I've been tracking the branching in this thing for three weeks now. My spreadsheet has 47 columns. FORTY SEVEN. And I still haven't found all the bad endings. The game keeps a hidden counter for how many times you choose to "smell the lavender" which, by the way, is not a euphemism until suddenly it is. That's the whole problem with this visual novel. It presents itself as a slice of life teaching sim at an all girls academy, thirteen romanceable characters, standard stuff. Then at random intervals the text glitches. Not in a jumpscare way. More like someone's editing your memories while you're still inside them.

The protagonist Sora gets dragged back to his hometown because his sister's in the hospital, and immediately inherits a teaching position he never asked for. The psychological horror tag isn't lying. There's a scene in the library where you're tutoring a girl and the dialogue options are normal but the background slowly desaturates and you realize you've been picking the same response for what feels like ten minutes and the game never stopped you. I alt tabbed to check my route tracker and when I came back the girl was staring directly at the camera. Not her sprite. The camera. I still don't know if that's scripted or if my save file corrupted.

The erotic content is genuinely well written when it happens, which makes the tonal whiplash worse. One route has you helping a student with her confidence issues, very sweet, hand holding, blushing, then the next scene she's whispering about parasites and you can't tell if she means metaphorically or literally and the game lets you sleep with her either way. I respect that. I think. The mystery dog at home is never explained. I've completed six routes and the dog is just there, sometimes mentioned, never shown, and in one ending it barks and the screen cuts to black. My spreadsheet has a dedicated column for "dog events" and it's empty except for a single note that says "what the fuck."

The art style is deliberately inconsistent. Character sprites are polished anime, but the backgrounds look like photographs run through too many filters, and sometimes objects don't cast shadows where they should. I spent an hour trying to figure out if the missing shadows correlated with route flags. They don't. Or maybe they do and my sample size is too small. The game auto saves at weird points, never when you'd expect, and there's no manual save option. You just have to live with your choices. Like the protagonist. Like the parasites.