Games&Girls

I went in wanting to like this one. The core hook in Games&Girls has something quietly interesting at its center: a socially withdrawn gamer who spent everything on a fictional console called Sirrah, only for that console to manifest as a girl in his apartment one morning. That is a premise with real potential. The first episode leans into the oddness of the situation reasonably well, and the clean, anime-influenced art style is pleasant enough for the format. The UI is uncluttered, the text box sits low and out of the way, and the background music is inoffensive, if slightly forgettable and repetitive across scenes. Structurally, each episode runs about 30 minutes and ends with a binary choice that splits into two outcomes, giving you a good and a bad ending path per chapter. The full series spans four episodes, sold as separate DLC beyond the base game. That episodic structure means the total playtime, even across all four episodes, is extremely short. There is no voice acting, which is a standard trade-off at this price tier, and the writing in English carries some grammatical awkwardness throughout. Sirrah herself starts as an intriguing character: she arrives with no sense of the world beyond her function as a console, and her gradual acclimatisation to human life is genuinely the most watchable thread in episode one. Moments where she misreads social situations or approaches things from the logic of a piece of consumer electronics have a quiet, offbeat comedy to them. The problems compound as the series continues, though, and they compound significantly. The writing grows more erratic, character motivations become hard to follow, and the later episodes introduce content and scenarios that feel tone-deaf in ways that go well beyond clumsy localization. Episode four in particular drew sharp criticism from the small pool of people who played through the whole series, and that criticism is difficult to dismiss as overcorrection. If you are considering purchasing the full bundle on the strength of the first episode, that trajectory is worth knowing about before you commit to the later chapters. For the absolute entry price, episode one on its own is a curious, flawed little thing: anime art, a novel-enough premise about loneliness and console personification, two ending routes, and a runtime you could finish in a long lunch break. The ambition to tell something about isolation and dependency through the lens of gaming culture is at least visible in those early scenes. It just does not survive contact with its own later writing. Fans of very short, casual visual novels who are comfortable with adult content and have low expectations for narrative coherence might find the first episode an agreeable curiosity. The full series is harder to advocate for without qualification.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Games&Girls.