Your amazing T-Gotchi! Reviews

really short and not much gameplay but SUPER intriguing with a lot of potential 8/10

Gonna give this a "meh" review. Played with my gf, and we were entertained for the first couple of rounds, but going for all the endings became tedious. It's pretty obvious from the get-go that this is one of those self-aware non-games, with dark existential themes yada yada, with a tiny bit of fan service. The "message" or "point" here isn't too crazy for anyone who's spent enough time on the internet, and I found the execution to be a bit dry and soulless, which may be part of said "point" but still, I think there are better examples of games like this out there. I give it a 6/10

This game has a pretty amazing concept, but falls a little flat in its execution. First of all, I thought the game, graphically speaking, was pretty good. The design of the t-gotchi’s interface is well done and captures the ascetics of an actual tomogachi pretty well. Additionally, I thought Tsumi’s overall design was nice, especially her animations, which are pretty expressive and bring a lot of life to the dialogue. Small things like her popping up next to the screen when she’s happy to see you, and conversely falling to her knees when she is hopeless adds heaps of character to the game. I also thought the “Hang On!” ending was great and definitely the most thought-through and best written outcome of the story. Even though you do everything in your power to keep her happy and alive, she still ends up killing herself because she gets the idea that you’ve stopped loving and caring about her. Furthermore, in the lead up to the ending, Tsumi also gives hints to the player about her relationships with both her father and other owners she had in the past, all of which seemed to have been very abusive towards her. The mentions of her prior abuse combined with the outcome of the ending made me interpret the story as a metaphor for how trauma from past abusive relationships can harm people’s abilities to form stable and appropriate emotional connections with others, often resulting in much inner turmoil. While that’s just my personal interpretation of the story, I feel like the ending gives enough of substance for anyone to be able to derive their own meaning from it, which is great! Unfortunately, the other endings are not nearly as intentful and, in my opinion, most feel like a case of “The Writer’s Barely Disguised Fetish” and feel almost like abuse-porn to me. The most egregious offender in this department is the “I love you, Master!” ending where you have to starve tsumi for days and then force her to strip in order to receive food, before she promptly hangs herself. Unlike the “Hang On!” ending mentioned previously, most of these endings lack much depth and substance, almost only focusing on inflicting pain on tsumi in sadistic ways. I was really hoping (and assuming) that these endings would be given meaning in the final ending where the game would give some sort of larger commentary on itself and ultimately make the cruel nature of the endings part of a bigger overall theme or message. But unfortunately, the “The End” ending is a half-baked, rushed, copout of a finale that fails to tie up the game in any way. In about a minute, tsumi essentially tells the player that, “whatever reason you had for getting all the endings and torturing me doesn’t matter, because this is just a computer game that isn’t real life.”which is just terrible, and just barely better than a “it was all just a dream!” ending. It leaves you with nothing to think about or dwell on except, “was that really how it ended?”Honestly to me, this is the worst part about the entire game, because if the final ending was at least somewhat competent it would have excused a lot of criticism I had about the other endings because it would’ve made them all worthwhile and necessary for the big finale to take place. But since the final ending is so awful it leaves most of the other endings feeling pretty meaningless. Another miscellaneous critique I had was with the dialogue system. As it stands in-game, it only matters whether you say something to tsumi or you don’t, not necessarily what you say to her. I feel like this was a pretty big missed opportunity to have included more nuanced endings that came from your dialogue choices and not just the current ones that only come from filling up different combinations of her wellness bars. As I said at the beginning, this game has an amazing concept but falls pretty flat in its execution. Some things, like the presentation, are done really well, but others, like most of the endings, are handled pretty poorly. Overall I wouldn’t really call this a good game, nor recommend it to anyone, however, I do think that it is an interesting game to discuss and critique nonetheless.

Good, very short game. All right for its price.

getting deadnamed by this game (thanks to my pc user files) was not on my bingo card but it was incredibly funny