. At first I was curious what kind of story サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 could possibly tell, since the first game basically wrapped everything up. The protagonist’s girlfriend died, killed by a bisexual psycho. By the end, Madoka had ascended to heaven and the protagonist couldn’t even see her ghost anymore. The mastermind, that bisexual psycho, had been taken out by the protagonist. The story had a relatively complete ending. All that was left were some loose threads with the side heroines. I could understand an FD, but a “2”? Are we just calling FDs “2” now? Then the game came out. After playing through it in bits and pieces over two weeks, I’d say as a “2” it holds up.

Honestly, I never paid much attention to Kure Ichiro before. It was last year’s Sakuranomori†Dreamers that got me interested in him. So in under a year, Kure put out another game: Kuraki Toki no Hate Yori (From the End of the Dark Hours), and judging by the promo art, it’s another horror route. For someone who loves ghost stories, that’s a thrill. And last time Kure started strong and fizzled out, but it was still passable in the end — he had to have learned something this time, right? So I started playing. Playing a horror game in the middle of New Year’s atmosphere — I gotta say, I felt pretty badass. Finished it. How do I put this… If Sakuranomori†Dreamers was a strong start with a weak finish, this one is… the late-game developments are just too explosive.

I’d had my eye on Sakuranomori†Dreamers (サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ) ever since before its release — the premise was dark as hell, the OP absolutely slapped, and going by the description it looked like it was going the horror route. Unfortunately the release got delayed, so I had to push it back on the list. I can’t say playing it felt bad, but it definitely wasn’t pleasant either — though half of that “not pleasant” is in the good direction. If I could get enjoyment out of a horror game, I’d probably be one step away from a jail cell… This game’s hard to rate. I lean positive, but I honestly can’t point to anything that absolutely backs that up. Maybe it’s just that I personally like this style of game, and it falls “just a hair short” in every direction…

I’m personally a huge fan of horror-mystery stuff. Honestly, it’s exactly this kind of work that got me into reading in the first place. Why? Because horror-mystery always dangles a hook in front of you, pulling you along, making you curious enough to keep going. Compared to other works where you have no idea where the plot or story is headed, this is way better — it completely saved middle-school me, who’d just read a few modern novels and gotten his face caved in by those fantasy-ass books with no discernible main storyline.

So here’s how I found this game. I saw some foreigner streaming it on YouTube, in English of course. I didn’t even watch the game itself, just the part where the OP played. Honestly the OP is pretty good, pretty damn sick. And from the OP you can pretty much tell it’s a horror game. More importantly, the Japanese lyrics in the OP told me this was probably a Japanese Galgame that got an English localization. I got curious and looked around for info on it, but there’s basically nothing out there—just some stream videos and not much else. That got me hooked. I wanted to play it, searched everywhere and couldn’t find it, except on Steam. So I bought it on the game’s Steam page. It’s not big, a little over 700 MB, supports English and Japanese, just no voice acting. The surprise is it supports Windows / Linux / Mac, so after downloading, the journey began. I just want to say, this game’s journey really felt like a close call…

I first heard about Midori no Umi (翠の海) two years ago. I saw a CG of the heroine standing in the moonlight and she looked so goddamn pretty that I went digging for more, and while I was digging I noticed something off about the CGs — same pose, except in this one she’s holding a bloody knife. Oh. Okay. I know what this is. Yandere heroine setup, dime a dozen. A fan translation seemed to be in the works, so I figured I’d wait for the Chinese release. And I waited. And waited. I waited until even a scrub like me had started reading raw Japanese, and the translation still hadn’t shown up. So I just went and got the game itself. I didn’t know much about it going in. I skimmed some impressions beforehand — mostly positive, but nobody talked about the plot. All they said was that picking the wrong choice gets you killed. “The protagonist dying is no big deal.” So the game began again.