"Do robots have dicks?" - Kokichi Oma, 2017

I mean, someone has to be asking the real questions with this premise. 

This one took two tries to really "click" for me. Occasionally, having an atmosphere that's trying too hard to be morose, melancholy, or depressing can circle back to switching me off completely, and I think I got a pretty bad impression of Arron that first run too. But I'm glad I gave it a second go, because I think there really is a lot to dig into (with maybe a few lingering issues).

Spoilers and some real heavy duty speculation from this point forward.

Starting with presentation, like most others, I think it's pretty good! The sheer amount and quality of the images provided in this VN is frankly incredible, and all of them feel thoughtful and intentional. Grayscale can often be a risky choice, but I think it worked well in conveying the atmosphere you were going for. There are some minor gripes I could make here and there, like not really being able to tell the difference between Arron and Margo at the restaurant, but nothing that really materially impacted my experience. For a one-man show, that was all top-notch.

Sound was also very consistent, with oppressive, foreboding tones from the intro that extended basically uninterrupted throughout. To the extent that overwhelming bleakness and melancholy was what you were aiming for, I think it was effective. However, at least personally as stated above, I think there's a point where constantly trying to be as oppressive as possible starts to lose its effect. I think there are some moments, like in the earlier flashbacks to happier times in the relationship, where you could have added a bit of levity to build a more stark contrast with how fraught the second half of the script is. I think you already try to highlight several contrasts (besides the main organic vs. robot one) like Arron being the most festively dressed and least festively behaving at the party, and there was more room to play with this. 

This is a pretty common issue with jam entries, but this one could have used another proofreading pass. Quite a few typos, and while few impacted my understanding (I'm not entirely sure you were using "jilted" right though) some were quite noticeable, like the things that stop your car are "brakes" not "breaks". 

Not sure whether to attribute this to presentation or writing, so I'll leave it in this kinda no man's land area between, but I did not particularly care for the way the disclaimer/warning was deployed. With the way it's worded and placed after the opening cryptic poetry sequence, it came off edgy and pretentious to me and felt more like a brag than a genuine warning. It got one (1) seismic eyeroll out of me and I think it would've been better placed in a more conventional spot on startup or beginning a new game. 

Moving onto writing, I think the "central" theme, if you want to call it that, is pretty clear: Arron, as conveyed to the reader, is afraid of Mal for perceived betrayal, but really Mal is the one that should be afraid of Arron because of the way his paranoia is affecting him. With that said, there's some discussion on this page and the store page about the toxicity of Mal's and Arron's relationship and Arron accordingly being a lying manipulator that was just using Mal to feel good about himself. 

Maybe I'm misreading things, and maybe some of the other commenters that didn't go into much detail were keeping this to themselves, but I think the unreliability of Arron as a narrator isn't being discussed enough in that context. Arron, as presented by the VN, is not a psychopath. He blows the whistle on PHSY because he feels morally compelled to. He refuses to accept the gun (at first). He talks about how he's been trying to "shake" Margo for years but he keeps her in the loop about what's going on. He is self-aware of how callous not focusing on Paul's death looks. 

With that in mind, I don't know if I buy that Arron was really taking advantage of Mal. I think there's reason to believe that he's attempting to convince himself of that as a result of the paranoia caused by the attack on his life, and that the events of this story that take place after the car incident are moreso the unraveling of someone under heavy stress who was invested in the relationship (that likely does have a reflex of pushing people away) than the reveal of a liar who was only in any of this for moments of fleeting satisfaction. The relationship may have been legitimately happy, an unrelated third robot tried to kill Arron, and now Arron is scrambling to justify a whole host of conflicting feelings.

So, yeah, I think there are layers to the narrative here, and there's a lot to unpack and explore with Arron as a character.

With that said, I did find the corporate thriller side of the plot to be a bit lacking. I know it's not The Point, but I really question PHSY's approach to the whole murder thing. Like, I don't see how killing the primary whistleblower, even if you made it look like an accident, would look any less suspicious if you did it the week after a trial. Any public harm and loss of confidence in the corporation has already been done, and nobody's going to just ignore the connection. You could say PHSY is supposed to be so powerful that it doesn't matter, but then why would they have been at any risk from litigation anyway? 

I think one alternative you could have tried here was PHSY not actually trying to kill Arron, but rather just making him think his life was at risk so he could lead them to the real threat, which was Paul (a person who in this version was not involved in the trial - I think it's implied he was involved in the current timeline when Arron says he's meeting someone from court) gathering all the information. Then the assassin bot leaving him and Margo alone would be accounted for, and it would make the tragedy of Arron's betrayal of Mal even more crushing since Arron was never truly at risk of being killed by anyone, much less Mal. 

Overall, there were some hiccups along the way, but I did really like this and it gave me a lot to think about, so a wholehearted Good Job from me. 

A very good VN I don't have that much to say about, but don't mistake it for a criticism. It's all just competent work to the degree that even the omissions and the ambiguities feel calculated not to produce uncertainty but rather to simply say what the story has to say; the game is a good exercise in (arguably) subtle storytelling resulting in something with a powerful clarity. The structure is fragmentary on paper, but you rarely feel it as the writing puts a lot of work into smoothing over the jumps and making sure the information we get always leads back to the present moment. The VN feels like a remarkably cohesive and well-paced read as a result, absolutely devoid of fluff.

The expertly managed scope bears fruit on the presentation side of things as well. At first, I was a bit worried about how well the game would pull its almost-spriteless look, but there's thankfully a generous amount of illustrations, and the snappy pacing means that you never linger in a scene long enough for the visuals to start feeling too static. The interplay of light & shadow and the use of color are fantastic – you know stylization is paying off when the color blue comes off as a startling, affecting surprise – and the style is in general built on many nice contrasts; I love how simple and unremarkable the (furry) characters look against the detailed backgrounds. It does a lot to convey the impression that these are ultimately normal people dealing with normal problems even while the protagonist's boyfriend is a robot and there's a Cronenberg-esque corporate thriller going on.

The story impresses me so much with not only what it does but also what it doesn't do: the way it wields its genre elements, never feeling an ounce of obligation towards them, radiates confidence. As a romance it's subversive both in content and form, starting with a seemingly happy relationship that gets torn down on two separate timescales, and said thriller & science fiction elements lead into a perfectly inconclusive ending I can imagine some genre adherents struggling with. In every way, the VN is the kind of stuff you comb through game jam submissions hoping to find.

"Let Lie" is a romantic horror, if that makes sense. It takes the question of 'Can robot's feel love', and brings it to a thrilling and suspenseful plot. The art direction is really stark and distinct. The gray-scale with bright orange accents really evokes this almost noir style. The contrast of this cold unfeeling setting with the warm glow of the expressionistic screen is ironic in it's ultimate use in the story. The story itself is actually quite intriguing. It leaves a lot to be read in between the lines and really makes the reader work for it. Something about over-reliance on technology to substitute for living connection. That being said, it gets a bit too difficult to parse, even in the opening poem of the novel, and it seems to get a little bit too ruminating as we seem to consistently circle back to Mal thinking the same thoughts, but never quite expanding upon them. I also don't get the ending. I'm guessing that this is overall a tragedy and the robots and their corporate overlords win? Mal decides that he's lived a lie and then it just ends? I think this is just a personal values thing where I don't understand creative decisions to have a story with an ambiguous ending without resolution. It'd be like if I finished my comment going "Overall, this visual novel-

An interesting one for sure. The art is really good, and there's a lot of poetic quality to this one. However, and call it a personal preference if you must, I feel I didn't get a whole lot out of this VN. When a VN gets excessively poetic, sometimes the message gets lost for me. In particular, a lot of the buildup in this one was cryptic, and I feel like I spent most of it scratching my head and trying to figure out what exactly is going on. I didn't feel all that attached to any of the characters, possibly because the MC spends the whole VN thinking in a clinically detached way from most of them. There's an intriguing mystery throughout the whole thing, that being why his boyfriend would possibly want to kill him, that I feel wasn't answered all that well. Something about the company taking over his body? Did he always plan this? I don't know, and the VN doesn't seem interested in giving me that answer either. The plot also felt just a little bit rushed as well. I don't think I was given enough time to say, bond with Mal before the reveal that he's trying to kill Arron, or get to know Paul before he died. So like, sure, it has an ambiguous ending and a somewhat abstract plot. The art is gorgeous. The words are pretty. I just feel kinda... unsatisfied by the whole thing. Sorry, I guess it's not for me.

Bowser's Grade: A+

Just would like to start off by saying my grades mean nothing and I'm just giving my feedback for the benefit of the creator. Hopefully my insight helps you grow and learn.

This review will be rather short because this is just a homerun on all fronts. The presentation was immaculate. The sound design was incredible. The art direction is divine.

This is a wonderful example of a project with perfect scope-management. This is the kind of project that works so incredibly well for game jams. It's a short story packaged with wonderful art direction that is more than manageable for a month-long game jam.

In the interest of keeping this review "spoiler free", I'm not going to render any writing advice or my thoughts about the ending. You're simply on a higher level than I am. In the interest of not leading you astray for your future projects, I'll keep those comments to myself.

"Keep doing what you're doing" is unfortunately not very actionable advice. But at the very least, I hope it builds your confidence for your future projects. Very well done 😸

I loved how bleak this one was, it's exactly what I was hoping for. The ending is also just as ambiguous as I wanted it to be. The art and music are also top notch. A real highlight for me was the subtext heavy conversation at the aquarium.

I have had some time to think on this one! I think we did a need a few more details on some aspects of the story. Not things that needed to be extensively detailed, but less gestured at if that makes sense. Overall I much more grappled with the b-plot of the MC thinking on their absolutely abysmal mental state and the prose's gesturing towards the MC being that one this game's tagline is talking about. Its a bleak existence for both, and few more details on both character's backstory/background could help make more sense of things. The very very last bit felt a little too abstract and non-committal, but I could easily be misreading it. Once I started focusing more attention on MC I think I got a lot more out of this one.  Art direction is solid and on point.  Check this one out, folks!