A 1990s rural Indonesian town on the eve of its lantern festival sets the stage for two high-schoolers petting cats, skipping class and filling out a bucket list, and the warmth is deliberate misdirection: the prologue the player believes is a dream is the story’s defining event, and the world is a grief-forged delusion built around a loss the game hides in plain sight. The reveal recontextualises every prior chapter, and even players who see it coming, as it is deducable from mid-game, will find the confirmation devastating anyway. The stages-of-grief architecture maps cleanly onto the chapter-per-character structure, an elegant spine the game earns rather than announces.
The space dive mechanic is the mechanical highlight: repeated dives into characters’ hearts escalate into full courtroom trials, with evidence-gathering, cross-examination and objection beats straight out of Ace Attorney, applied to town mysteries like a dead Major-General and a factory fire. The genre shift from cosy adventure to cross-examination trial works far better than it has any right to, and the late-game dives into the past retroactively justify the errand-heavy middle by making each fix pay off in the present timeline.
The Indonesian setting is rendered with lived-in specificity rather than exoticism: rupiah prices, kerokong mixtapes, kick-up challenges, rival sodas, neighbourhood mosque geography and loan sharks ground what could have been a generic anime-town in genuine place. The cat-petting meta-system, naming every stray and hunting the fluffiest animal for the bucket list, accumulates real affection that pays off late when a beloved named cat turns hostile, a beat that hits because of hours of investment. The name-as-power theme threads through the cat-naming, the chapter erasures and a forgotten girl’s existence, the game’s truest structural idea.
The fairy-tale spine completes the structure: a Star Princess story told in fragments across the whole game maps each chapter’s afflicted character onto the tale’s cast, and the completed telling at the climax lands as both puzzle payoff and emotional gut-punch, delivered with a musical number nobody sees coming. The ending treats grief as ordinary and survivable rather than melodramatic, and its candour hits repeatedly across the finale without ever feeling false.
Friction concentrates in the middle: the erasure-a-chapter pattern, elegant thematically, becomes predictable once clocked, and the road-roller complaint calls, recipe scavenging and ticket errands sprawl across a middle chapter that charms in isolation but pads in sequence. Recurring input-registration failures, A-presses dropping in the arcade game, the kick-up challenge and the final combat, plague every session, and the Future Fighter high-score grind stretches far longer than it should as a result. Backwards-speaking cinema patrons and glitching NPCs are effective creep, though the puzzle logic around them occasionally turns opaque.
Roughly fifteen to sixteen hours cover the whole story plus a woven-in bucket list of side objectives, from bottle caps and gum letters to the arcade high score and the fluffiest animal, and the difficulty stays low and puzzle-forward throughout, with adventure-game opacity rather than reflexes supplying the friction. The English localisation carries errors throughout, forgivable given the studio’s origins but worth noting, and the final chapter’s bullet-hell-adjacent combat is where the input flakiness bites hardest.
Overall, a narrative triumph whose structural honesty, courtroom heart dives and lived-in Indonesian setting outweigh flaky input registration, a predictable erasure pattern and an errand-padded middle. The grief architecture, the fairy-tale obituary and the musical-number ending combine into something genuinely moving, and the disguise of cosy slice-of-life over devastating truth is the point, executed with a confidence few adventures this size manage.
