Mesmalie

i will never stop thinking about mesmer for the rest of my life. thanks

good 7/10 game. mesmer is a good character, with a nice inner and outer conflict. i appreciate how her stimming is just natural in the story, and that alongside her speaking style [spoiler] and the undertone of "this person is going to kill you but you can tell she's still nice and genuine" [/spoiler] makes her enjoyable whenever she's on screen for the protagonist, [spoiler] i don't understand the purpose of building up their identity, the game ending with hearing their voice on call, just to not reveal their name. it feels like there was a conflict of interest between writers, though there's no credits button so i can't check; if rain is the only writer, then it feels like sticking to an old plan for the game unnecessarily. there's similar incongruency in other points, like the protagonist being able to recite the ritual and know it's on the fridge before actually knowing the ritual or that it's on the fridge. it's doing the sort of gag undertale does, but in that game it works because saving and loading is the bedrock of its narrative, while this isn't the case here; you can still make a funny meta joke if your game doesn't have a metanarrative, but if it messes with the understanding of one of your characters i'd say don't do it. to be clear though, i like the protagonist and their deal. it's enjoyable how they're relatively unopposed to murdering mesmer compared to the deer, and how they have the option to sort of berate her in session 4 or be nice; it characterizes their inner self well [/spoiler] [spoiler] speaking of session 4 though, it's a bit strange. it's hard to really explain, but it doesn't seem cohesive exactly. mirphie characterizes the conflict as being a communication issue, where none of them would really want it if the other didn't, but you also have malady who's very down with it; this sort of thing would happen in real life, but i guess i would prefer if the story was more focused about what actually went wrong here. cage creature is interesting and i like them but i can't really deny they're decently just meant for exposition because figuring out how to communicate all of the information was difficult. i don't think it'd be bad if less things were said, really. like cage creature says, their name doesn't really matter, and similarly i think the details of the ritual buildup don't exactly matter, those characters' ghosts can just be present over the story instead like with the forest and eye plants, what matters is how mesmer has reacted to it. session 4 in general is the meh-est part of the story, i think if you're going for an unlockable true ending that it should have a major reveals like undertale does while here we don't really learn anything new, but it was still good in general because the characters are just entertaining [/spoiler] minor, but for people with hand issues, it'd be a good idea to have a 'magick' setting that can always be turned on so you don't have to alternate between right and left click. this is already the case in some segments but allowing the player to just turn it on anywhere would be nice again though, i liked the game, there's just more point in saying my flaws with the game than my praise. i hope the devs can well learn from the experience here in whatever they make in the future