Recent reviews by Ashref

This game requires you to have a specific type of mindset when playing it. It wants you to slow down and explore every secret and interaction, which can feel rewarding… sometimes.
You see, there's this fairy ring spot you can fall into that leads to an alternate route with unique puzzles and good character moments. My issue with it is how it ends; it just does. The entire route ends with a literal dead-end where you just sit and die. Yes, the whole thing was a glorified bad ending, and the game then sent me straight back to before I interacted with the ring spot.
This game wasted 20 minutes of my time baiting me into exploring just like it asked, only this time with zero payoff. I kept playing, of course, but my experience was already soured and after another two hours, I couldn't keep up with the story.
Who knows, maybe later there’ll be more sections that undo your progress just so you can watch your cute MC die horribly for the billionth time.

Tfw a demo has more gameplay than 90% of indies out there

Waiter! more Wario-likes please.

Rare sight of a video game's demo being too generous for its own good.

This one is going to be unfair because I really dig games with retro Atari-like graphics and sound design, but everything else about this game turned me off hard.

The game’s core mechanic was tedious from start to finish, especially when I had to replay the entire game ten times just to reach the true conclusion of the story. The writing was unironically cringe, humor felt forced, and the sci-fi twist was disappointing; I wish it took a different, simpler direction.
I liked the 8bit-like environment but the roughly drawn anime portraits pretty much killed my immersion. Trying to force a cutsy artstyle into a serious setting is always a double-edge sword. Ironically, that one black-and-white artwork in the main menu was the best portrait in the whole game, and I wish they’d kept that artstyle throughout.

Still, it’s not a bad game. It just didn’t click for me, sadly.

The "Interloper" chapter was obnoxiously long but the elevator part came and redeemed the whole game, for me at least.

Long =/= Good

Legit one of the most boring games ever made.

Not only it screams "Look at me I deal with depression lol" for the entire playthrough, but when It ended, I felt absolutely nothing at all.
Nothing, I got tired from the YIIK-tier writting that sometimes sounded pretentious. I got tired from walking back and forth just to make the main issue crystal clear (ty for testing my patience). But then there's the ending and... nothing really happened?? wtf am I supposed to learn from all of this???

tldr:
It was too boring for its own good, which is a crime for an "experience" or an "art" game, whatever you call it.

That one song goes too hard.

You legit took all of my fears and put them in one free game, I've NEVER nope'd this hard.

Btw the manual save system gave away the threat. In fact, Once Jesse said "I need to save" I knew I could die any moment, I felt like I got spoiled somehow. Another thing, the plot was kinda trash. I wish it was something more relatable for once.

At first I thought this was one of those obscure anime games where everyone is half naked for some reason, but nope.
This one remained cute and fun from start to finish, easily 9/10 (needs longer invincibility frames)