Game of the Month for December 2021: Nameless ~The one thing you must recall~

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(I hope noone minds the sudden change but noone actually voted for my other suggestion and it struck me that it would be more fun to have a game set at Christmas for December)

Another game from Korean developers Cheritz, and my personal favourite of their games.

"Eri" is a high school student and everything about her seems ordinary except she has a special hobby.

Eri is into collecting ball-jointed dolls made from the doll company, Crobidoll. Although she treats her dolls like her real family, she cannot talk about them to even her "normal" best friends.

With her parents living overseas, she was left all alone after her grandpa's death. She started to rely on her dolls to escape from her loneliness. Then, one day, she had a dream about feathers coming out of her diary and when she woke up, she heard strange sounds coming from her kitchen...

I wrote reaction posts as I played the game, here's my review from the time:
This is a very enjoyable dating sim about a lonely teenage Korean girl who relies on her dolls for companionship in her empty house...and then they come to life as cute boys! I was worried I'd find the premise too silly but once I got my head around it found the Toy Story-esque emotional arcs surprisingly affecting. It reminded me of the way Labyrinth used dolls and fairtytales coming to life as a metaphor for adolescent mixed feelings about the changes of adulthood, including sex. In the end the focus is more on the protagonist's emotional arc than the romances, and the ending, while happy, left me writing fixit fic, but I still really enjoyed it. Be warned that the plot goes to some dark places, especially in the bad endings. But it's also quite funny, with a lot of cute platonic relationships and swoony romances.

Content notes: Rape, abuse, memory loss, tropey depictions of illness and trauma

Buy on Steam or download the demo