Gore Screaming Show is a flawed-yet-entertaining horror visual novel. A consistently engaging horror mystery, the story falters when its psychological horror elements take a backseat to grotesque, overlong, and too frequent H-scenes which unfortunately house most of the gore the story has to offer. Its overly similar routes don't help, either.

The initial three routes focused on the cover heroines introduce the core elements of GSS's story—those being Yuka, her companion Gore Screaming Show, and Kyoji's return to his hometown. My initial readthrough of the common route, targeting Akane, was the most interesting, since I knew less about Yuka, and I therefore felt a sense of unease each time Kyoji and the other characters interacted with her and her dissonant theme played. Unfortunately, on repeat playthroughs targeted different heroines, the first half of the story was a little too repetitive. Every time Kyoji visits the shrine with Yamiko and one or more heroines, every time he discovers the well and Yuka appears behind them, every time she says something hurtful to a heroine, every time Kyoji and his classmates visit Yuka's mansion, every time Yoshiki shows up and Kyoji helps him pursue Yuka.

The H-scenes also suffer due to their repetitive nature. There's only so many times I can see the heroines being filled in all three holes during some overlong gang /SA/ scene that eventually devolves into gore before I get tired of it. Aoi and Kiika's route are particularly bad regarding this; Akane's route at least had more involvement from Kyoji, and the back-to-back-to-back H-scenes during her route were actually relevant to the conflict of her route.

Yamiko and Yuka's routes, therefore, were a nice change of pace from the three mandatory routes before them. Yamiko's route nicely and greatly decreased the frequency of H-scenes in order to reveal more backstory regarding Yuka and some other relevant characters. Her route is only helped by the fact that I found her to be the most interesting and well-rounded heroine overall, with her usually carefree, but serious when she needs to be, personality. On the other hand, I enjoyed how Yuka's route branched off at a much earlier point than the other four routes. However, I was a little mixed on the latter half of her route. Her redemption story was a little too undercooked for me to fully buy into it—yes, the story revealed plenty of reasons why she is deserving of sympathy, that stone froze her mood at a point in time when she was wishing death on everyone, so the deaths she caused were not entirely her fault. But, at the end of the day, while I was able to partially forgive her, Yuka's reason for redemption felt somewhat too little, too late. As such, the ending left me with mixed feelings, and a hint of unsatisfaction.

Overall, I did ultimately enjoy Gore Screaming Show,—it was often a compelling, uneasy, psychological horror story—but it did have pacing issues in its H-scenes, too similar routes, and a moderately lackluster conclusion.

7/10