Taking a break from commercial kusoge, I decided to hit up Roseverte’s indy game How to Take Off Your Mask that I picked up during a STEAM sale. This will be a spoiler free review since it’s a short game and available in English!

Our heroine Lilia works in a bakery with her childhood friend Ronan who delivers food ingredients from his store to her bakery. One day she runs into some black cat who tells her that something bad will happen to her the next day. As expected the next day she wakes up and she’s turned into a luccretia aka a catgirl 😂 She ends up bumping into Ronan but he doesn’t look like his usual self. Ronan ends up adopting her and she makes up that her name is Leea. So now both Ronan and Lilia are hiding secrets from each other, so who will be the first to reveal their true self? Lilia discovers that her father was a catboy making her half catgirl. She finds out she can turn herself back to human by sneezing and then she realizes that there’s an organization in town that wants to get rid of all the cat-people.

As typical of indy/doujin games, Lilia is a heroine with an actual personality and a fun attitude that allows her to bump off the personality of the guy you go after, Ronan. The game has 2 different endings, of Lilia as either her human self or cat self but generally it’s the same. Unfortunately this ends up being a down side of the game because once you finish 1 route, the 2nd one becomes a bit boring since essentially the story is the same aside from a few slight difference and Lilia’s appearance. Despite this I still enjoyed the game, because both the 2 main characters and the sub characters had fun personalities and great dialogue that did make the first run of the game very enjoyable.

While I find the price tag a bit high for the content you get ( $15 without the sale, sale price was ok for me) I think it’s made up for the fact that the game is fully voiced. It’s very rare that you get a fully voiced indy game, most of them are not voiced at all. But this one even voices the heroine, who by the way did a tremendous job as Lilia and Leea. There’s a nice opening movie and an OP song which again is unusual for these types of games. So I think that ends up validating the price tag, but I guess I would have wished that the 2 routes had something actually different rather than almost identical stories.

Only other gripe I have is I wish the skip and auto-mode buttons were on the menu GUI so I wouldn’t constantly have to right click to open the menu. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the game, and especially the voice acting was probably one of my favorite parts. Both Ronan and Lilia’s voice actors did a great job and really helped bring out the characters’ personalities. If you’re looking for a short and cute game, I definitely recommend giving this one a shot as it’s better than some of the otome games I’ve reviewed recently. Yea sure it may be short, but that just means that it gets to the point, and isn’t filled with hours and hours of pointless sleep inducing scenario. There’s also a STEAM achievement guide that I used available here.