Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star

My honest first reaction to Holiday Star was something close to warmth mixed with mild concern for my own sanity, and I mean that as a compliment. This is one of those follow-ups that exists entirely for the people who already care, a seasonal companion piece that trusts its audience completely, perhaps too completely. Structurally, this is a linear visual novel split into four main episodes, each running roughly half an hour, plus a collection of six short stories and a set of radio broadcasts featuring series favourite Ryouta. The dating sim mechanics of the original are almost entirely gone. You are still playing as Hiyoko Tosaka, the lone human at a school full of birds, but instead of courting pigeon professors and classmates you are now investigating Christmas tree thieves, surviving a chaotic Comiket visit, and eventually boarding the Galactic Railroad toward a deeply strange cosmic horror arc in episodes three and four. The tonal shift in those final chapters, from gentle absurdism into something genuinely melancholic and strange, is where Holiday Star earns its keep. The art in those sections shifts to a naive coloured-pencil style that feels like a children's picture book about grief. It is, quietly, the most interesting thing this game does. What it does less well is interactive fiction. Player choices are sparse to the point of being ceremonial. There are one or two per episode, and most of them change a single line of dialogue before the story continues exactly as it would have anyway. For someone coming from a genre that rewards rereading and branching, this feels like a step backward. The game knows you are here to read, not to play, and it does not apologise for that. Whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you are looking for. The soundtrack, which was reportedly patched into a full state after some early missing-audio issues at launch, does meaningful character work in a game with no voice acting, so the scenes where it drops out feel especially quiet. For series fans, Holiday Star gives expanded backstory to characters who felt underdeveloped in the first game, particularly Anghel, whose dedicated episode is the comedic highlight of the whole package. References to Ace Attorney, nods toward the first game's darker canonical threads, anime magical-girl transformations for your pigeon classmates, and a villain who is essentially a lost soul too frightened to move on, all of this lands warmly if you already know and love this world. The Steam community agrees, rating it Very Positive despite the middling critical reception. Critics who came in without playing the original tended to find it opaque and thin. That split tells you almost everything you need to know about who should buy this. Holiday Star is not trying to be the original game. It is a fan disc in structure and spirit, and the best moments, particularly the final two episodes, suggest the creators cared about the material beyond the joke premise. The slow opening chapters are a tax you pay before the story becomes genuinely affecting. I think the tax is worth it if you have the right passport.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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