HIATUS

The story starts out with the player (You) going home after a long day, thinking about how it's time to move on from your ex. Upon walking back, they find a flier about a chatroom called Yanchat and take interest in it. Once home, they log into the chatroom, and complain about how they can't get over their ex, when they get three comments on their post: one from Infern0 who suggests getting revenge on the ex, one from echo_echo, who suggests making them jealous and one from throwaway_acc who suggests just ignoring them. From this point, the player can now choose who to respond to.

Responding to Infern0 will allow the player to hang out with them to get revenge on the player's ex. They end up going to the suburbs where their ex's car is parked and vandalizes it in revenge. After talking with Infern0 and some of his hobbies, Infern0 stays back as he's forgotten his lighter while the player goes home. The next day, the player sees that the neighborhood where their ex is has been burnt down, and gets a text from Infern0. Depending on the relationship with him, different endings will occur.

With low affection, Infern0 confesses over text that he was the one who burnt down the ex's house. The player is panicking and angry, but Infern0 states that the player was the one who wanted this, that he did this for them. The game glitches out with the admin removing him from the app, thus causing the game to move outside when they first met. Infern0 confesses to the player in a glitchy way, gaslighting (?) the player into believing that he didn't burn their ex's house down.

With high affection, Infern0 will instead appear behind the player when they threaten to call the police on him. Infern0 tells them that it's useless, as they had left the oil canister and spray can, thus leading the police to suspect the player instead. Infern0 ends up choking the player, causing them to pass out and leading him to kidnapping him.

Responding to echo_echo instead will lead to the two meeting up and talking about their plan to get the player's ex jealous. He suggests the two meet up to study and talks about how his fanclub is annoying him by following him around. The two have a drink at a cafe together and talk to him about various things. The player also notices that he seems to be a little inconsistent with some of the information that he's told the player about. We also find out that the player themselves might also be a yandere, and that them and the ex might not have been in a relationship in the first place. We end up going to his house afterwards, but after he takes a very long time, we try to open the door to where he has been hiding.

Echo's route glitches out during this part, skipping through the events of the game, only to lead to echo responding directly to the player. He talks about how he tried really hard to make a good route for him, describing what might happened in his route had he had more time.

There are also some smaller moments that you can play around with the file, from deleting either of the character's .char files or if you login as the admin name. It seems to imply that the Admin is trying their hardest to get the best and perfect route for you the player, and that the admin themselves might be interested in you.

This game takes a lot of inspiration from DDLC and it's pretty interesting how it does it. Basing off of the original Yanchat idea, the player does go to talk to these characters on the Yanchat blog, even being able to put in a username and posting. I've always been a big an of achromatic color schemes in games and the addition of red really brings out focal points of the characters and app. I just generally like the artstyle and pixelish based tone, so those are just big pluses for me all around.

Infern0 as a yandere is pretty up front about his actions. He is able to convince the player to vandalize their ex's car before burning down their house soon afterwards, and in either ending, he admits to burning down the ex's place for the player's sake, seemingly frustrated and gaslighting the player into believing it was their fault or even getting them to shut their mouth as the evidence they have is still at the scene of the crime. I wonder what will happen after he kidnaps the player character at the end, will he burn them to get him to do what he wants? Or perhaps focus more on manipulation? It's hard to say. I will say that if the player in this route is similar to the player in Echo's route, that they might have just burnt down an innocent person's house- since it's implied, at least in Echo's route that the player seemed to have been stalking/yandere for their ex, considering that the ex didn't even seem to know who they were. We'll talk about them in a different section, however. In the ending where he kind of... tries to convince the player that none of that happened, it felt more like the Admin attempting to fix the errors that they made so that they could give the player a perfect experience. Very cool, and I think this route so far is the most solid (?) of the two.

Echo_echo as a yandere in contrast to Infern0 is a lot more subtle. In general, as much as the idea of pretending to be someone's boyfriend is pretty, uh sus, he does also make excuses to learn and hang out more with the player so that they can "convincingly be dating". Pretending to be in the same college together and trying to get to know the player, finding their social media account and at the end trapping us in the apartment (or glitchy space). Echo goes more into breaking the fourth wall than Infern0 did, with him deleting every ending that is bad just to skip to the good ending with the player. It is pretty funny that if you don't drink coffee he actually just leaves you to the bad ending. We also learn in this route that again the MC might actually have been a yandere for the ex, or otherwise stalking them, without them ever seemingly been in a relationship. Personally I think that Echo's route feels a lot shorter and feels a bit like a cop out, since while it is cool that he does more breaking the fourth wall things, we don't actually get to see the entirety of his route. We also don't really get to see what the "Good Ending" is for him that he wants for the player, whether it be that he confesses at the end or that he's gotten rid of the Ex once and for all. It doesn't really... feel complete I guess in the way that Infern0's route did. Still, I can't deny that it is a good concept, even if I feel like his route's story gets essentially decapitated at the end.

The admin themself is an interesting entity since we don't actually get to interact with them, other than outside them connecting us to the other two guys and trying to get the game under control when the two guys step out of line. We get the most information out of them when we login as admin. It is interesting that the Admin does have interest in the player as well, trying their hardest to make the player happy with the person that they're dating. Whether this is another character that will eventually be added into Yanchat or just the creator themselves talking to us is unknown, but I think it is a pretty cool feature that you wouldn't know about unless you look through the game files itself and/or play through the entire thing.