Short game with a cool premise I had wishlisted for years. It has some kind of fame has a gurogame with EGs rating and comments not being very promising, but still decided to give it a try since I was in the mood and wanted something short.

The protagonist Takuya is a very capable doctor working for the university in some secret-ish investigation with some some of the students there. He lost his wife/GF years ago and still hasn’t fully moved on from that. That is until shortly after starting the game that he starts receiving mysterious love letters, but rather than your typical love letter, it is the creepy yandere type, then well, people start disappearing, then the letters start becoming into videotapes of those people getting tortured and killed…
Obviously Takuya realizes all the incidents are related to him and the letters, so he starts trying his hardest to save the captured people and avoid the rest of the bishoujos to also not end in bad hands. I think all this near the start-middle part is the strongest part of the game, has a good 疾走感 plus creepy enough atmosphere. The ending becomes ??? the closer you get and kinda lost me, at least for the first scenario. It has a good contrast between all the fucked up shit and wanting the protagonist to have some peace with the girls (well mainly Mizuho since its the one I liked).

And yeah, the game doesn’t have traditional routes and instead it is divided in three scenarios, although may as well consider them 裏 routes since now the POV is from a different character. I went kinda blind so I didn’t expect it at all, and considering how the mystery develops it ends up being pretty cool, it has some repeated text, but the narration is completely different and the game knows when to skip ahead so it doesn’t become repetitive, the routes are also not the same content wise since the bad ends in some routes is the actual ending in other routes, etc. So at some point the story fully diverges and see new content. Seeing full routes from heroines POV in a guro 2002 game isn’t really what I expected, but overall was pretty well done, it also helps the backbone of the trio relationship is pretty interesting too, I also believe the game only has 1 normal h-scene with the main heroine, and none with the rest of the main characters, all the others are sub-characters which kinda fits the 純愛 plot(?).
The climax of the second route and the game is also hilarious since it’s basically resolved with the protagonist shouting three stock sentences about life (don’t expect any life changing thematic content here) and the antagonist gives up their entire scheme, it also features some insane puzzle minigames that have nothing to do with the plot for no reason at all. After the second route you are kinda done with the game, since the third and true end are rather short and mostly to finish the loose ends, not that it explains everything, but well I doubt the author gave much thought to some of the stuff.

The only comments I saw about this game before playing it was basically gurogame, but to be honest it isn’t that guro even, it is mostly the videotapes which are 10 lines long, I don’t think its any worse than Kara no Shoujo for example, much more tame than the likes of Dead End Aegis or Ban’ya stuff in any case. I think the hard part of recommending it is the 640x480 resolution, no backlog, very few save slots, no text read skip and cd check, but to be honest it’s not that bad and you can get around it using stuff like upscaling, text hooking and a guide, even the skip thing isn’t a big deal since the game is actually mostly linear (only the first route has two endings which require skipping, but only the ending changes).

Anyway despite the bad comments I enjoyed going through it, it’s very much a B-movie kinda story, but you can read through it in a weekend easily (took me 12h) and for once it didn’t need to spam flashbacks to actually resolve the plot, so that’s good. Despite the low ratings I don’t really think its worse than something like Cartagra or Kara no Shoujo, and fans of it probably will like it enough to be worth going through.