A Towa by any other name: let's talk about Slow Damage

I've already rambled about Towa and how much I love him over there at my shrine —“but Winter”, you say, “that page is borderline unreadable and makes no sense”—well, worry not: this review is exactly the same.

Slow Damage is an incredibly fun game to play. Going around Shinkoumi through the map, collecting clues, doing the interrogations, figuring out what the correct answer is—when the game opened on a tutorial I was afraid that it would be hard, but I got the hang of it pretty fast.

The start menu being Towa's room is awesome, and the UI as a whole was such a jump in quality. I mostly play old stuff (hell, I was playing a PC-98 game before this one), so when I play anything from this decade I kind of feel like I'm in a spaceship. There's also this thing about how Towa sees colored smoke floating around each person, which changes hue and wavers depending on their mood. It's a really neat visual effect that my laptop could pretty much never handle, so I'd usually just get some flickers instead. It looked really awesome on the two or three times it worked properly though.

The soundtrack has got to be the worst thing about it. I cannot point to a single song that I liked, which has never been the case in a nitroplus game. Not even an Itou Kanako ending song, come on…

The story is set in the near future, in the fictional island of Shinkoumi, an autonomous zone controlled by the mafia. The protagonist is Towa, a guy in his mid-20s with a body covered in scars. When he isn’t working part-time as a receptionist in his friend’s clinic or downing lukewarm alcohol from one of the bottles strewn about his floor, he’s an artist who goes by the name “euphoria”, painting his model’s deepest desires (yeah, I'm just repeating what I said in the shrine, let's move on). The only indication that we're in the future is that Towa’s phone uses 7G.

For the routes I went Taku→Rei→Madarame→Fujieda, and while I would not exchange the absolute decadence of going from Ikuina’s cutting fest on chapter 1 to angel wing surgery on chapter 2 for anything in this world, it really does make more sense thematically to go for Rei first so you can get Madarame’s route building off of Taku’s straight away. There's also “funny endings” where you get an extra h-scene with one of Towa’s friends—when I stumbled into my first one, I was honestly wondering if this game would have any “proper” sex scenes or if it would just be people cutting each other up (not that I was complaining).

I feel like I didn't get a proper understanding of Taku’s character until the very last route, so while at first I didn't care much about him, by the end I was pacing around thinking about the Implications.

Rei’s route had some insane moments, but I'm not sure how I feel about it as a whole. “Two guys punching each other counts as gay sex” is a viewpoint I can stand behind, though I'm more of a “cutting people up” pervert myself. Also, that h-scene was just the cutest thing ever...!

Madarame’s route was insane. The mysterious hooded figure. Towa “crying” blood from his empty eye socket. BLOND TOWA. It's just. It's just so much. When Towa woke up in that abandoned apartment with that collar and chain, I honest to god had an asthma attack. It wasn't the first time it was triggered by just seeing an image, but I'm not even into this stuff! I think! The only reason I won't say it would've been a worthwhile way to die is because I would've missed his bad ending. Now, on the day I finished that route, I spent most of the time I wasn't playing the game thinking about how I should interrogate Madarame, because it's not as if he was hiding anything, right?—alas, I didn't see that I already had the answer, and this failed the kobayashi-maru and fell into my first bad end—and boy, what an end! Reading it felt like touching a live wire. Combine that to the joy of discovering that I still had an unread bad end (with added h-scene) for Rei and Taku both, and it felt like having Christmas and my birthday at the same time. That was genuinely one of the best days of my life~

When Fujieda’s route started, I realized I still knew nothing about this game at all. It was such a crazy feeling. Honestly, at the start I wasn't sold on him at all. I was like, “you can't possibly tell me the final hero is going to be this slicked-back salamander looking guy?!”, but as the route went on I ended up doing a 180° on him. He was so different from what I expected, it surprised me a lot. Also, kind of a life-changing h-scene at the end there. My laptop keyboard stopped working in the middle of it, so when I say life-changing I mean it in more ways than one. Finishing the game on the damn touchpad was surely an experience, but that makes for a good story to tell. Probably.

That was such a beautiful ending. Towa cried, and I cried, too… The thing is, I've never felt this understood by a story before. It's like everything I am, even the ugliest parts, was being embraced. They never cut any deeper than what I would’ve personally found enjoyable. And then, of course, there's Towa—

This screen has been my life for the past two years.