Hello, This Is the Suicide Hotline by Shirogane

Review by MacabreMobster2

Wow, this is kind of hard to review. I have no idea where to start. I guess I'll start with the writing, as it is my biggest complaint. The writing is... mediocre at best. A lot of the dialogue is either ridiculous or nonsensical. For example, "'It goes away when I rip at them. They get scared when I rip at my skin, watch as it tears underneath my fingernails.... hehe,,.heheh!!!'" Obviously, this can be taken as the author trying to show the character as insane, but it's not well implemented. The main problem I have with it is the crawling in her skin has: A. No bearing on the story at all, and, B. never comes up again, ever. What's the point in mentioning it at all? This made it pretty difficult to get invested in the character I was trying to save. The grammar could also use some work. While I have seen people use multiple commas after sentences as a form of punctuation, it's in no way grammatically correct. I also have no idea what it means, or why it's come into use, but still. Capitalization, such as when it is and isn't used, is pretty sporadic as well. The pacing is pretty poor at times, perhaps due to the story's length. Things escalate and deescalate so quickly that it seems like we're just making massive jumps in the story, as if perhaps there should've been some more content in between. The formatting is also a tad confusing, as it kind of makes it hard to understand who's speaking. At first, I thought that the bold text was the character speaking and the plain text was me speaking, and I imagine that's what the author was going for. The only problem there is that often times dialogue that was obviously meant for me was put into bold white text and vice versa. This made the story hard to follow, but it's an easy fix that, once made, will improve the game greatly. The psychological aspect of the story is flawed in many ways, but it also shows potential. Not much about the character's psychological aspects are explored except that she suffers from an abusive father. While there are some great places that this could go, the story (again, perhaps due to length) delves into none of them. She has an abusive father, and that's it. We don't know exactly what happened or why it tortures her, we don't know why she imagines him, and we certainly don't know why the hell she's digging at her skin or how that relates to having an abusive father in any way. Now, of course, this game isn't entirely bad. As I said before it shows a lot of potential and has brief glimpses of good writing, such as when the character's voice is described. Unfortunately, there's still a pretty long way up from here. Sorry if I sounded like a cynical asshole, by the way, I try to be constructive instead of destructive.

Review by Manggagapas

Alright Kids,

Let's look into a day in the life of someone who is far more altruistic then me,

There's a lot to enjoy in this short game. You play as a volunteer for a suicide hotline and your job is to prevent a lady's suicide. Unfortunately, the game is really short and you can go through all the choices in about 10-15 minutes. The maker of the game does a good job of making a game where it feels like there are stakes and they cover a lot in what little game there is. One thing that bothers me a little is the period question mark in, "Abuse.?"The line when you win is perhaps a bit cheesy, and personally the picture confuddles me. It's more of a "Where did she shoot herself, the splotch of blood on her head doesn't look like a gunshot wound." and "Why is the splotch there if it isn't the gunshot?" It raises a couple of questions about the (Possibly) Schizophrenic lady with daddy issues.

To summarize, it's an enjoyable game that you wish would be longer or have more calls. The maker, Shirogane, did an excellent job, especially with this being their first game. I encourage the maker to make more games in the future.

To quote, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Page 8, “Lemme have a hunk uh cheese and some sody crackers.”

Review by Rc17

played though it out of curiosity. Its pretty short game. Only took me a couple minutes to complete but the writing here is good.