I love a lot of the images in this game, grainy & hard-mixed they look cool and unsettling. It delighted me to open on that. The clip of the moving hands is ESPECIALLY fun, and really captures the emotion that the scene is trying to evoke; at its best, the music went a long way to set the mood and tension in a scene. I cannot stress enough how good your use of music and sound is here. It really works. I never felt bored while playing this game. The progression was fun; you really utilise the theme of a road trip to its fullest extent, and explore a lot of of the potentially spooky stuff which can come with it. Central to this game is the whole 'shitty boyfriend' thing which I think really grounds the horror (which can get fairly wacky) into something mundane and relatable, allowing it to stretch into the potentially goofier corners of a horror game. I wish we were given more time to sit with those unsettling scene though, and explore them; currently it feels a bit like whiplash, shifting between weird monsters.  I would have loved to see that weird and crunchy quality in the portraits we get too - they don't feel congruent with the rest of the visuals we get, and it can be kind of distracting. The issue isn't design; I think they're relatively well made (though the face portraits at the opening looked especially out of place), it's just that they dont mesh well with the rest we see. On that note, I found Maria's design really really fun. I think the fact it used rougher lines and has a more 'charcoal' feel than the other portraits makes it work much better. 

Spoilers for the ending:

I'm really not sure how I feel about it. I think generally it's OK. My main gripe is with the antidepressant reveal - for an attempt to 'ground' the story and to reveal that the horror wasn't supernatural, but psychological, it doesn't seem to understand how antidepressants, withdrawal, and recovery work. I think it would've been better without it.

Thank you for making this game. Im glad I got to play it. You are clearly a talented artist who, with some more time, can become a very talented artist.

RUMINATION — slaystation<3

Where I'm standing: I make visual novels too, so I came to this knowing how the sausage is made — and I use AI assets where this dev didn't. So when I say the hand-built care shows, take it as a compliment from the other side of that choice, not a neutral verdict.

Theme — Road Trip — 5/5

The cleanest read of the prompt in the field. It doesn't gesture at "road trip," it is one, beat for beat: leave the neighborhood, stop at the gas station, push through the woods, end at the motel. The gas-station bonus isn't bolted on for points — it's a stop the story needed anyway. And the photographs leak the truth in a way that makes the paranoia pull double duty as a mechanic. Theme as spine, not theme as tag.

Story — 4.5/5

The catalyst is almost nothing — a thing left at home — and that's the smart part. Small enough to be real, big enough to crack two people open inside a car they can't get out of. The mental-health material is handled with care and the content warnings sit where they should. Where I wanted more, as a fellow VN writer: the branches felt narrow — I wanted my choices to bend her fate harder than they did. Jam-scope, not failure, but it's the first thing I'd grow.

Horror — 4/5

The fear isn't a monster, it's the two feet of space between two people who've stopped trusting each other, at night, doing sixty. That's the hard stuff to pull off and it works.

Presentation — 4/5

Glitching-as-the-mind-frays is the strongest idea here: visuals doing psychological work instead of decoration, and the silences used as well as the noises. Nitpicking from inside the craft — the text boxes are the default register, and custom typography would carry the mood the rest of the art already carries.

Gameplay — 3/5

The honest soft spot, and every VN-maker's eternal problem: it's mostly reading and choosing. The photo-examination is the one real interaction and it's the right instinct — I just wanted it at the stops too, something for my hands at the gas station and the motel, not only in transit.

Creativity — 4/5

Making the couple's argument the horror engine is a genuinely good idea — the threat is the relationship. And it's hand-made, no generative AI, which for a debut is real labour. I'll say it plainly as someone who reaches for those tools: the by-hand seams give it a texture mine don't always have.

Overall — 4.3/5, and the entry to beat

For a first game this is assured. It takes the theme further than anyone by making the road the spine instead of the backdrop, and it earns its dread the hard way.