It’s free. It’s meta. Go play this horror dating sim (about 4 hours of content) before googling it.
Seriously.
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This is a dilemma since I don’t really enjoy visual novels, mostly cause I’m terrible at them, but I love horror games. Ok, You’ve got my attention.
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It’s about 1 hour (taking your time) before it suddenly ramps up into the horror stuff, but you can breeze through it pretty quickly.
I played it about that much last night, I think I know who I ought to look out for but it’s just a guess.
The bizarre contrast between the game’s cute and simple appearance vs the warnings around it have my interest. I have it installed and will give it a try.
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Can I play this on Android?
Oh shit, I just finished it. I won’t go into spoilers but it’s definitely worth going into it with as little knowledge as possible.
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Looks like it’s windows, linux and mac only
Edit:
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Aw, phooey.
Well I will then.
Did you read through all the system files? And here’s a link to the ARG collection of stuff on reddit.
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I googled the game after I finished it and I read all about the files and a couple of things I missed, but that’s OK, the best part of the game is in experiencing it, an I felt I did that.
Did I mention how much I hate visual novels? I hardly consider them games, I played a few of these in the 90’s and never looked back, maybe that’s why I never even once during my gameplay thought to look at the settings to see if I could change the text speed, I would have gotten through the game a lot faster that way.
End of rant, because other than slow text, which I realize now, was partly my fault, I really enjoyed the experience.
Frankly , it didn’t feel like a game, not really, you can’t actually lose at this game and you certainly can’t win either, which is why I appreciated it more as an experience and why I’m not that into finding all the secrets. I mean, it’s fine if someone wants to get into all of that but, for me, what was so great about the game was how creepy things get after the (completely necessary) cutesy facade drops away.
I got chills. The last time a game spooked me like this was F.E.A.R. and System Shock 2. Especially the latter as I was reminded of the revelation when it turns out the captain is dead and you as the player realize it’s been Shodan who’s been directing the plot all along. spoilers
I was also reminded of reading Lovecraft for the first time quite some time ago. The setting just as fantastic but with rogue sentient AI’s instead of mythical cosmic creatures. More Skynet, less C’thuluh.
This game has been described as a meta game with having to poke around with the game files and the “breaking” of the fourth wall but I don’t really see it as that. There is no point in the game where the player stops playing the game (Though to its credit, it certainly does invoke that feeling), and even if we do have to go into the windows explorer to delete Monika, it’s not literal. The Monika file doesn’t contain the only instance of Monika in game, it is more symbolic than literal, but again and to its credit, the game makes it feel like you literally are deleting the character from the game forever. Like maybe you shouldn’t do that.
It could be easily argued that there is little difference between interacting with the game via the built in graphical interface with the mouse and keyboard on pretty pictures, vs interacting with the game via its back end made up of files and scripts.
So for me it’s not about how the game is a meta game on gaming, but a game that forces the player to look under the hood of modern games and feel horror at what lurks there; Text files, game code, directories and the developers twisted imagination. All these serve the show us, just like in Lovecraft’s stories, how small we are in such an uncaring universe of cold technological progress. Except that this time we are not initiated into the cosmic horror of the universe as passive spectators reading the long lost notes of an unfortunate character, we are the protagonist, we get to simulate peering into the void.
10/10 would recommend.
Edited for clarity and fixing spoiler tags after first edit broke them. 
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Thank you for this suggestion. I’m neither a fan of visual novels or of horror genres in general and wouldn’t have explored this for more than 10 or 15 minutes without a recommendation. That having been said, wow was it an unsettling experience.
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