The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen Reviews

Interesting premise and solid execution! The game loop is pretty simple - you and your friends are being haunted, and for all four of you to survive, you need to manage the stress of your entire party, including yourself. This ends up being pretty simple mechanically - talking to your party members about their problems and taking some time to yourself regularly should net you a good ending after a few gameovers, especially once you work out that [spoiler] different characters require more or less comforting than others depending on their temperament [/spoiler]. Given how dialogue-centric the game is, it's good that the characters don't just feel real, but feel like real friends. I felt bad when I got my friends killed! Absences were felt during otherwise small moments - if the character who would normally break into a house died earlier, the surviving party wait around a second too long with none of them willing to do the dirty work. The tone wasn't super consistent - the conversations with your friends are scripted to play in order, mostly unaffected by external context. This can be kind of funny - a character just died, and I immediately turned around to the other survivor and went, "So, I've been thinking about how you're insecure about your academic abilities". But it also kind of works? They're teenagers! Of course they're oscillating between fighting ghosts and complaining about their love lives. I also excused it because it felt like a somewhat unavoidable function of the main plot and character arcs segregation, and I'm not sure how easily it could have been prevented. However, it's overall worthwhile, especially for how cheap it is. The characters are enjoyable and believable, the main plot is engaging and the gameplay mechanic is pretty cool as far as horror visual novels go. Would recommend!