The game, as you know now, tends to give you some pointless choices. I played the game twice just to scope things out, and the choices just change the two or three lines afterwards. These choices seem kind of unnecessary, but I'd argue they're central to the message of the game. First of all, they allow you to personalize it, based on either the actions you would undertake or your memories of the high school experience. Do you remember people being outright mean, or simply inconsiderate? Would you leave a party that got uncomfortable, or stay and try to calm yourself down? This both makes the protagonist more relatable, and helps it feel like you're the one having the conversation.

The second part is the ending. After the conversation turns from reminiscence to regrets, the person on the other end seems to disappear. An eldritch entity with too many eyes, depicted with beautiful pixel art, pops up instead, and offers the protagonist the boon of forgetting their high school memories. I internally sighed when the game cheaply turned to the supernatural, and was about to write it off. I expected a dialog choice here: maybe a few lines exploring the ramifications of the choice to forget and of the choice not to forget, and then the end of the game. Instead, of course, you can only keep your memories, as your character explains that without them they would make the mistakes of a high schooler, preventing them from truly being known.

This lack of choice really hits home that this is the only reasonable option for this character, that they truly believe that to forget the past is to repeat it. It also underscores what the game is trying to impart, which is that looking to the future but not forgetting the past is the only option for you (giving that you're only talking about, like, being mean in high school, and not anything seriously traumatic). This climactic moment, where it seems almost as if your character makes a choice for you, turns the game into an experience nearly as constructive as a therapy session, and it's so much better for it.

At this point, the wordcount of the review is longer than the wordcount of the game, I think, so I'm gonna stop here.

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