By Your Side

[got_quiet]

Name: By Your Side
Status: Complete
Site: https://takafumi.itch.io/by-your-side
Rating: G
Pairing: F/F
Description: A cute but overly padded game with a paper doll bonus.

This is a NaNoRenMo game by a single person so expectations need to be managed accordingly. It's a simple day management sim with three phases. In the morning you can chat with your girlfriend or garden, in the day you go to work, which involves picking the right location to take pictures at based on a hint, and in the evening you chat with your girlfriend again or just sleep. If you pick the right location for the day you get paid, and the money you earn is used apparently exclusively for buying clothes that you can then use to dress your girlfriend up in as a little paper doll minigame. The paper doll aspect is the most fleshed out part of the game and there are a few dozen pieces of clothing that you can buy, plus some you earn through going through the story.


 

The rest of the game is a little rough, mainly for reasons that make perfect sense considering the limitations of NaNoRenMo. The big issue is that it fails the "respect my time" test. While there are a handful of events that advance the story a little, the majority of the game is playing through repetitious content. You will get the same dialog with your girlfriend multiple times. For example she will keep buying the same book at the thrift shop, keep telling you the names of her stuffed animals, and keep asking you about your family back home, based on what appears to be a randomized roll of limited options. Likewise the job is repetitious. In the beginning my boss asked me to take pictures of bees five days in a row, for example. You reach the "end" of the game plot wise at day 50, although the ending says that there are other things to discover if you continue. But I would say at least half of those days don't have anything of substance in them and you have to play through all of them. I spent a lot of time fast forwarding because I had seen conversations before and the game ended up taking me an hour and a half to play.

There is something of a plot though it's very open ended. This world is much like our own except it's somewhere in the past, fairies are real, and time travel is a thing, but not broadly understood or known about. A mysterious shop sells some technology from decades into the future, so you end up with a laptop even though the rest of the world is just now starting to experience color TV. Your girlfriend also seems to be out of place. She is very sweet and loving but then says some dark and misanthropic stuff. An explanation for who she is or why the PC seems to attract all this time traveling material is not provided (at least by day 50). So there's an interesting juxtaposition of cuteness between the PC and LI, and mystery about her nature and some weird background noise about soulmates and curses.

All of this is revealed by scenes that show up without much player input. There are stats on the top left of the screen but as far as I could tell affection goes up steadily no matter what (you get no dialog options in the game, choices are strictly for job or to talk/not talk each time block) and an energy stat didn't move the entire game. This is almost a kinetic novel except there's that paper doll element.

 

Since the game was made within a month it makes sense that a lot isn't explained and the game is very simple. The filler was way too much imo, but if you can endure that it's got a cute doll maker element and a chill relationship at the heart.