NO MORE WORK FOR ITO

Intriguing plot and setting, with a touching and very real message at the end.. Also the art style and music are well crafted and fitting to the tone of the story. There are no cheap jumpscares, it's very tasteful. Played on a Steam Deck from start to finish, and the game has a native Linux build (it's RenPy).

The story is all over the place. I kept stopping every once in a while and coming back, but couldn't get through it after all.

Short psychological horror VN exploring the dangers of toxic work culture. The writing is overall good and the small cast feels fleshed out and developed relative to the runtime (be sure to check out the newspaper and chatlogs on the computer). The visuals are really well done! The atmosphere is excellent and mysterious ... unfortunately the ending has no real climax. Would be a big problem if the story was 20+ hours, but for 4-5 hours it's forgivable and I still recommend it for the overall experience. There are choices, but I didn't explore what, if anything, would change since I couldn't find a skip read text option.

a very niche and passionate indie project that never got the chance to fully bloom, developed under highly unfortunate real-world conditions and facing ultimatums that essentially forced a complete reconstruction in under 4 months. yet despite all of this, NMWFI is still a beautiful and complete experience that manages to tell a unique story that uses creative design choices in order to touch on many disconnected themes that finally intertwine towards the end. As someone that doesn't even like VN's, my only complaint is that this game didn't get to blossom into the original vision that the writer clearly had. It seems that they really wanted this to be a lot bigger and I can still see some remnants from a game that never got fully finished. So whilst I'm very satisfied with the final product, I can't help but wonder what this could've been if they had enough resources to fully spread their wings.

An absolutely drastic nosedive of writing quality from the demo. There is so much more weak-creepypasta-esque writing in the intro sequence now and everyone talks in an obnoxious, self-asserted way, while our character stumbles and mumbles around. The writing in the demo, in comparison, was sharp, quite realistic, and the scare in it was really effective because it came SO out of nowhere. I have a rule to not negatively review games just because I don't like them, because maybe there is a quality I am unable to see, maybe years later I will come back to the game and see something I like, but making a game be a COMPLETELY different experience from the demo in this way is just objectively bad.

I liked the first 4 hours a lot! Then it kind of dragged on and on. I think it’s almost over, but I’m going to quit without reaching the end bc I get the message and while I agree with it immensely, others have also said it’s a bit more heavy handed than I’d like. Good story and visual novel though.