2023-04-09
NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE review
NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE is definitely an interesting experience.
The gameplay is essentially a raising simulator, where you make decisions for OMGkawaiiAngel to make her the biggest streaming star on the Internet. It doesn’t take long to wrap your head around the available choices and the day-to-day rhythm. Advancing through a single day is also quite fast, so you can make through the game pretty fast. Nothing too advanced here, just a core gameplay loop that does what it needs to do to present the story.
Story-wise, it’s a bit hard to comment. The game doesn’t play like an ordinary visual novel with a branching storyline. It’s more of a Choose Your Own Adventure book where you’re constantly making decisions that affect what happens, and at the end, you’ll land on one of the endings. Hence, there is not really a “story”.
The endings vary from humorous ones to more serious ones, and there’s a couple of dozen of them. Not gonna lie, some of the endings did hit me like a ton of bricks. And luckily grinding them isn’t too arduous of a task. However, if you go for 100% completion, you’ll probably need a walkthrough – some of the endings are pretty opaque as to how you’ll reach them.
I also need to point attention towards the localisation: it's fantastic. It actually feels hard to imagine that it's been translated from Japanese. Feels like they definitely put in effort to make it work in English.
The art is perfection. From the character designs, to the ways the sprites are drawn, the various filters that happen when things start to go awry and the faux Windows 95 user interface… I can’t find a single thing that I do not love here. I’d say just getting to ogle at the game is well than worth the price of admission alone, considering that this is not an expensive title.
The music is also superb. The chiptone soundtrack fits the art and story and it definitely didn’t get old during my time with the game even though you will hear a lot of repetition. And the theme song is just a chef’s kiss on top of that. Naturally, you can listen to it in its entirety in the game, as well as hear a chiptone arrangement of it as one of the background tracks.
A fairly short and bittersweet, I’d definitely recommend NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE to anyone with even the vaguest of interest in it.