I went into playing this game just to kill time and get through my Steam backlog, but eight hours later, I found myself really determined to fully complete this game. Why? Because the real story is buried way deep in there!

You play Mayu, a junior high school girl, being forced into a trip to the Manten Aquarium by her best friend Himeno due to strange urban legends. The real reason Mayu is hesitant to go though is due to her past, five years prior. Your ultimate goal is to solve the mystery of the aquarium that quickly turns into a terrifying horror story.

Story

Revolving around the Manten Aquarium, you find out that there are a lot of urban legends tied to this place and a very dark past. This is a really interesting, fun story to play. There are a lot of twists to the story that may come as a surprise and often times, you will find out new revelations during new gameplay that changes the whole tale.

There are about 30 endings that you can achieve with only 4 of them being true/good endings. Many of the bad endings you can achieve fairly quickly, so it becomes fairly addictive to try completing them all. You can achieve two of the good endings during the first round of gameplay, then you will have to return to Start for the remaining endings. However, as daunting as it may seem, the story is worthwhile to dig deeper and you will want to know more information.

Characters

Mayu is a 14 year old girl, pretty timid, and still in shock over the disappearance of her younger sister in the past. Since this is not a visual novel that requires 30 hours of choices and watching your character grow while developing romantic feelings, Mayu only grows a little more confident during her trials. Her close friend Himeno definitely has strong emotional ordeals she has been privately going through regarding Mayu, but depending on your choices will allow her to be more honest with herself. All of the other characters are pretty standard with their personalities and typecast, with the exception of Kenji. Without going into details, his character development is the strangest and seems to have loose ties to the reasoning behind his actions.

Gameplay

If you have not played a visual novel before, this could be an interesting first choice. You will mostly read the text, then select a choice to move forward as the scenes prompt you. Like many VN, the choices will often lead to bad endings and usually by surprise. This game did some pretty clever choices, even when you feel that you are on the right track.

Overall, fun story and decent characters. A lot of possible endings and many CG images to receive during various routes. Kenji was a conflicting character and I felt like he could have been given a better role or given more development to work with. If you want to complete the game, I would expect about 8 hours of gameplay (even with the Skip option).