This game was really impressive. Beautiful pixel art, fun gameplay, and a girl that seemed a bit too realistic now and then.
You see, it’s not so strange that I, living “bathed in the blue light of a screen in a dim room” as the song puts it, felt like the boundaries between game and reality kept blurring. I would get Ame’s messages and read her vent posts, then check my DMs and open tumblr to scroll through posts that could’ve been written by Ame herself. I think I might’ve gone a bit insane, but after taking a break, I was able to get through everything swimmingly.
think I got the “Ame quits streaming and gets a job” ending like 4 times in a row before I realized I’d have to be a bit mean to her to get the game to progress further. At the start, I felt so bad, like, that’s one of my girlmutuals, don’t you know? I can’t raise her stress levels like that…eventually, that sensation went away, and I feel like I got pretty good at managing her channel—to the point where I wished I could play it forever. A number-goes-up type of game, y’know?
Picking out her streams, managing her stats, trying to get all the different endings, doing a spit-take when I first got the wrist-cutting minigame…all of it was very fun.
NSO feels like a love letter to things I also love, so it’s no surprise that I liked it as much as I did. Now, if I had to pick a favorite ending, maybe it’d be “Rainbow Girl”...
You see, when I got to this cg, I put my hand over hers on my laptop screen—
And when I got this achievement immediately after, it felt like magic.
