Natsuki's Life In Prison

Imagine the following. Put on a pair of blue jeans and a heavy parka, get in a boat and head out into the ocean. Go until you are so far from shore that it just looks like the blur of safe land. Wrap a thick towel around your head so it covers your mouth and nose, but your eyes remain unblocked. Then sink the boat and start swimming for land. And as the weight of your clothes, heavy from the water they've absorbed, begin dragging you down, as your arms and legs begin burning with the strain while your muscles fight to move you closer to safety, as you struggle for breath through the wet barrier on your face, when your view of land becomes harder to maintain as your head dips lower beneath the waves, and as the desperation and hopelessness of what you have done starts to build your panic and dread, then you will have the mindset this game tries to evoke. What a bleak, depressing, hateful and ugly product. I read the reviews but I didn't think it would be this bad. Not in terms of subject matter, but in the absolute lack of hope and absence of humanity the devs used. I expected a game with a dark theme but more of a plot that was about escape and revenge. It's not that kind of game. The game is designed to break your spirit and literally make you give up and submit. And it sucks all the way through. I hated this experience. The story is oppressive, and not in a good storytelling way. It is just evil upon evil, depravity dipped in sadism, ugliness wrapped in barbed wire and then all shoved down your throat. And there is no hope! Seriously, nothing in this game has a ray of sunlight. I played through to a situation where she finally escaped (after pointless repetition of the same abuse), they all got arrested and she went home, just to have that end up as a bad ending too! Nothing you do matters. Maybe there is an ending that ends more positively, but the slog to get there, dragging your feet through the sludge of the story, isn't even something I am willing to invest anything more in. The adult scenes are just uncomfortable to sit through so the skip feature was used more than in any other "game" I've tried. You might say that's a credit to the writing, but I don't think the writing was good. It was so full of spite, hate and abuse, it made everything tainted by association. There is a lot of meaningless repetition. Not because it was necessary, but I think the devs felt by grinding out the horrific monotony of abuse to a human trafficking victim, it would make the ordeal have more impact. For me it just made me more exhausted and then pissed off when I finished the game and it was still a disaster. This story is like the movie "I Spit on Your Grave", but only the torturous first half. There may be an ending to this game that has a strong cathartic finish, but the overall experience is so trashy and infuriating, there's no way I'm going through it again. This story needs more hope, more power for the MC, more payback throughout the story. Not just in one perfect ending, but in stages to keep you invested and wanting to try. It needs significant points of justice and revenge, not just at the end, but strategically in the whole story, to alleviate the pressure of hopelessness. It feels more like this was some wannabe goth kids art project he made to antagonize his teacher and look edgy. As it stands, this just makes me wonder who hurt the devs so much that they thought this was a good direction to go. The only plus to this was the voice actress who was able to put a lot of emotion into a bad script and terrible concept. Other than her, this product eats a big fat one, chokes and then vomits on it's own chest and stomach. Memory erase from the human brain needs to be a product. I would definitely buy a dose after this. In case my sugar coated words weren't clear about what I'm getting at: I can't recommend this product.