Capsule Review: Confess My Love
A short adventure game where you play as male student Willie who plans to confess his love to female classmate Liza. You can technically accomplish this in a matter of seconds, but there are twenty different endings based on exactly what you do and when you do it and all of them must be witnessed before the game is truly complete - and the more endings you see, the more clues you find that things are not as they seem.
As a free game that was clearly developed by a small team, I’m inclined to forgive its lack of polish (isometric graphics with square-grid movement was a poor idea, and repeated dialogs and actions should go faster than they do) but unfortunately the flaws run much deeper. Several endings require specific sequences of actions that are in no way telegraphed - or even literally waiting for a certain amount of time to pass before confessing. If you don’t use a guide, expect to spend a lot of time experimenting to track down all the endings.
More problematic is the narrative. While it’s possible that this made more sense in the original language and an improved translation could help, it’s still the case that the game spends a lot of its time building up the drama and suspense around a particular object and then just abandons it as a red herring at the end. The final reveal is totally unrelated and dramatically unsatisfying - the story has no arc and no poetic justice and most of the game’s events that you had to hunt so hard to find turn out to be arbitrary and meaningless.
I’m still intrigued by the premise, and I believe it has real potential. It’s a shame that this game squanders it.
I Stopped Playing When: After an hour and a half, I saw the true and final ending, which revealed that the game had not been worth my time.
One Star: Not for me. While there might be someone out there who'd enjoy this game, I was actively repulsed by it or just found nothing to latch on to.