I’d been keeping an eye on this one for a while but never bought it, and the reason was that whole abstract Chinese crowdfunding mess from before. You open Modian’s front page and more than half of it is various “heart-stopping Chinese visual novel masterpieces” in vigorous development — who knows if you can actually finish yours, maybe you’ve already run off with the money? Then I saw the game had launched, and it even went on discount for the winter sale, so I figured I’d buy it and give it a spin. It’s way longer than I expected, and after finishing it I have to sigh — as expected of a team that went to Japan to study, it’s better than traditional Chinese galgames in basically every respect, and in a lot of places it’s genuinely excellent. At the very least it does things “right.” I’ll break this down into a few points, and since spoiling this game would kill half the fun, I’ll try to keep things spoiler-free:

A game called Dougan, I Was Surrounded by Beauties! (完蛋，我被美女包围了！) suddenly blew up, and the reason it blew up is, to me, completely baffling. Mostly it’s some dumb meme like “give Haohao a home,” and the game itself doesn’t strike me as anything new. Live-action dating sims were already a thing in Japan last century, the AV industry has put out similar stuff, and across the whole AVG space a live-action text game called The Sealed Shibuya was huge years ago. Not to mention localized Chinese titles like The Invisible Guardian or Leap to the Thirteenth Room, which already pulled off results that were maybe passable. So why did Dougan, I Was Surrounded by Beauties! suddenly blow up again?