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Ghosts, suicide and gender issues, April 24, 2023This is a Twine game with some well-done styling that runs for a little over 15 minutes for me.
In this game, you are (I believe) a young Chinese girl at an American high school in Japan. Hannah, a friend of yours, has died, and her ghost is haunting you, but in a mostly positive way, like helping with homework.
Outside of death and ghosts, the games secondary emphasis seems to be sex; although no explicit scenes are shown, there are discussions about the relative attractions and submissiveness of different ethnicities, and of high school girls in general. I felt uncomfortable at times, but it never went beyond talk.
The story centers on finding more about Hannah and the reason for her death, as well as a couple of bullies in the school who do more and more over the top actions.
Gameplay was pretty linear at first; each screen had multiple links, with the last one going to the next page and the earlier ones revealing hidden text. Eventually there were more choices, with two major choices in the game providing the four endings (although the first choice, (Spoiler - click to show)taking the umbrella or not, may not seem important at the time).
The endings vary significantly. Some were about building friendships, but the others felt more shocking to me. One involved (Spoiler - click to show)violently dismembering a girl because she used anti-trans language and revealed she had bullied Hannah prior to suicide. The author in the authors note said that they could have seen themselves doing that to someone in their own life. Another involved (Spoiler - click to show)the bully pushing herself romantically onto the heroine, explaining that all the mean stuff she did was because she was attracted to her.
Overall, I think the interactivity could have used a slight tweak; either having more options early on, or, if it was intended to be read straight through, adding a smooth transition to the link-clicking effect (like a .3 second or less slide-in animation) to give a little more satisfaction with the links.
I didn't strongly connect with the story, but as a roughly 40-yr old cis man I'm not the audience this is going for. I could definitely see someone in a similar situation deeply appreciating and feeling touched by the story.