Don't Take it Personally, I Just Don't Like You

[got_quiet]

Name: Don't Take it Personally, I Just Don't Like You
Status: Demo only
Site:https://lockerkid.itch.io/dont-take-it-personally-i-just-dont-like-you
Pairing: Any/F (suggested Any/M in later complete game)
Description: A short demo about drama in the woods



This is a self-contained, complete demo for what is promised to be a larger game. The setting is New England in the 90s, and you're off to spend a night in the woods with your maybe-girlfriend and a couple casual friends. The demo features two LIs, Rose, member of the college student council, and Maria, a punk waitress who spends a lot of her time in the woods. The two don't really mesh well, and a lot of the game is you trying to figure out how best to keep the peace, or how to best pick a side on one issue or the other.

 

While the larger game itself gives off some hints that as a "Dating Game" it's probably going to fuck around with the player and leave them disappointed in love, the demo keeps things cordial. There are a lot of choices, none of them seem to be too obviously the right or wrong one, and there are at least a few endings . You can get a quick ending before you even get to the woods, and at the end of the game I got a short rundown from one of the NPCs for how things went. There are no tracking aids, so I didn't bother to play more than one run.

The conversations between the three of you felt pretty natural, and while it isn't super perfect (Maria makes reference to boomers in a very 2020 way) the game tries hard to give everything a 90s New England feel, with flip phones, bad reception, the last lingering vestiges of the punk scene, spooky forests, and a Win 95 type interface. The UI is a little shit for accessibility, as the developer decided to use a semi transparent textblock and at times uses a lot of static to indicate moments of high tension, but it looks like he's already made note of feedback to that effect and will fix things up a bit on that end.

This is a demo so it's super fast to play. It took me one hour. But I thought the branching was pretty good in that small space of time and the characters were interesting. The only weird thing is that even though you do get to choose your name and pronouns, your options for LIs look limited on the m/m side (one guy and 5 girls it seems for the final game, 2 girls in the demo) and the demo starts out with you already romancing one of the girls, which is a bold move. It took me a while during some of the initial dialog to figure out what was going on because it didn't even cross my mind that Rose was talking about being romantically involved with me right off the bat. I thought she must be talking about being involved with some other character when she made reference to sharing a sleeping bag, but nope, it was with me!

 

As a demo, this game does its job. It gives me a sense of the tone, shows that the characters and dialog is appealing, provides for enough choice options to show that there is some decent logic that isn't confined to "good/bad" options, and makes me curious for more.