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Do you ever wish you could have an entire video game based on resetting your saves!? Well now you can with Anonymous;Code where every problem is a simple of “woops I walked into a bad end time to load my save!” The only unique part is that the characters break through the 4th wall by communicating with “you” as the “ANON” who watches them in this video game universe. So ultimately you are playing a game – but the characters in the game figure out (well at least the protag does) that they are all inside a video game and you have to outsmart the programmed in game computer by loading/saving and changing your options. In other words it basically makes fun of the whole visual novel concept of loading/saving in order to get a good ending. While the idea is neat, overall there’s a huge problem with it because then when the protag finally figures out what he has to do, and that’s basically to completely start the game over, load a new save and change EVERY single option because his initial “game play” is so screwed up there’s just no saving it. Luckily the game doesn’t force you to play the game a 2nd time, but it’s kind of a damper seeing everything be like “ok yea we just resolved it behind the scenes so now you see the good outcome”. I don’t know, it just left me so unsatisfied and disappointed.
On paper I like the concept of saving and loading being a thing in the game because of it’s “we’re all in a simulation premise”. In practice I like it a lot less. The first reason is purely practical, which is that it’s often quite finicky when you’re actually supposed to do this. You’ll often feel like something bad has happened (or is right about to happen) and you need to keep hammering the hacking button until it finally goes through. Sometimes the game gets extremely obvious about this (any time Pollon has an internal monologue where he says something like “I NEED TO DO SOMETHING!”) but other times it’s further back than you think. Then on a more conceptual level, I realized that it does kind of annoy me when the player needs to consider the inner workings of the game engine as part of the game itself. I think it’s because there is still a line that the game can’t actually cross in terms of “stuff that needs to be in the software to make it work” and “stuff you would do as part of the game.”
The worst part of course is the cop-out ending where the game resets, everyone loses their memories except Momo because she’s the only character you, the ANON player, backed up the data of. Why not back up the data of Pollon too? Or anyone else?? It just seems like they didn’t really think the entire concept all the way through and tbh I think they just wanted to have an excuse to throw in the Steins;Gate waifu in here for more cameos (which meant nothing to me because I never played any other science game series.)
I honestly get annoyed when a visual novel makes me do a complete second playthrough to get a true ending. Mostly because it feels like it’s wasting a lot of time, and then also because the typical actual actions you are taking in the game is “click the skip to next choice button” which chops up the story so much that everything new loses context until you get to where the game fully diverges from before. So because of that I appreciated that the game doesn’t require a full playthrough, but then instead it feels cheap narratively when the game skips up to very close to the end with the handwave of “okay I did everything perfectly for the two months up to this point.” I don’t really have a good answer for how to balance these conflicting ideas!
I had more positive things to say, despite all the resets, but at the end I ultimately got irritated because it was unclear when you were supposed to load/save/backup and the stupid mini game was bugged on Steam so that drawing the pattern was annoying as hell on keyboard/mouse and on controller it just straight up didn’t work. So by the end I just made Kanade do it the hard way while I went to do my nails 💅 cause ain’t no one got time for buggy ass Steam ports. Overall, I think I’d give this game a skip unless you just want to play every game in the company’s series. If this is your first time coming into the series, maybe start off with a more popular cult classic like Steins Gate if they ever release the remake lol. 💀
All that stuff combining is then what made the game end on such a sour note. It felt like we were in another situation where the game was going to loop until we did the correct fourth wall system command. Then after looking it up we saw that we had to “click on one of those commands in the options menu that we never clicked on before and didn’t even really know what it was”. Then since we had never clicked on this before we had no idea how it controlled or what the point of it even was. Maybe the game was then expecting this of you, and then in turn expected you to pull up the help command in there? If you did this there was a big hint in there as to what you’re supposed to do next but it’s also buried under all the other instructions, none of which seemed to actually do anything in practice? Then I wasn’t sure if I did it correctly or not since nothing seemed to acknowledge what I did, so I just went back and continued. It let me keep going, but this just was because what I thought was a loop finally stopped fake looping and continued…until we got to the point where it turns out you were supposed to do what we just did. But instead we thought we just had to keep waiting or something, then maybe thought it was glitching until pulling up a longplay video to see that oh right, THAT’S where you do this stupid puzzle. Whoopsie!
Bread Master Lee 
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