Delusion Halloween

Title: 迷妄ハロウィン (Meimou Halloween)
Author: Ankrache
Genre: …Halloween
Playtime: 3 hours

Plot: You just finished carving a pumpkin when suddenly, it starts talking to you. It even claims it’s the devil incarnate. Hahaha, that’s funny, you tell it–until it greets you with Trick or Treat. With thirty minutes left in the day, it’s time to look for a treat before he plays a trick on you: death.

I sang praise to the doujin maker/circle Ankrache in my intro post for how she makes good use of the KiriKiri visual novel engine and this title is always the one I think of. Originally released mid-November 2012, it got a bit of an expansion the following January. The circle is currently inactive and all but one of her works are no longer available, but that’s not going to stop me, because this one’s about Halloween and I’m going to make it known. I replayed it to try and remember what effective horror and suspense should begin to feel like. Not for the faint-of-heart; elements that might be of concern to some players can be highlighted in the next line:

Minor Presence [ Incest < Stylized Blood < Stylized Gore < Yandere ] Major Presence

(To note: I don’t normally go for the above elements either, but I make exceptions for great execution.) (I’ll probably need to go make the vndb page for this.)

Freeware Doujin Visual Novels: An Introduction

Unpacked Title: visual novels with original stories developed and self-published by Japanese amateurs that don’t cost a penny

Skip to Recommendations?

If the English space knows this at all, it’s largely thanks to the al|together community festivals–the pool of translations pretty much lived and died by them. al|together is where I went after exhausting (and being exhausted by) eroge/galge. Once I exhausted those, I jumped to the Japanese side to look for more, and have never left.

I wrote long posts about it 2-3 times on Reddit so it’s time I wrote out a more polished point of reference. Also, I’ve never sat down and banged out a full digest of my familiarity with the most niche hobby I’ll ever have, so win-win.

Freeware Doujin Visual Novels: To Get Started On

“Get started on”? More like all that’s available, to my knowledge.

Just Otome Things

There’s a bunch of loltastic things that happen in otome games but they only happen in handfuls, so I’m just dumping them together as a hodge-podge list of amusements…starting with:

Historical Inaccuracies