ok so this game is called Alive and it's a visual novel but like, the kind where you're on vacation and everything goes wrong immediately. you play some guy who's supposed to be relaxing but instead gets wrapped up with criminals and honestly the whole thing feels like a fever dream i had after watching too much anime.

the minigames are weird. there's this one where you have to click on stuff and i kept failing it because i was distracted by the cg hentai scenes that pop up when you least expect them. the art is rough, like deliberately unpolished, which i actually kind of respect. it's not trying to be pretty. it's trying to be something else entirely and i'm not sure what but i kept clicking anyway. the criminal tag makes sense because there's this whole subplot about... actually i forgot what it was about. something with a suitcase? maybe. doesn't matter.

what matters is the scenes hit different when you're not expecting them. there's this one moment with a character whose name i already forgot where the dialogue is so awkward it circles back to being hot. you know that thing where someone's trying to be smooth but they're clearly not and somehow that's better? that's the whole game. the vacation setting makes everything feel temporary and a little desperate, like everyone knows this isn't real life so they might as well. i wish the minigames were skippable but they're not and honestly that's fine because failing them sometimes leads to better scenes. the criminal plot is nonsense but who cares when the cg hentai is this unhinged. just click everything and don't think too hard about why the protagonist is making these choices. he's not thinking either.