Will change my review as the game is developed to reflect the state of progress/

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i want to like this game i really do. but it isn't a cozy dating sim. it's a survival game.

you are meant to go to school and do school work and make friends, do fun club activities.
but if you do any of that you just waste calories and die.


here is how an average day goes:

wake up at 5am monday and go to the store to buy food so you don't starve.

walk back home to cook the food then go to school.

sit at your desk and fail the classwork causing your energy to drop so low that you are falling asleep by midday and losing health.

attempt to visit your club but get punished to stand with buckets because you forgot to change your shoes.

immediately pass out because the buckets drained the rest of your health to zero.

wake up wednesday morning skipping a whole day because passing out skips 24 hours

skip school all wednesday attempting to get your stats under control realising you are super low on money and won't make it to your next payment without starving and passing out again at least once.

find some amount of time in all of this to do all the dating sim and club stuff you are meant to be doing.

by the way time moves so fast and food cooks so slow that while it may take 2-3 minutes to cook instant noodles, that is actually more like 2 ingame hours.

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one of the best examples of how weird this games survival mechanics are.

if your energy is low you can go and buy coffee from the vending machine, but you will spend more energy walking to the vending machine and back than you will get from even 5 cans of coffee so it's basically pointless to buy it

yep just went and checked just standing on one spot drains 1% of your energy around every 10 seconds or so and drinking a 100 yen can of coffee only restores 2%

Game is pretty dead. No updates or post since Dec. 21st... feels like they took off with the money and ran.

I'm giving this game a Thumbs up merely because I have a vested interest in seeing it improve.

As for my review itself:

A For Effort, D- for execution, B+ for Style.

Let me explain, The obviously means to simulate as much of the social anime life as possible (good), unfortunately this includes several unhelpful references to Japanese society that are not well known in the western cultures.

For Example, let's take the whole assumption that this is a high-school level character which someone else posted on their review after NOTING that the clothes were designed for children. Had they done a little bit more research they would've known that in Japanese Society a Child is for most intents and purposes considered "Age of Majority" at 13. Granted the strict social classes would mean that they still would not engage in sex acts and the like, but there as best as I can tell no sexual activity in this game; barely any nudity.

Another thing that might confuse western gamers is the fact that the signage and instructions despite the controls being translated for english, are in Japanese. Some of these signs you absolutely cannot live without in the game play, like the poster in the schoolyard that I can only assume is a medical remedy chart for common illnesses, that are explained NOWHERE else.

Also while Detention is a good idea, and while it is quite plausible that a student in japan would be in big trouble for wearing the wrong clothes in/outside a building including shoes; this is not the practice in many other parts of the world, where only what would be considered "zero tolerance" offenses of uniform code in japan would be heard of as being enforceable; and largely be a slap on the wrist in western culture.

Also, the game is designed to make you explore (good) but it does so with limited information on what you should be seeking. The Tutorial is all but a quest system without guidance.

The only positives I can think of that really give the game potential are the fact that it's in early access so things /may/ change; and the fact that the style options are super cute. I will revise this review if/when these things change, but for the moment I'm going to recommend you go play this devs OTHER game, Shojo City instead, as it completely lacks the survival system and is more of what this game aims to be in a more complete form (albeit not open-ended in the storyline)