J.J. Macfield

Playtime: 7.5 Hours

Finished the game once with something like ~212/275 donuts, not planning to do a second playthrough with the alternate character to clean up the rest. I've read all of the phone conversations that I unlocked, but they haven't fully concluded since I need more donuts.

True to my initial expectations, this is a really strange game by SWERY, though I ultimately liked it quite a lot. While it was clear from the very beginning that this game had a lot to do with personal identity, I didn't initially expect it was going to be a trans story - I saw the relationship between J.J. and Emily, and figured it would primarily about gay acceptance. That being said, I think the writing handled it very well; the tension that accelerates towards the end does not feel sudden or hamfisted. When the final reveal(s) happened in the last scene in the real world, it made me think back to all of the signs and symbolism embedded throughout the game. In particular, I thought it was funny that the 'major hemorrhage' moose man was just a taxidermized head in the gym - I had been wondering what it was supposed to mean, only for it to be some random object.

The gameplay itself is quite janky, and I definitely wouldn't consider it responsive or snappy. Controls are quite sluggish with some serious input delay, but the puzzle and platforming sections weren't very tough, nor too lengthy - so it balances out quite well. The game also wasn't quite as short as I expected it to be, but the actual length doesn't feel drawn out either. I'm also still not too sure how important the multilation mechanics were outside of the shock factor, but I suppose it does add an interesting mechanical layer to the game that distinguishes the gameplay quite well. In a sense, I wish there was a greater reason to be in each "form", since the only dismemberment states with real use were primarily when JJ is perfectly healthy, and when she's in head mode. There wasn't any special use for crawling or partial dismemberment, as they are slower and limit actions - the worst of both worlds.

Despite the overall scenario and addressed themes being handled well, I thought that the written dialogue and texts in the game felt a slight bit weird, with many of the same issues as other games that try to simulate 'casual' conversations. I imagine that it's extremely difficult as a writer to come up with perfectly real-sounding fake conversations, but I felt that there was a bit too much gratuitous cursing and sticker spam that sounded a little too artificial for me. Also, for some reason the ghost Emily has a very strange/shitty Japanese-English accent which is almost completely incomprehensible, which actually needed the subtitles for me to understand. Even if most of the game scenario is manifested in J.J.'s mind and not in reality, I don't understand the purpose of Emily having a completely different voice. It's super jarring to hear the completely normal-sounding Emily at the end of the game.

Lastly, one of the major things that confused me at the end of the game (post-reveal) was the identity status of the real J.J. From my understanding, she's a transitioning MtF that dresses like an ordinary dude as seen in the final cutscene. But if that's the case, I feel like most of the students wouldn't really know - I could have missed something in the chat logs about this though. But there's still some questions on if J.J. actually dresses in female clothes and was pressured for it, or if the chats with her mom (regarding clothing in her room) and with many of the other characters entirely involve characters and personalities that exist only in her mind, and the suicide attempt was a result of these internal thoughts combined with increasing amounts of pessimism and hopelessness.