okay for context I've only been playing this game for about four days and I've almost 100 percented it. It is extremely fun and addicting and tickles my brain perfectly. I wish there were more things to do in it because I love the gameplay loop and I need more...I NEED MORE !!!!! The game itself is a stat manager/balancer type thing where you help manage this emotionally unstable girl's streaming career, and she's also your girlfriend. I love this idea, and I love how the gameplay just makes sense within the narrative. You have to manage her stress, her affection, and her mental darkness, and managing them differently unlocks different paths and endings. She's incredibly needy (see the title) and so a lot of the stats and endings are very fickle, which makes the game pretty challenging. For example, you have to keep replying to her texts with these emojis and not leave her on read or she gets mad and eventually leaves you. This can get tedious as she will text you throughout all the day cycles (day, dusk, and night)! The streams themselves make just...so much sense. Streaming s*xy streams gives you more followers, but negatively affects her mental health, same with breakdown streams...which makes sense as s*xualizing yourself for views online or begging for sympathy CAN negatively effect you, especially if you're in a vulnerable position like our needy streamer. More standard streams give you less views but are better for her mental health. If you stress her out too much the game sometimes auto-locks you into certain tasks that can "ruin" your plan for her, which adds another element of challenge. There are also SO many classic visual novel and denpa references, when KAngel starts playing the "f*cked up VN" and I saw the sunset, I screamed "IS THAT SAYOOSHI????" and then the sprite for mutsuki showed up and I was like "I KNEW IT!!!!!!!!!!!" (steam if you're listening please PLEASE find a way to localize sayooshi and put it on steam i want to play it SO bad) There's also a really blatant shizuku reference in the mv and it made me very happy...and a bunch of other denpa references that other people found but I didn't catch...hhehehe... like imagine if ddlc pulled out a totono reference or something??? that's how this felt! ahhhh! I noticed there's a spin-off needy streamer game which has some very classic vn gameplay, including the "white text over the cg" which I have a soft spot for as that's how I played higurashi! The creators really have some denpa/vn experience! The soundtrack is also INCREDIBLE??? Each song matches the vibes of the situation perfectly. The song that starts out is an 8-bit sorta "let's do this!" loop that gets faster and crazier as you work towards monetization...one of the versions of this even has someone screaming in it which is very fitting lol Once you hit milestones, this very relaxing classic vn song plays that feels right out of doukyuusei or something. And when you do milestone streams, a lullaby music box song plays that reminds me a lot of yume nikki. After you hit monetization, a more peppy, runway type beat plays kind of like a "yeah let's really get serious" with little remixes of a girl speaking (I thought she was saying "ii desuka" but that might just be my earthbound brain) There's also a song that plays any time something f*cked happens, it reminds me a LOT of the milk bag games which made me smile! I will say, as much as I enjoy the balancing act of this game, it left a few things to be desired. I still wholeheartedly recommend it, but just keep these in mind. The game relies almost fully on clicking things in this "faux desktop" kind of area, and the spacing of a lot of it makes it a bit difficult to easily and comfortably click on things. It's a bit unclear where you need to click in order to have the inputs go through. I found myself offsetting my mouse a bit and clicking the sides or just above certain icons in order to have the input go through. I got used to it after a bit, but it was a bit off-putting at first and definitely ruins the quality of life for the first little bit. I also found a few glitches/bugs such as menus staying on screen instead of disappearing, endings triggering the achievement but not triggering the textbox that brings you back to the title screen, and some asset errors. Since the game relies mostly on clicking things, clicking the screen at all can cause a bunch of different things to happen, so I think the code should have had more parameters to make gameplay smoother (i.e.: if ame has this sprite, disable the "patting her head" mechanic so clicking on her head wont negate that sprite") The writing is also a bit hit or miss. I went in expecting something similar to the milk bag games, in which we slowly learn more about this mentally ill girl and her problems. We DO, but sometimes Ame seems almost cartoonishly cynical or unfair, in a way that seems more like a cynical parody of a mentally ill streamer rather than a well-rounded character. Maybe that was the intention, and there certainly were moments where I sympathized with her, but the strength of this game is definitely in the gameplay, rather than the character writing. With these bugs and hit or miss characterization, the game almost feels like an early-access or demo? The replay-ability and multiple endings carries the gameplay length, but even with that a lot of the streams are repetitive. I was expecting your choices to affect the streams a lot more, like if you do a bunch of s*xy streams and then go to more "normal" streams, the comments would be like "why is she acting all innocent" and stuff, but it's just the same comments you would get if you never did s*xy streams at all. It broke the immersion just a bit as I slowly realized the game was probably just internally looking at the stats bars rather than checking which streams you had done etc. I was really excited for an ending where your fanbase goes against you for switching up your streaming topics! Overall: I recommend the game. I mean you can just tell by my hours I've gotten in through only four days. I'm obsessed. It has it's flaws but I love it anyways...!!
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