#love hex

The story starts out simply with Mina being held captive by a handsome person who is attempting to feed her. We then see Mina attempting to create a hex/potion for getting a boyfriend. She's missing the final ingredient of a dark mage's skull and goes into a cave to retrieve it. As she goes through the cave, she finds various demonic circles with varies text on it, mostly talking about the sacrifices that are being fed to the monster. On each of these demonic circles, Mina talks to a tentacle like creature. She initially puts herself as a sacrifice to open a specific part of the dungeon, before talking about what the monster's favorite type of sacrifices are (the type that tastes like caramel), talking about what she's doing here in the cave, and then finally feeding the monster caramel as an attempt to kill it, only for it to enjoy the sweets. After getting into a locked security area, Mina is finally able to retrieve the skull she needs, but the monster seems rather unhappy considering that she's about to leave. After attempting to leave, she finds that the outside is blocked by black goo that slowly starts spreading. After unlocking another door, she finds herself inside of a laboratory. It is implied that the cult used both magic and science to keep the monster alive, but after some mishaps, was unable to contain it and got itself killed. Upon nearly leaving, the monster captures Mina, developing into a form that looks like a handsome human named Valen to appease Mina. When asking why she was looking for the skull, Mina starts to talk about her past.

She states that the entire thing was triggered by watching her brother get married. From when she was small, Mina was prophesied to bring doom to her village, thus shunning her from pretty much everyone except for her family. As her parents were busy and Mina was not close to her other siblings, she became very lonely and tried to make something that would get her a boyfriend. Valen seems to empathize with Mina as he too has been lonely for a long time. While initially going to eat her as she is a human that he enjoys the taste of, Valen seems to change his mind and instead asks if he could be her boyfriend instead. Initially Mina refuses, but Valen asks for her to play a game of chase with him. He pretty much declares that he wins by default as he's holding Mina and takes a protesting Mina into the underground. From there, we see the end scene of Mina and Valen hanging out together, with Mina complaining that she doesn't want to play house with Valen and Valen trying to eat food with Mina so that he can be like her. Mina accepts her fate as she enjoys being with Valen and continues to live with him, presumably forever.

The story itself is pretty good for a small game. I think that the idea of having magic and more scientific elements together in the cave was a cool idea and cool world building that is presented in such a small place. I also think that the reveal of why Mina wanted to have a spell/potion for a boyfriend is also pretty cool and does make sense why she would eventually have been happy being with Valen in despite being isolated because she already didn't have a lot of people whom she cared about (though I do feel bad for her parents though, since it seems that while they were busy they didn't have bad relationship or anything). It does make me wonder if releasing Valen (sort of) is what the prophecy that made Mina isolated in the first place, and if it isn't... then was the prophecy false? Would there still be something that she does that causes the village's downfall? These things seem to be left out for this game, but perhaps it can be explored in a future game. I do like that she is willing to try to trick and kill Valen for her goals, even if they don't really work at the end. She is very determined to get what she wants which was nice.

Valen as a yandere is pretty much made by Mina indirectly, considering he doesn't really seem to understand humans all that much. It seems that Valen was pretty much just used for sacrifice feeding, and initially only liked Mina because of the fact that she was a tasty sacrifice, even almost just using her as a meal. Of course, in the end, he does seem to sympathize with Mina more especially when she reveals the reason for wanting a boyfriend. He does take care in transforming into a form that she does like, and in the end does try to pretend to be more human so that Mina will like him more and try to play games with her. It is nice that he does try so hard to make sure that Mina actually does like him, even if it does seem like he doesn't fully understand what love is when it comes to humans. He does trap her and try to attend to her every need, so really both of their wishes of no longer being lonely is finally fulfilled.

While I do like this game, the one big gripe I have about it is the three codes that you have to put throughout the game. For the first one, I think you can actually find the code by using the last three numbers for each of the rituals that you go through, but if you fail, the game will automatically kill you after three tries. The other two locks seem to have no real good way of figuring out what you're supposed to type with them, with one being based off of the various grime on the number pad, which is difficult when you can hear the black goo coming after you and eventually killing you if you take too long, and the last code in the lab for the computer, which I have no idea how you were able to solve that one. I had to check the answers for the codes in the comments to find those out. Generally, games will have better clues on what you need to submit for the number puzzles, but for this one it feels like you really need a tutorial or have to stretch pretty far to figure it out, so it can be pretty frusterating to try to figure out what the codes are for that one.