Playing this vn after my shift was like slipping out the back for a cigarette. This was the perfect pick to unwind after a stressful time at work. After my own torture, I wanted to see fictional men suffering worse than me.
It is a psychological thriller BL eroge about two friends who find themselves participating in a locked room experiment, where they are forced to defile each other in order to escape. This is definitely not a game for everyone. There were a couple of spots in my playthrough where I took a break because the scenes felt so intense, though I felt that this honestly just reinforced the metanarrative of the story; in which the audience is morally corrupted alongside the cast, consuming increasingly more depraved and dehumanizing content from the subjects of the experiment. The game is supposed to be raw, violating and extreme in order to evoke all kinds of emotions in the audience, all culminating in the enema scene which serves to 'wake up' the audience by using an unconventional sexual act to shock them into lucidity. My senses were heightened the entire time; between morally dubious sex scenes I felt my heart literally ache for the circumstance of the characters and the actions they were urged to take. The scenes transition from hot, fetishistic gay sex into gutwrenching internal dialogues, forcing the implications of every scene to linger overhead the whole time. I cried for them; felt their pain as my own and empathized with their struggle. Their reactions to traumatic events are realistically depicted, influenced by each character's pasts and feelings towards the other.
While not romantic in a traditional sense, the intimacy of their relationship is displayed in full as each of them is pushed and pushes the other towards their limit. Reading through the entire story was so rewarding as it gave so much realism and life to the cast. The characters, Daichi as 'Subject A' and Seiji as 'Subject B' are close in a very 'masculine' and surface-level way, with neither one ever revealing or dissecting their deeper feelings. A theme of internalized homophobia permeates the story; the protagonists are not opposed or disgusted to have sex with each other, but the experiment forces them to cross that line before they are ready or able to open those doors inside themselves first. The two dynamics at play throughout the story are the moral degradation and violation of Subject B (Seiji) by Subject A (Daichi), or the alternative of Subject B inflicting physical torture onto Subject A. Each wanting to spare the other the pain of the action they must take, the men are forced to choose "the lesser of two evils" in order to escape the experiment together. There are way more sex scenes than gore scenes, mostly because this is an eroge, but I would also go as far as to say that it heightens the narrative about how the 'wound that leaves no physical mark' is trivialized beside the visible wound. It's about life enduring after sexual assault, it's about the tragedy of internalized homophobia; it captures how it feels to drift away from a friend who was once there for you at an important part of your life. It is not a traditional love story, but love is present at every moment of their actions, thoughts, and motivations. Every task forces the men to choose; is it more merciful to accept the torment without reservation, just to lessen the guilt of the perpetrator? Or is it the weight of that very guilt that makes it more torturous to be the one who inflicts such pain? In the different endings we see how their choices in the room have changed their lives and relationship forever, often in very depressing ways. Ending F "Friendship" is probably the most 'happy' out of all the endings, and the last couple lines of dialogue made me burst into tears. Overall I really enjoyed the game, even despite it's shortcomings and faults, and I can say without doubt that it has left a lasting impression on me. Just completely depressing, raw, sexy, terrifying, deeply upsetting; and all in a way that ravages the emotions and lingers in the mind for weeks afterwards. For days afterwards. I could not stop thinking about it and feeling miserable. One of the best translated BLVNs, for the nuanced psychosexual vn enjoyer who can appreciate art, or at the very least a lover of men with armpit hair...

really cool mahjong series... I fell into another riichi phase, and Ryu guided me to my yakuman.

SO CUTE... after playing for a long time i really understood why others were disappointed with lack of features, but i'm still holding out hope that there's room for an update... i loved playing touys and seeding my island with phrases, characters, food and other items handmade to make me laugh. i loved hearing about all my friend's islands were progressing and about all the different versions of us that existed. it makes me happy watching the miis I've made of all my friends play with all the other miis of my characters, sonas, franchise-favorites and anything else i could come up with. truly a when worlds collide kind of game i'll be playing and retstarting for years to come.

i really had fun exploring the dream-like world and finding new sights, new blocks and items for crafting with the apotheosis system, and most of all enjoying the lush and surreal soundtrack.

this is a game i could easily sink hundreds of hours into while still enjoying fresh content. the game can be so random at times and a lot of the dialogue and events in the world suprise me and make me laugh. i was interested in the game after someone compared it to kenshi, which i played last year and became obsessed with.

vintage story really feels like the most premier of all the sandbox survival games i've played. i love building so the chiselling system in vintage takes the decoration aspect to a whole new level and is probably what i've enjoyed the most so far. the survival gameplay is pretty challenging but it makes the reward of progression feel so much more worthwhile. it's so easy to spend hours just working away on a base or task while listening to the soundtrack.