One Night Stand

[got_quiet]

Name: One Night Stand
Status: Complete 
Site: https://kinmoku.itch.io/one-night-stand
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: M/F
Description: Short game about the morning after a one night stand

 

You wake up in a strange bed, suffering from a terrible hangover, and remembering absolutely nothing. Next to you is a young woman who you've clearly had sex with at some point the previous night. As the game goes on you can poke around her room a little and piece together what happened the night before, get to know the girl, flee, cause trouble, and so on and so forth. It's a very straight forward system that works well for the conceit. Each path is very short. The girl leaves the room intermittently, and you are given a chance to look at two or three things before she returns and you have a short conversation. This happens a handful of times, typically, until it's time for you to leave. A first playthrough is only maybe 15 minutes if you take your time, and then a lot can be skipped in subsequent playthroughs if you go again.

The art uses rotoscope to create a decently smooth looking  animated character in the stranger you just had sex with. The rest of the game is limited to three interactive backgrounds + 1 extra if you try to escape through the front door. Both art and writing wise there isn't much connection to tropes common in VN space. No anime cliches are present. Outcomes feel pretty granular. That is, you can get a lot of similar endings and while there are a lot of things to look at, the wrong combination will land you at the same endings multiple times. Since I'm not a completionist, it didn't feel particularly rewarding to play multiple times. The gallery hints at 12 different endings, and I got about six before being done with it. If you like getting hints for outcomes and then trying to figure out how to achieve those, this might be a nice game to dig through.

Even though I didn't find it particularly replayable, which means that I probably missed a lot of content, there is still enough to explore that I was compelled to give it a few tries to just to see what would happen if I snooped around too much, or tried to leave without any clothes on.

The writing is well done and feels like natural conversation. You can choose through your actions to be an asshole, but you can also be a very nice and considerate guy and the girl you've gone home with is nicely and sympathetically written. It's pretty much guaranteed that she isn't interested in starting any relationship with you, but you can end up becoming friends, which is what I got in my first playthrough. One of the reasons I didn't end up replaying too much is because most of the endings seem to require either an invasion of privacy, or unethical behavior.

 

Ultimately the game is too short to elicit any sort of emotional investment from me. What's there is a well-made little diversion, but as far as VNs go it doesn't feel like it breaks any new ground. For that reason I wouldn't really recommend it unless you really like the premise.