The puzzling is a simple case of matching three or more of the same colour orb either vertically or horizontally, aiming to increase your target's "happiness" to its maximum before you run out of moves. Now, puzzles have been mixed with boobies since at least Taito's Gals Panic hit arcades way back in 1990 – that's nothing new or exciting – but it is a problem for Kotodama when a twenty-nine-year-old game did it so much better. And by layers, they of course mean clothes. Speaking of not being sexy, The way Kotodama has you find the truth is by playing a match-the-colours puzzle minigame, "peeling layers, like the lies falling away". Even if we ignore the plot entirely and try to look at this mess from the game's other "angle" – it's just not sexy. Bar internally describing her as (and this is a direct quote) "COMPLETELY MENTAL", later on you appear to do or care nothing about her or the truth you force out of her. Your response, after going to the trouble of mind-stripping the truth out of her (without her knowledge or permission – but hey, boobies!), is to keep your mouth shut about the whole thing. As you'd expect from a game that sees no problem in combining any of these themes with an 'undress-the-schoolgirls' puzzle minigame, both the more lighthearted as well as the deadly serious moments are handled with all of the grace and tact of the world's largest bull in the world's smallest china shop.Īs an example: An early scenario with a serious twist has you tracking down a "white wolf" (a stray dog, in reality) who it turns out has been beaten to the point of bleeding by a student as a way for her to relieve her pent-up stress and frustrations.
The tone of these mysteries varies wildly, running along a sliding scale that starts with "I just wanted to play the violin in peace" and escalates all the way up to "My girlfriend committed suicide (complete with a special "event" image of the freshly-deceased girl in situ) and I don't know why". This is especially insulting during your mystery investigations as working out the truth involves nothing more than clicking on every location to exhaust all options before having the only possible answer (which was already offensively obvious as anyone who's not a major character is drawn in a noticeably less detailed way) handed to you on a plate by your marketably cute fox-spirit companion, Mon-chan. An overview "map" of any plot branches you've witnessed so far is conspicuous by its absence and grows to be a real hindrance on further play-throughs.Īlthough certain decisions are critical to not only your progress but your very survival, the game often only gives you one "choice", making it almost feel like it's just checking you're still there and haven't already fallen asleep with your Switch in hand. All spoken dialogue is in Japanese, although in a few places no written English translation is provided – most of the time this means missing out on a little flavour chit-chat, but at other points you are left staring at a blank text box. There's the ability to create a quick save/load point at any time, text history logs, an auto setting that saves you from having to jab a button (or the screen – Kotodama can be controlled entirely by touch) to move text boxes along, and a not-fast-enough fast forward option to skim over any previously encountered text. The visual novel portions of the game are where you'll be spending most of your time and have all of the basic features you'd expect of the genre.