Our End of the World

Our End of the World is a 2017 Chinese Visual Novel, released in English via Steam in 2018. It follows the story of a boy who kidnaps a girl in order to protect her from the surface world, which has become dangerous after the titular end.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Great art style that helps with the mood of the story, be it happy, disturbing, or otherwise intense.
 * 2) Lots of different choices to make, only there comes a point where making a specific choice will have no impact at all if you make it too many times. The game has segments where you pick from five different choices, and not revealing the consequences of all your choices until the end of the segment. When one choice might not have much affect at first, it'll have a different outcome the next time. These segments play more like puzzle solving as making the wrong choices will generally lead to a bad end.
 * 3) Many different endings depending on your choices. Any of the bad endings are triggered by making too many wrong choices or not enough right ones, making the game quite suspenseful. Should you get a bad ending, it also gives subtle hints on how to avoid it and get a better ending. Sometimes, an ending might seem like a good one only to surprise you with bad circumstances. There are also outcomes that actually allow you to progress through the story and attain the "normal" endings or the true ending.
 * 4) There are also more concrete choices that have more obvious circumstances at certain points, ones that fill the entire screen and are made clear that they diverge the plot in some way. Even with these, the "obvious" choice can have unexpected and dire consequences.
 * 5) Both the main characters, the unnamed male protagonist and the girl, are very likeable (though that depends on your choices for the boy)
 * 6) Some of the endings, called "special endings", are kind of hilarious, such as one where the boy becomes so obsessed with solving 1,000 jigsaw puzzles that the girl disappears without his knowledge.
 * 7) Interesting story.
 * 8) Great musical score.
 * 9) The plot can even diverge into different levels depending on your actions, some levels will play out completely differently despite being in the same chapter.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The steam version in English comes with some obvious mistranslations.
 * 2) One of the paths to take at the end of chapter two involves the boy RAPING THE GIRL and making her his sex slave. This is super messed up and comes completely out of nowhere. However, you're discouraged from taking this path, it's not shown in graphic detail (but is described somewhat), and the game berates you for doing this. However, it also leads to an optional route in a level, which kind of sends mixed messages.
 * 3) To get through the actual game, you have to follow a pretty specific path of choices to even progress to the next chapter. For example, in the beginning, you'll want to persuade the girl to trust you, but that only goes so far, and choosing just persuasion and feeding her might seem like the right choice, only for you to get the bad ending. To progress, you have to feed her and persuade her a certain number of times before spending some time on your own, which can be confusing since she looks like she's about to die while you're making these decisions. A lot of these decisions are kind of obvious to avoid or make, but with so many different outcomes, it can be a little difficult to actually get through the game.