Title : ヒラヒラヒヒル Developer: BA-KU
From the first look, I loved the realistic artstyle this game provides and ADV style reading which IMO a perfect fit for the topics. The pace feels so fast but still on point which is great but sometimes it just getting really slow in smallest details which making me bored when it comes into SOL dialogues. The character details feels great enough and making you feel close with them in a way before the plot getting little serious.
I have a little doubt in the first hour after I got little context about what's this game talking about. With the length this game has, is it possible to actually solve something? that's what I think. After finishing one ending I think my thought before was ironically correct, because there's nothing to solve in this game, and I got a little confused. A bit dissapointed, but I've read some other Setoguchi's game and I believe this game absolutely has something that I just can't look at in that moment. That feeling happens until I reached the end of the game. I still feeling empty after finishing this game with all ending and CGs, but still not solving anything.
While that feeling still stick to my brain I try to take a break and think about the game again while having energy drink from my local konbini. I saw people, so many people on the area I sit to have a drink and chill. I saw various types of person, one who looks very satisfied in life with his shiny car that looks like brand-new, one who have a very local features sending his wife in to the konbini to buy daily necessity I suppose, foreigners, students, the lower-class who looks incredibly tired and struggling building a tent for their afternoon food sales, every kind of lives is there. Different life mets, and from how the world looking at them, there is... nothing to solve, just like the game. It always flows, people just live there and it's what it is, that's how things always been.
In that very moment, I realized the game was meant about looking something to solve inside, but how we perceive a situations and trying our best to solve something that currently happens in our life. Playing this game is like spectating a whole two different live prespectives with different society class from world-view entwined by some little choice they made in life. I guess this game is the perfect example of enjoying the journey rather than too-focused on the goal. There's hardly a goal in this game, but the journey is definitely a ride.
In conclusion, this game is a perfect commentary to our modern society by looking on various problems from many prespectives. Poverty, disease, disabilities, mental health and how society and goverment interact to those problems. In the very end of this game-thinking journey, I realized that all of this is not about Hihiru or Aeroderma, but this is all about our daily lives and how society reacts about the common upropar that happens again and again, what an amazing read.
