Cruel Reality: A horrible dream

Very, very short game but that's reflected in the price. As the other reviews say, there aren't any major issues with translations. If you have the time and energy, I'd still recommend this game if you find yourself bored and in need of a new, quick horror game.

But personally, I didn't like it, but I think I wasn't in the right head space for it. As you can tell from the trailer, it's a weird mix of massive trigger warnings, and old 2000s memes. It's somewhat janky in a fun, dumb way, but if you get the wrong ending, it ends up being really edgy and emo (complete with the game telling you that s/c isn't a "bad ending"). But then it's somewhat hilarious when you get the good ending. I think if the branching choices were a bit more thematic towards the ending you were headed towards for a slightly longer time, I'd enjoy this. But it gave me whiplash how fast it went from fun to edgy if you didn't already know the route choices to keep up the "fun" parts.

Alongside that, there's some issues I couldn't stand. If you got the bad ending, the game booted you to the desktop (or maybe it just straight up crashes) but didn't boot you to the desktop with the other endings, which was weird to me. The font also cannot be changed, and it hurts your eyes after a bit, so I'd appreciate better accessibility options.

Regardless of my complaints, I'll definitely be checking out more of this dev's work, and hopefully they keep improving on this genre/style.

A short, one-hour visual novel that goes for the pixelated look.

I won't go into detail about the plot because it's best to simply enjoy it. In short, you're just a regular guy with problems who starts having strange experiences.

Because you can reach the end in around 45 minutes, or even less if you're a fast reader, the story doesn't have a lot of meat on it. That’s why the game encourages you to go through the story again and make different choices in order to reach one of the three possible endings. This can go even faster because it’s possible to skip the text you’ve already seen.

The visuals in the game appear to be photographs of actual places and individuals that have had an old-school pixelated aesthetic applied to them. Everyone who has ever played old-school adventure games will experience a wave of nostalgia. It also gives the game a distinctive appearance.

I don't mind it because I grew up with the style. But I can also see how this may be considered ugly in the modern era. There are some scenes that are so severely pixelated that nothing can be seen. Which is unfortunate because certain images have the ideal balance between pixels and sharpness.

You can easily identify every item in the kitchen scene, for instance, from the bottle and glasses on the table to the pots on the stove and the tools hanging on the rack. The opposite of this is the store. You can't tell where one detail ends and another begins because of the chaos of pixels you see on the image.

The English script reads well and avoids translation tools despite its "foreign" roots. Rare grammatical mistakes are barely noticeable and I’ve encountered only one part of the text that was left untranslated.