#full review

Cozy Liora is a relaxing "game" built around writing in your diary in a cozy, relaxing environment. it's currently in early access, with the creators intending to raise the price of the game as they add more features. that's a slightly uncomfortable advertisement to hear from a game that, as far as i'm concerned, has too many features.

i'm here for a diary, okay? i want to write stuff down on my deck and i want to have one designated place for it so i don't spend ages going through my various game notes. i don't need much more. the music and aesthetic options can stay, i'll even allow the minigames, but some of these features are plain superfluous. anonymous letters that get sent to a random user? the ability to see how many other users are writing in their diary at the same time? there's so much going on here that it overwhelms the mind and overshadows the actual diary, which is the point of the app.

the overwhelm isn't helped by the AI generated visuals, which... are AI generated. that's its own can of worms, and if i'd paid more attention in order to see it before buying the game i would not have been willing to spend money on it lmao. even ignoring the ethics and environmental factors, the AI visuals look bad, and they make the app harder to use because all the UI icons are AI generated images without so much as a piece of alt text to help clarify what they do.

the real problem with this app, though, isn't the bad visuals or the superfluous features or the confusing navigation. all of those would be sacrifices i am willing to look past in order to use a basic app. the real problem is that there is a character limit. on your diary. and it is a hard limit - it's not just a "now you have to make another entry to continue your thoughts" thing, you only get one entry per day, you have a strict limit on how many words you can write per day in your personal diary. which is not a problem you would have on the vast majority of like, platforms that have a text field that could theoretically be used to write your thoughts, and certainly not a feature i think anyone in the world wants in their fucking diary.

i... have beef with a lot of journaling apps tbh. with all of the fucking Journaling Content that I see everywhere online. everything is so fucking... Chill and Wholesome, and it makes me feel like it's not for me. like, i'm not opening a journaling app because i'm such a Chill and Calm person, i'm doing it because i want to write down my thoughts, and if my thoughts were actually Chill and Calm then i probably wouldn't want to write them down. i've started to genuinely hate the whole Lo-Fi Aesthetic because it's so like, constantly pushed down the throats of specifically people who are probably already upset, and if you're not one of the minority of people who is made less upset by this specific aesthetic then it usually just feels worse to be looking at a Wholesome App so disconnected from how you actually feel. in my less charitable moments i insist that journaling isn't actually for people with any problems at all, it's just a performative thing for happy people to write about how happy they are so they can post it on instagram, and then people start to give me that look they give me when i'm making a generalization so broad and irrational it's actually starting to get concerning.

but like... that is what this is, right? this isn't for people that like, want to write down their thoughts. it doesn't even feel like it's broadly for people who want to have a diary. the character limit feels like it's rubbing salt in the wound, making it clear that this is not a ~chill safe space~ for anyone who wants to write anything messy or complicated enough to take up more than a tiny page of text. this is an app for people that want to have a relaxing cozy app on steam, but it's not an app that people would actually use for most of its advertised features.

genuinely i have never so strongly considered requesting a refund on a game as i have on this one. the only thing stopping me is that (1) it's been over 2 weeks and (2) i've heard the more often you request refunds from steam, the less likely it is that they'll allow refunds in the future, and i don't want to shoot my future self in the foot over 5 wasted dollars. normally for a game this cheap i would not bother thinking about a refund even if it was like, genuinely unplayable in a "cannot launch it in order to start" sense. but sometimes i get the sense that products are like, such a low-effort cashgrab that it seems like their business model is actually just "nobody is going to bother going to the effort of a refund on such a small purchase, so it's okay if players can only get 5 minutes of playtime before realizing it's not worth it, because we've already got their money then". the audacity of having a strict character limit on a diary is so outrageous to me, i'm convinced it's either a deliberate scam or proof of my "significant amounts of Online Journaling Content is not aimed at people who like, have any problems or thoughts they might wish to journal about, and is just about having instagram-perfect pictures of how well you're taking care of yourself" conspiracy theory

Teaching Gender Affirming Care is a visual novel in which you play as a doctor at a queer-inclusive health clinic, navigating situations with various transgender patients and trying to help them as best you can. the target audience is very explicitly doctors as per the advertising, and it is specifically designed to teach real-world doctors how to handle real-world patients, to the point of having "learning goals" before each session. i do understand the benefits of learning via gaming, but i also can't help but imagine some poor 60-year-old doctor out there is saying "I want all my patients to feel welcome, but I just don't understand this transgender thing!" and then suddenly finding himself being instructed on how to make a Steam account.

i'm not a doctor, obviously. i'm a game reviewer and a trans person and i'm not particularly good at either of those. while i will allow myself to freely speculate on how this approach may or may not facilitate medical providers to learn real-world skills, the fact is that i really don't know what's best for doctors or how they learn. this game may be advertised and designed as an education tool but once you put something on the steam store, you inevitably open yourself up to people treating it like a game - there's some obvious value in this game for the patients just as much as the doctors, it doesn't exactly seem like most of the game's 17 official reviews are from medical professionals. i will be primarily reviewing TGAC as a game.

and as a game, it's... fine. it's not Deck Verified, but it works just okay on the deck. it had some lag, more lag than i ever really see in a visual novel, which seemed to get progressively worse throughout my playthrough as more data piled up. half of the steam achievements are broken. there's no feature to skip dialogue you've already seen, which is particularly frustrating because (1) that's a built-in ren'py feature that someone must have chosen to remove and (2) you're explicitly encouraged to replay sessions until you answer every question correctly.

there are a lot of quiz/question sections in this game, and while some are just about the most compassionate or helpful course of action and relies on emotional intelligence over medical knowledge, some are just straight-up medical questions about the effects of medication - which makes sense for the target audience but feels unfair for those of us that never went to med school. normally in this situation i would just google the answers, but online information about trans medicine is so unreliable and so full of contradicting claims that i don't really expect to find anything. in fact, i don't even really expect the devs of this game or the doctors treating the patients to know any of these answers for certain - this shit is underresearched as fuck, different doctors say different things without much of a clear consensus, and of course, absolutely everyone is pushing some kind of an agenda.

since this is more of a visual novel than a game, i'm primarily judging it for the story. which is ... again, just fine. you follow a couple of trans patients as they work through their issues and get the care they need. they become more confident as they have a doctor they can trust and then they find a therapist that works for them and a loving partner and achieve all their goals outside of transition (even the really lofty goals like becoming a famous movie director and actor) and they all live happily ever after. it's... sickly-sweet.

the tone of this game is the thing that stuck out to me the most while playing. it's so positive that i can't ignore it. every line of dialogue is written with an insane degree of self-awareness and honesty about both physical and mental health problems - everyone talks like they've been to 500 seminars about communication. the doctors are kind and nurturing and explain everything perfectly. the questions are phrased like "is it okay if i ask you about these symptoms?" and the patient responds with affirmative consent for the question before they describe their symptoms. they know exactly what is medically relevant and they hesitate with none of it, they gush constantly about how the clinic is so good for them and they're so grateful, and even when the game specifically has to guide you on how to handle a situation where another doctor misgenders or mistreats a patient they are always simply uninformed rather than actively transphobic.

it's downright jarring when you factor in the obvious reason why this game was made, which is acknowledged by characters in the game: healthcare for trans people fucking sucks. it's an uphill battle to find someone who's even willing to do the most performative respect of names and pronouns, let alone someone who knows enough Trans 101 to actually provide you healthcare on anything relevant to your gender. the game tries to acknowledge this - characters talk about their own previous offscreen bad experiences, about offscreen characters not having good experiences, about the statistical fact that the vast majority of trans people are not having this perfect wholesome doctor experience - but it comes across as a massive violation of "show don't tell".

even when the game tries to show this in practice, it fails. the in-game meter of how well you're doing in each session is labeled as a measure of how much the patient trusts you and how stressed they are. saying things that are insensitive or factually incorrect will decrease the patient's trust score... because, of course, the patient knows more than you and is able to immediately flag it as incorrect. there's no risk of realistic consequences from being given wrong information by an expert who you trust - the patients don't follow your bad advice and end up in a bad situation, they just reveal that they knew the answer to the question they asked all along, and you calmly apologise and re-check your information and correct yourself.

the most jarring part to me, i think, is that the patients don't really respond to a decreased trust in you. if you make them uncomfortable or give them wrong information, they don't, like... stop expecting you to give correct information, stop self-advocating because it seems pointless, stop asking questions, try to end the session as quickly as possible, stop coming back. they just argue with you, briefly and gently, and then forgive you. providing healthcare to vulnerable traumatised individuals really is as simple as not fucking up every single fact you try to state.

the obvious defense for this is that the game isn't supposed to be realistic, it's supposed to train doctors, but, well, i can't help but wonder. wouldn't it be better if the doctors were trained for real patients? not for a hypothetical extremely-self-aware trans person who describes all of their problems perfectly and with no hesitation, but for real messy people with real messy problems who don't know exactly what to say for the doctor to understand them? do doctors not need training on helping patients who, instead of describing physical pain/discomfort in the exact way the textbook does, say "idk it feels weird" 5 times and struggle to give more information? on helping patients who don't see the point in talking about issues that they don't expect to successfully get help with, and need prompting or support to talk about stigmatised health issues?

i don't actually... like to get into my Dark Backstory on the game review blog. but in this case it does genuinely feel relevant to say exactly when the game found me, so here's the cliffnotes version: i gave up on the idea of medical transition a few years ago, when it seemed like the risks and the hardships outweighed the benefits. then things happened to make me question if that was a rational decision, and i had to start grappling with a thousand variations on the impossible question of "do i actually not want this, or do i just feel like pretending i don't want it is less painful than admitting i can't have it?". someone in the steam reviews said "This game is especially good If you want to know what to expect from a doctor visit discussing gender affirming care or are curious about hormone therapy". it seemed like the right time.

it... would have been really cool if i could say something in this review like "the game lags like hell and the dialogue is insufferable, but it caused me to get lifesaving medical care so i have to give it 5 stars". unfortunately i suspect that's an unrealistic expectation to place on a video game, and i really don't feel any less uncertain about medical transition than i did before playing. i definitely don't feel like it's helped me "know what to expect" from a doctor's appointment, because everything about the doctors depicted in this game is so far removed from my lived experience that it reads as blatantly unrealistic.

my best friend, more optimistic than i, has made a valiant attempt at telling me that it's not unrealistic, just... uncommon or something? i'm pretty sure the gist of what they said was "some doctors genuinely are like this, you just haven't met them". i guess i get the idea.

realistic or not, i do see the appeal of games like this, where all the evils of the world happen offscreen and all the important characters seem to live in a trans healthcare utopia. i don't usually like anything in the "wish fulfilment" genre and i sometimes try to get on a high horse about "um actually if this story isnt realistic about Trans Experiences then i can call it transphobic for that" but this game ended up being an exception for me in a weird way. even as i told myself that it was a stupid game/education concept that wouldn't help anyone, and the writing was bad and the whole thing was unrealistic... i couldn't stop playing.

sometimes playing this game, imagining a world where everyone is perfect and accepting and safe and it's just okay to be trans in a doctor's waiting room, feels like healing. other times it kind of feels like it's making fun of me. the constant therapyspeak just takes it over the edge from "hopeful goal to work toward in real life" to "unrealistic utopia with no relation to real life" for me, and i hate that something that could have been so hopeful and healing is so full of jarring reminders of "by the way, none of this is real!". the perfect doctors from this game might really exist in some lucky queer-focused clinic, but i really think the perfect patients probably don't, and if they do then i'm not one of them.

i... don't know, man. i understand why the trans community needs stories like this - we need to be able to see examples of people like us succeeding and finding joy. i just feel like the tone of this one is so obnoxiously, jarringly wholesome that i can't see any of myself in it. i mean i thought the One Night, Hot Springs game series was a bit Fluffy and Wholesome for my taste and that had way more realistic tackling of Trans Issues compared to this.

ultimately: do i think this game achieves its intended purpose as a training tool for medical professionals? well, probably - there's a lot of things that i would have designed differently if i was the one calling the shots on what doctors need to learn, but that's probably why i'm not writing med school curriculums. do i think this game has unintentional value for trans gamers? sure, in the way a lot of lighthearted wish-fulfilment-esque trans stories are. if you find it healing or comforting to see stories like this, absolutely check this one out. i just have a hard time swallowing it.

there's something oddly healing about a lot of the wholesome casual trans-friendly dialogue, but the most meaningful part of the whole story for me was an offscreen character, River, who is one of the patient's friends. in one of the obligatory "this clinic is so meaningful and helpful to me" scenes, which is supposed to educate medical professionals about the positive impacts of trans-friendly healthcare but in a video game context just comes across as player shilling, Liv mentions wanting to recommend the clinic to others because of a friend who had a bad experience with doctors. in the next appointment with liv, during the mental health screening, they mention that their friend committed suicide recently. a damn heavy-handed and oversimplified way to get across the concept of "bad healthcare experiences affect patient mental health", sure, but it was the only point in the game where i really felt like my character was doing meaningful work and like giving the best care i could was important.

but, of course, we never get to meet River, and we certainly never get the chance to accidentally drive a character to suicide. that would be beyond inappropriate for a training exercise - a lot of my criticisms, i'm aware, can easily be parried with a simple "it's meant as an education tool for doctors, you can't expect it to tackle everything". i can stand here and argue till the cows freeze over about why i think maybe doctors should be educated less optimistically about what their trans patients go throug. but really, i think it's only natural that as a trans person i'll look at a resource like this that necessarily cuts so much of what could be meaningful to me in order to be school-appropriate, and think, why can't we ever be the target audience instead of the subject?

the static speaks my name is an abstract, short horror game. you step into the shoes of a man at the end of his rope, a man about to commit suicide. the explanation offered for this decision is... surreal, abstract, requires you to really read into implications that are not spelled out whatsoever. it reminds me of like, the post-fnaf and post-ddlc era of recent indie horror, where it's become increasingly clear that some people just put out surreal and contradictory hints with no thought into the story in the hope a fandom will make a story for them. to the game's credit it does predate the Phenomena of ddlc and fnaf, coming out back in 2015, so it might just be coincidence.

i thought this game was going to say something about suicide, honestly. i was interested in that. as one review says: "Cute in concept but feels incomplete. It behaves as if there will be more chapters but then changes its mind. As if the creator was going to go back and continue working on it but never did." the most meaningful thing it says about suicide is "this guy does it".

i presume that this game is, actually, steam deck compatible with some tinkering. it's a DOOM mod, and DOOM is steam deck compatible, and installing a mod is some pretty light tinkering my steam deck community standards. i just haven't yet gotten around to trying - i'm more of a "the steam deck is like if a nintendo switch could run steam games" guy than a "the steam deck is like if a complex PC was a handheld console" guy, you know? even the most simple of modding intimidates me.

myhouse.wad is many things. it's a DOOM mod. it's a loose adaptation of house of leaves. it's an experience, one almost impossible to describe sufficiently and one that is best experienced firsthand, blind. it's a way to make yourself feel very, very small. it is, perhaps above all else, a really fucking good game.

i'll try my best to summarise. myhouse.wad is, according to the initial advertising on a doom forum, a DOOM tribute map that an unknown user posted in honor of a deceased friend, based on that friend's house. on a first playthrough, perhaps, that's all it is. you can play through this in typical amateur-doom-mod, boomer-shooter style - you make your way through the house, you kill the monsters, you unlock the keys to progress, you exit to a vanilla DOOM level that wasn't replaced in the files. but, of course, that is not the intended experience. all it takes is one walk around to lock out the easy ending and get you trapped in something bigger than you can understand, and the game has a way of luring you toward its secrets.

the game has many secrets. multiple endings, countless easter eggs, and a curious diary that you gain access to when you download the map - a diary in which every instance of the word "house" is curiously highlighted. the game advertises itself as simply being the house, but it should be obvious there are more areas to find. that's not the interesting part, really - anyone can make a game that advertises one thing and then contain another thing, even outside of the horror-disguised-as-innocent-game trend. the interesting part is the way the house itself contains far more than you first think, the way you feel so small as the player when you realize there are rooms in the house that shouldn't exist ... and far more interesting is the way the house persists in contexts where it shouldn't be able to, the way unrelated locations invariably bring to mind the place that you can't escape.

you can't escape the house until you can. the setup of this game nearly guarentees that each time you find a new location, it will be accidental, and each time you find your way back to the house, it will be accidental. you tend to get trapped in new areas as soon as you enter, ensuring that you're constantly powerless. when you do get out, you will probably wish you hadn't. the storytelling is sparse and cryptic here, but some of the stronger themes i can piece out are childhood and growing up and the change of perspective. this thing haunts you, hunts you, terrorizes you for hours, and you can't get away from it. suddenly when you feel like you're about to figure it all out, it escapes from you. you're not ready; nobody cares that you're not ready. it's time to move on.

you can't move on, of course. at least not yet. this is a game about not moving on, about cycles and repetition and powerlessness, but it's also about hope, if you simply keep trying. many of these psychological horror, "not-what-it-seems" games have a problem of leaving you utterly clueless on how to progress, and while i did get stuck a few times, myhouse.wad does a remarkable job at telling you what to do without telling you anything at all. you learn to puzzle out the path that is being laid out for you, to take notice of the changes in your environment and what they mean for progression.

the psychological horror genre has a ... complex relationship with real-life mental illness. it's the low-hanging fruit, i suppose, "what if the character was actually CRAZY this whole time?" it's too easy for it to become tropey at best and ableist at worst. but this game singlehandedly repaired my relationship with psychological horror by making me realize that psychological horror isn't supposed to be about questioning the sanity of the characters. it's about the sanity of the audience.

myhouse.wad is the closest you can really get to being gaslit by a video game, and i mean that as a high compliment. everything is just uncanny enough to make you doubt yourself. you constantly encounter things that shouldn't be possible, things that cannot possibly be what they are right before your eyes. the way the soundtrack starts to unnaturally loop sections and play dissonant sounds, before descending into a constant unnerving drone.

the amount of work that went into this tiny, unadvertised, un-monetizable game is ridiculous. there's so much attention to detail - so many easter eggs, so many ways to find new secrets that most people would never think of. you can't outsmart this game, because you can't outsmart the house. whenever you think you've figured a way around the way the game is designed, you're very wrong. there are at least three points at which a first-time player could think they've found all there is to find - and yet they are almost never close, and yet the golden ending still telegraphs itself clearly when you find it.

if you don't have the time or the skill or the hardware to play it yourself, this video essay is generally regarded as the closest possible thing to an "authentic blind experience" without getting an authentic blind experience yourself, as it covers just about all of the game's secrets from the perspective of someone going in blind.

Keep in Mind is a short psychological horror game about a man, Jonas, who wakes up in a shadowy world full of monsters. When he leaves his house, he is locked out, and abruptly set on a journey to find all the creatures in this place. he is warned that they may be more familiar than he thinks.

that's... about it. you find 16 creepypasta-esque creatures, each of them telling you some ominous dialogue. then you unlock the end cutscenes that explain the symbolism of the story - and the opening of this game, going into detail about Jonas's shitty life situation, makes it pretty clear that all of this will be symbolic. in the end, i found "the monsters actually represent the character's psychological issues" to be such an obvious explanation that i don't even consider it a spoiler to spell it out like that. i honestly probably would have liked this game better if it had left some of this as subtext instead of spelling it all out at the end.

it's one of those things that gets called profound by people who haven't seen anything like it before. it's a 20-30 minute game about facing your inner demons and Getting Better, which is unavoidably going to be a major oversimplification of what Getting Better actually means. there's a lot of telling-not-showing with regard to the protagonist's issues.

Jirai the Red Panda is one of many games that i very badly wanted to like, for no reason other than that you play as a red panda helping his cute animal friends. it's a simple platformer, but a fun one. you can climb on bamboo and jump up walls to reach higher platforming sections, resulting in many-layered levels where failing a jump means you can still save yourself if you're lucky. there are enough enemies to make it engaging without it being overkill, and an adorable art style.

of course, there's the typical lack of polish that you grow to expect when you're in the habit of downloading random indie games on steam. the soundtrack is fine, but it only has one song and that will become noticeable quickly; the enemy collision is a bit wonky.

the thing that ultimately stops me from recommending this game, though, is the ending - or the lack of one. there's a softlock after one of the bosses, where the prompt to advance dialogue simply stops appearing at one point and then no amount of button-pressing will make the dialogue advance. i think it's close to the end anyway so i'm not sure how much content i'm missing out on, but it's more the principle of the thing. it doesn't feel good.

We Know The Devil is a psychological horror visual novel about a summer camp where teenagers have to ward off and defeat the devil himself. it's mostly just a chore, like any other thing adults might force you to do. there's some hints at a wider universe, particularly lore references to magical girls existing in the world of this game, but most of the worldbuilding is light, narrowing down our focus to our three reluctant heroes.

the first thing you notice when you open We Know The Devil is the way it paints the camp group as a collective rather than as individuals. this is turned into a joke early on when we see another camp group - they're treated as one person for the sake of dialogue, three mismatched characters in one sprite with no known names, the same line of dialogue repeated to show them speaking at once. but it's taken more seriously with the main characters in the whole game, with the narration from a plural first person perspective - the constant casual references to "our" actions, the typical first-person teenage girl angst spoken from "we" instead of "i".

the second thing you notice when you open We Know The Devil is, of course, that your camp group is not a collective. the three main characters scarcely agree on any course of action, and every decision in the game revolves around them splitting up. time and time again, the three characters are squeezed into a situation clearly better suited for two or four people, and the plot mandates that one person waits behind while two people participate in something - the only type of choice the player can make here is choosing which characters go together, and that means that even if you're not meaning to, you always choose who is unfairly excluded.

it's such a strong combination of themes for the premise - it's the sort of thing that i would insist should be like, taught in English classes or something, except for the glaring problem. there isn't a third thing you notice, or at least not anything similarly profound. the dev had a brilliant idea for what themes they wanted to tackle in their story, and a brilliant idea for how to tackle those themes in the finest details with the very interface and narration, but somewhere in the middle the potential wasn't fully met, and as a result i find myself far more interested in the broad metaphorical story than i am in what's literally happening with these characters.

the characters are... fine. i don't dislike them in the slightest. you invariably get the sense that they exist as vehicles for delivering themes rather than as full people - something that is probably at least somewhat true about most characters in most media but it's probably not a good sign if your audience is actively thinking about it. there are a lot of dialogue sections that leave me thinking, this seems like a really meaningful and profound thing that you could say about some real people... but it's almost meaningless in the context of the game, as something this character is saying to the other character. i don't feel like i know these people well enough to be particularly moved by dramatic statements about their inner motivations, or like i understand the relationship between the characters in order to understand how they intuit all these truths about each other. in some way that adds to the experience - it's like the very real teenage experience of being stuck with other teenagers that you're constantly at odds with and never feeling sure if you're friends or enemies or something else - but in other ways it just feels like i need way more time with this story and these characters in order to understand and be invested in their arcs.

there's a lot of aspects of this story that i think could have benefitted from more time and explanation, really. the worldbuilding is very light, to the point that i'm not even sure what is meant by some of the words used to describe the items the kids use to fight off the devil. the storytelling is very dialogue-heavy, and the lack of narration of the characters' actions makes it harder to visualise what's happening.

the dialogue-heavy storytelling has its other drawbacks as well. the first-person plural narration has a lot of potential, but it's rarely used because the writing often defaults to characters describing what they're doing in dialogue for the audience's benefit rather than the narrator describing it. the characterisation has a lot of telling-not-showing, and sometimes it just leaves me unsure how the characters know this about each other. the dialogue is very often like.... written like text messages, eschewing grammar for a more authentc delivery. it's the sort of thing that would be funny if it was just reserved for an occasional joke, but gets old quickly.

this game is only about an hour to play through once, but most likely you aren't just playing once; there are 4 endings, and i think getting all of them is the intended experience. you'll be seeing a lot of scenes more than once, and there's no skip feature. this is where the flaws in the game's writing really become apparent.

do i like the overarching story in this game? yes, quite a lot - it's a story about queer self-acceptance, about trying so hard to follow all of society's impossible rules that you don't have time to think about whether you want to fit in, about what would happen if one day you just said "fuck it" and broke all the rules. it has a lot of memorable, impactful quotes. it's just that the characters saying those quotes seem to largely exist as mouthpieces for the author's profound thoughts, resulting in a visual novel that feels like it could have been a thought-provoking essay.

here's a very personal and very embarrassing story about this game and me: remember how i said a friend recommended this game to me back in 2023? yeah, this friend actually introduced me to this game in the context of showing me their fanfiction. you know those fics that like, take characters from one piece of fiction and put them in the setting/plot/etc of another piece of fiction. it was one of those, characters from another fandom but a plot stolen straight from WKTD... and for the first hour or so of playing the game, i could not remember who the characters were without relating them back to the other fandom characters that took their place in a 3-year-old unfinished AU.

at first, i thought this confusion was because i was chronically online. then, i thought it was because all three characters were named after planets - something that i'm sure has potential symbolism for audiences that care about planets, but for me it just meant that every time a character name showed up i just mentally pictured a Generic Unspecified Planet to associate their name with, and as a result i associated all three names with the same generic image. but after thinking about it, i feel strongly that this isn't just me being an idiot - it's because the story, tragically, works better as inspiration for fanfiction about other characters than it does as an original story with the original characters that it has.

i'll take one of my favourite quotes from the game as an example - "Venus, your problem is that you are very nice. But you want something. And you think being nice is going to give it to you. But it never will. And until you figure out what it is you want. Every kindness of yours will be full of that want." when i first saw this, i thought of fanfiction about totally unrelated characters, and i don't think that was just me being totally fandom-brained. i think this is a quote that could be meaningful, if it was Jax talking to Ragatha or Misha Bachynskyi talking to Constance Blackwood or some third fandom example that is, god willing, not so obscure that it automatically makes it very clear what non-video-game things the video game reviewer secretly likes. uh, skif talking to richter, maybe? that one's a real stretch.

but this quote, unfortunately, isn't terribly meaningful as something Neptune says to Venus, which is what it actually is. it's an out-of-context quote in a relationship, a summer camp, a whole in-game world that does not explain context to us. there isn't really anything in the dialogue or narration that tells us that Venus wants something before Neptune brings it up, let alone how Neptune intuits this oddly specific truth. the eventual explanation for what Venus wants is shown through subtext exclusively in some endings (endings you're less likely to get if you're even seeing this scene), and we're relying on statements from the author's social media to get a clear unambiguous explanation.