I would give this a "meh" if I could. I genuinely do not understand the hype for this game. I started it when I first bought it and decided to DNF it. Then I went back to finish it and regretted wasting my time.
The good:
The soundtrack's rad. The art is well done. I can *almost* see why people look past the gameplay for these alone.
The meh:
The story is loose. I'm not even sure we can call it a story. While there's an attempt at an overarching narrative, the game is much more about sort of wandering around talking to people about the minutiae of their lives (common enough to the genre, to be fair), followed by a plot that shows up once every few days to drop some vibes on you. The overarching narrative then attempts to have an ending you might find interesting, though I agree with other posters that it's not as well developed as other elements of the game. So if you wanted to play it for the overarching plot, I fear that's not the point of this game. That plot, if anything, feels intrusive to the character stories.
If you're playing it for specific characters, you'll have better luck, I think. Maybe if you find the characters interesting or relatable in the first few days of the game, you'll get more out of it, but I didn't find them particularly compelling. Plus, chasing down any of the side plots feels like a huge chore, so no points to be won there, either. I think if you're not hooked on any characters by Harfest, this game isn't for you (or me).
The bad:
The gameplay.
This is an excellent art piece, an okay story, and an absolutely garbage game. It's unclear to me why this is a game and not a graphic novel or animated series or really any other form of media. The point of making a game is that you can have interactive elements that can add something. The interactive elements in NITW, however, actually detract from the story. I felt like I was slogging through the same 7ish screens over and over again to get any tidbits of story (applies to overarching plot AND character development), wasting my time looking at the same art (cool the first time, boring the 50th) over and over as I held down left or space. With a few standout exceptions, the mini-games felt like a chore. The dream sequences were all too repetitive and added very little to the story, since they're all the same structure and feel. And this was a running theme: there were 5 or 6 dream sequences where 1 would have sufficed to create the right vibes. When you need to break something, you have to hit it with a bat 10 times instead of 3. Most of the achievement involve doing 1 action repeatedly, without necessarily rewarding novel exploration. It's as if the gameplay sets out to bore you, and at least in my case, succeeds.
What is the point of having interactive elements when they don't seem to actually add anything to the experience of the actual narrative? Why not make this some other form of media that doesn't involve me pressing the interact button a hundred thousand times?
Is it *artistically* interesting that you can get bored of walking through the same screens, just like some of the characters living in the town probably do? Sure. But the player is not a town resident; they are someone trying to enjoy playing a game. Boring them to make an artistic point undermines the value of the game. And that's why I think this would have worked better as ANY other visual medium: by removing the gameplay element, you get all the benefits of making the same artistic point without the slog of the gameplay.
And that's really the problem here: this is a story about a town where nothing ever really happens (except the One Time It Does), and the gameplay reflects that nothing ever really happens. Even if we dared to call that ludonarrative harmony, the problem is that makes for a REALLY boring game.
"Ah, perhaps you do not like visual novels or walking simulators" - incorrect, I own a bunch of them. But there's nothing in the visual novel design handbook that says they need to be so slow that the heat death of the universe might come before anything interesting in the story does. Unlike many other visual novel games, the pace is glacial and it never picks up (unless, again, you find yourself particularly attached to one character or another), and the gameplay elements do not fill the space between narrative elements in any kind of satisfying way.
As always: YMMV.
