December 20th 2025
Quite often I feel like the ulysses ogre, I think it would help if I thought more. In doing these reviews I'm forcing myself to reflect more than I usually do, usually I'll think a little and then open up instagram and scroll away any more thoughts I could have possibly gathered, there was like an hour of scrolling between me beating the game and starting to write this but people were active in group chats it wasn't even my fault at allll.... Before I try to tackle what I think happened, I'll talk about some other less confusing things
I wouldn't say that this was a direct evolution of the fixed camera stuff that was going on on the ps1, more like it sort of stepped off of it, like it's not just the same third person angle all the time, it changes around often enough. What is interesting though is that the most common camera angle is close to the ground looking up at the player from a couple meters back, whether or not this was chosen for the kaede shots or for other reasons, it's a interesting choice as the lack of visual information about where you're going keeps you tense and from falling into a simple rhythm. There's quite a few of things like that throughout, the method of movement and navigation is unlike anything I've ever played, although maybe that hinges more on the qualifier than the systems themselves, but although they are peculiar they work well and the game is fun. The puzzles are mainly pretty lame; go to place, is it a character ability? is it a ring? is it copy numbers from before? or is it poorly communicated bullshit, not much in the inbetween zone of good puzzle but there are a couple.
I should've been drinking more while playing this game, something to soothe me while iwazaru's grating ass voice said the same catchphrase for the 20th time that stage before flipping a coin on whether or not he's gonna say something funny or just tell me the solution to the puzzle. That's one thing I should mention, I selected normal mode at the beginning because normal seemed like default, there was some line about hints in the description but I paid it no mind. Normal had hint children and hint mask man and hint iwazaru, please shut up all of you, especially hint children, the fights they preceded were almost always pisstakes anyways over in a couple shots, I don't need a dead orphan telling me to shoot it in the glowing weak spot. The music was largely great whenever the loud as fuck audio wasn't drowning it out, but the laugh noise was mixed so loud for a reason (so it scary).
Okay now we go into spoiler zone: Here's my investigation into what happened. Okay in the penultimate level garcian kills his past and tick the kill the past box. In the past garcian had killed the killer7, the box he'd been carrying around the whole game was full of everyone's weapons. I think this means after he killed them the rest of the game he was pretending to be them or had some split personality shit going that made him think he was them, even if it was still him. He had repressed these memories and remembers them when he sees the blood splatters in the hotel. In the hotel he meets young harman, this is fucked up because throughout the game up to this point we've known old harman, old harman exists mainly in the special room and he says one line about time moving differently in there but that's lowkey bullshit. I don't know how seriously the game is trying to take this, so it's hard to say. Harman was the secretary of education who controls the schools, and everyone knows if you control the schools you control where most voting happens, which means you pick the next president, harman was in on the corrupt government system. I think maybe raas ah ghoul "villain" man knew this and said this system is bullshit lets make some change so it's smiling friends time.
I have no clue wtf was going on with glowing green eyes garcian in chapter 6, is he pure garcian or is on some cyborg bull shit. This is why they have killer8 mode, I HAVE to replay this shit. Enough "thinking", time to sleep, game was pretty dope though.