Buried Stars - Rune's Playthrough

[Rune Lai]

After starting Buried Stars I realized I had too much to say to fit into a what are you playing post, so it's time for another of these. There are three sections for this first post; my random logistical and tangential to the game thoughts, artistic/presentation stuff, and the story stuff last, which will include the usual spoilers.

Took Me Ages To Buy This Game

This is one of those games that spent ages on my wishlist. First, I found it while randomly browsing the Nintendo eshop store for visual novels, and I thought it looked interesting, but it was way too expensive to buy on a lark from a dev I'd never heard of. Second, some time later after I'd almost forgotten about the game, I read a pretty good review over at Noisy Pixel, but again, not paying full price for a game from an unknown dev, and it seemed this game was never going to go on sale. Third, it got ported to Steam, where it did go on sale, but I just don't like playing visual novels on computers if I can help it. I like the curled up in bed position like I'm reading a book. So I would only buy it on PC if it happened to be on sale at a time when I was free to play it right away.

But eventually, finally, it went on sale on Switch and I nabbed it for a better than expected price since once it finally went on sale it was like a Steam sale discount rather than console sale discount. I would have paid more if it'd gone on sale sooner for less, but I'm guessing their sales team didn't want to cut prices until they ended up on Steam where periodic steep price-cutting is expected, and then they matched prices to stay competitive across platforms.

Though this has little to do with the game itself, I'm mostly outlining it here to illustrate how hard it is to get me to pick up an unfamiliar game even if it looks like something I'd like.

As a side note, I'm also rather surprised, being from a Korean dev, that this game came out on Switch before Steam since Koreans are historically PC gamers over console ones, though that's been changing since the console market opened up over there.

Artistic Differences From Other VNs

Anyway, logistical stuff out of the way, this is my first time playing a Korean VN, and I don't know if that makes a difference (as in this is common in VNs hailing from Korea), but I found it visually striking how much mileage the game could get through positioning its sprites. In my experience, Japanese VNs often work with three distances of sprites to show if someone is far away, in conversational distance, or in your face. They're rarely mixed unless it's for a specific effect (like to show someone's listening in) and 90% of the time it's as the middle distance. If it's a group conversation, all characters will be at a conversational distance and slide in and out of the side of the screen when a new speaker takes the place of an old one.

Buried Stars will treat each screen more like a CG, which is aided by its vivid and sometimes animated background art. Characters might change poses, but there's no sliding in and out of frame. The camera might zoom in and out or move side to side (which is generally something Japanese VNs will only do on a CG) and characters can be positioned at varying distances, so you might see the back of someone's head in the foreground, the person they're speaking to, and a third person behind them, creating a sense of visual depth that most VNs lack. They're not restricted to specific distances since the camera is free to move, and in some cases this creates the effect of having seen a CG without one actually existing.

I also really like the variety of poses, with (seemingly) all characters having a side and back view, allowing you to view them from behind when they're facing another person or from the side if they're acting closed off or the game is creatively making it look like the group is walking together in a particular direction. The sprites of five characters can simultaneously appear on screen without feeling crowded, which is insane. The game just positions them at different distances so the overlap looks natural.

On the other hand, I think the controller vibration can go to hell (there's no way to turn it off in settings) and I don't quite like how protagonist Do-yoon's sprite is handled.

When I first got control of him, he was viewed from behind, which made sense as the protagonist. If he's viewed by himself at a conversational distance while deducing something that also makes sense. But it's really weird when someone else is in the foreground, he's in mid-ground, and someone else is in the background, sandwiching him between two other characters. Since he's the audience surrogate, he really shouldn't be aware of people in both directions. This doesn't happen often, but when it does it visually chucks me out of being the protagonist and feeling like he's just another character.

This is not helped by the fact the narration is in third person instead of the more common first person.

I also have some beef with the general UI/gameplay design. This is a mystery game, so you pick up clues that occasionally you'll need to "show" people. (These are usually facts rather than physical evidence, but you still need to discover them before you can bring them up in conversation.) In something like Ace Attorney you can show everything to everyone if you want, but the game only expects you to show the ones necessary to further the plot so if you have ten things in inventory you don't need to show everything, and you generally have a decent idea of what you need to show to who.

In Buried Stars, if you have something, the game doesn't tell you what needs to be shown to people and it's not clear what will give you a reaction. If that means you've got ten clues to talk about and there are five people present, then you may well go through fifty conversations before figuring out it's time to move to the next section of the game. Each clue gives you unique conversations rather than one or two sentence "I have no idea what that is," but they're not all "good" conversations that further the story or the character, and you can build/lose rapport with a character through them, so it's hard to avoid "nothing" conversations even once you realize you've gotten all the new clues for a scene.

This is particularly problematic because of one of the other big differences between Buried Stars and other VNs; its save system. Though you can save whenever you like, it actually operates under a checkpoint system, so manually saving reloads you to the nearest checkpoint before your save, which are generally before and after communication segments (and sometimes between communication segments, but critically, not during communication segments). Communication segments are when you talk about things with people, so if you're tired because you just rammed through twenty pieces of conversations and want to take a break before the next thirty, too bad. Leave the console on or say good-bye to all that progress.

I found this out the hard way after talking with two out of the five people trapped with me and saving for the night. I was not a happy camper the next morning. The communication segments are not so long that it takes more than an hour to plow through even with fifty conversations, but I wouldn't want to allocate less than that, which makes this a very non-portable sort of game, which is weird considering it was a Switch game before a PC game.

While not a must, I have to admit that I was disappointed that there wasn't an opening music video to the game that features all five of the Bstars performing. How can you have a video game starring wannabe k-pop stars without any k-pop? Even an indie Japanese VN would have scrounged up the music to do this. It seems the Steam version added an opening number, which is nice, but I'm not sure if it's performed by one of the female VAs and it lacks any sense of performance by the characters, making it a missed opportunity of seeing the characters as their audience sees them, which is kind of important to one of the game's running themes.

On to the game...

As of this writing I'm about five hours in, minus some redo time getting back after I reloaded at a checkpoint instead of where I left off.

I knew going in that this would be a mystery game involving a number of k-pop stars being trapped in rubble after a show gone wrong, so I shouldn't have been surprised that my protagonist would be doing some investigation, but somehow there just seems to be something a little off about how Do-yoon dives into it. For one thing, doing investigations is not his profession or his hobby, and for another, he dives into it before we know there is any sort of crime. The game oddly takes a while before we get a body, with the early focus being on entrapment presumably because of an accident in shoddy construction. And actually, where I am right now, there's still no evidence of any crime (other than likely disregard for construction laws). There's something weird going on aside from being trapped in a crumbling building, but we don't know what.

Basically, Buried Stars (in-universe) is sort of a talent show where people compete, presumably for a recording contract, even though the prize is interestingly not actually mentioned. The contestants have been winnowed down to the top 5 based on fan voting, and in the middle of the show the "stage" collapses, leaving the five contestants and the floor director trapped.

The translation is a little confusing because it says the stage collapsed, which implies the group is now underground beneath the stage, but once the group has a chance to look around that's not actually the case.

The stage is still standing. It's the set that has collapsed around the stage.

And that's kind of par for the course with the translation. Individual sentences are grammatically correct English and look very good out of context, but when pieced together I sometimes feel like I'm missing something, or some point didn't get across. For instance, there's one conversation where they talk about how a lot of footage of Hyesung went unused, and then a few dialogue boxes later in the same conversation they talk about the show's clear favoritism about him. The actual flow of the conversation makes no sense. (Edit: Playing a little further, I think what they actually wanted to say was that the show favored Hyesung by editing out all the unflattering footage of him, because they actually come out and say that later on, but that's not what was conveyed at this point in time.)

And don't even get me started about how the producer could only have been hit on the top of the head if she was looking up, but not if she was looking down. If she was looking up she would have been hit in the forehead or the face. Arguably by looking down she'd be hit in the back of the head, but that's the problem with the wording. The only way the top of her head should have been hit is if she was looking straight ahead, which was not a selectable answer.

Aside from that, I have some serious realism questions about what's going on here. The set collapsed, but it seems to have been a load-bearing set because large chunks of the concrete ceiling have come down as well. Strangely all the audience members and most of the staff have managed to escape, leaving only six perfectly fine people and one dead body (which I'll get to) trapped inside, surrounded by rubble.

We find out pretty quickly that a lot of corners were cut under pressure from the producer and the set was restructured at the last minute, but that doesn't explain the state of the building itself, which seems to be the real problem. The whole structure seems to be in serious trouble and that doesn't make any sense since it probably wasn't built specifically for the show. It takes time to lay down all that concrete and make a building after all! Given the production's slapdash rush job it makes sense they would have set up in a preexisting space and only the set and the audience seating would have been built specifically for the show.

And what is the layout of the building that it's able to drop such large chunks of ceiling concrete all over the recording venue but not reveal open sky? Are there additional floors above the stage? Are we in a skyscraper, or something only a few stories tall?

Once the group gets their bearings and actually tries to look for an escape route (which takes longer than you'd think--they actually call for a rescue team to dig them out before they even investigate to see if they could... you know, walk out themselves), we see that it's more than just the area around the stage that has collapsed. There are spider cracks all over the walls of the building. Hilariously, they investigate the men's bathroom at one point and see the mirror has been shattered so they interpret it as proof that the walls are unstable because clearly the mirror broke under the pressure of supporting the ceiling. (I... I just can't... A load-bearing mirror...)

....Anyway, there's something fishy going on and it seems with the shifty construction, positioning the contestants where they were, it looks like all their troubles point at autocratic producer Seungyeon Shin, except that the group finds her body partially crushed near the stage so even if she was responsible for their current situation she's now dead.

Even though I don't know where the game is going yet, there's obviously a lot our poor group of survivors is unaware of. It seems each contestant has an unflattering part of their past that they'd rather not talk about, and someone on Phater (the in-universe Twitter) is posing as the deceased Seungyeon and saying that Buried Stars is now a survival game where the contestants will have to come forward and be honest about their transgressions in order to survive.

Interestingly S_seungyeon, the user on Phater, knows a few things that aren't public about the contestants, which hints to them being involved with the show in some capacity, and they also claim to be Seungyeon Shin tweeting from beyond the grave, and this claim about being dead is made before Seungyeon's death is publicly announced.

S_seungyeon has also announced that this is going to turn into a real survival game where the lowest ranked of the five will be killed in an hour, or about 2am in-game.

Things I like so far about the story is the use of Phater, where you can choose different responses (or to not respond at all). It's pretty wild when the contestants realize that fan voting has not turned off even though the accident happened in the middle of their show, and that Hyesung (in 5th place and at greatest risk of elimination) has still been encouraging his fans to vote despite the crisis. The writer or writers handling the social media dialogue is really good at replicating the disjointed look of how a Twitter conversation plays out, while still keeping it fairly each to follow.

Having the characters be largely trapped but still having access to social media (but limited phone calls because lol it would be too easy to straighten things out otherwise) makes for a nice level of tension, especially when they can see how everyone else from fans to show staff are freaking out outside.

I have to wonder how much the staff and the show executives are involved though. Realistically I would expect S_seungyeon's Phater account to be shutdown pretty quickly after Seungyeon's death is made public, and random users even comment about it, drawing attention to the fact it should be. I don't know if that's the writers saying "Yeah, we know, we'll get to that later" or the writers "Yeah, isn't that weird. Sometimes that happens."

I really like though how the game dives headfirst into tackling the manufacturing process of a Korean pop star. I'd read before about how the process is highly regimented, where the aspiring performer is given a persona and that becomes who they are on stage even if it's not who they are in real life. I'm sure that happens to some degree in the western industry as well, but the constant talk of playing the character the show has assigned them, and how the show has been edited to match the script the producer wants (like how Inha being concerned about Juyoung's health was edited out because Inha's character is to be a snob) feels very much like the essay I read by a Korean woman who went to a highly competitive k-pop training camp to join a girl band. (And despite getting an offer, the writer turned it down because she disliked the persona she was to become.)

This is why I feel like not having an opening music video performed by the cast was a miss, because we could have seen the public facing personas that their fans do, while spending most of the time with them being who they really are. I really like that Inha, despite having bleached hair and blue contacts to look fashionable and "snobby," is constantly looking out for Juyoung. Seeing Inha's before and after looks, when she had long straight hair and glasses and then the wavy short hair is a nice contrast in showing how much she's diving into the role given to her. We don't know how much she's okay with her on-stage persona, with Seil praising how much she can handle the business and the meanness that comes with it (including a stalker), but I think it will come up before the game is over.

And speaking with Seil, he's the floor director and the one person who is trapped and not a contestant. While it's nice to have a staff perspective, his presence is odd because trapping the five contestants seems to have been intentional, and assuming this was all engineered, trapping an accidental sixth person would be undesirable. He's nice as a visual shorthand though to remind the player there are five people trapped. Since Do-yoon is usually off screen being the protagonist, group shots still end up consisting of five people because of Seil appearing in them.

But I don't trust Seil. I have a mild suspicion that he's Inha's stalker because he zealously backs her up regarding anything, but on the other hand, that feels a little too obvious. At one point everyone empties their pockets when Inha suggests that one of them trapped inside could actually be S_seungyeon and none of the contestants are carrying electronics other than their official sponsor smartwatches, which only allow access to their official accounts. But due to Inha having a change of heart, she calls off the search before Seil is forced to open up his messenger bag, which he clearly does not want to do. Leaving the player knowing that he had something to hide and not getting to see that it was something stupid like a notebook full of bad artwork, just feels like it would be a terrible out if it came back that Seil was actually trouble.

Seil says he lost his phone when this whole thing started, but that's just what he said, and as staff he would not be restricted to using the official sponsor's device. I don't think he's S_seungyeon because, again, too obvious being the odd man out, but I'm not sure what his "purpose" for being included is. Though it's not pointed out by anyone (yet, at least), he's the only one not in danger of dying in this survival game because he's not a contestant.

Anyway, that's about where I am right now. Someone might die in an hour. Do-yoon is in fourth place so I think that's to give the player some breathing room without thinking they're going to die right away, while also giving the story leeway to off Hyesung to show the threat of death is real.

But maybe it's possible to keep everyone alive? The game had some hint text that said something about changing the epilogue if Do-yoon's rapport with everyone was high enough. I have fully trusted status with Hyesung right now so maybe he'll stay alive a while longer.

[Rune Lai]

Okay, I screwed up. To rewind a bit, Hyesung stormed off solo to implement his brilliant plan to no longer be in fifth place. He says this is because the episode they were filming would have eliminated whoever was in fifth place, so this is his plan to move up the ranks when the show eventually resumes (after they're dug out and all), but there's a part of me that also wonders if he was also scared of being killed and afraid to show it.

Hyesung is a bit of a pill in how just as he earns a bit of sympathy from me he's quick to shoot himself in the foot and make himself dislikeable all over again.

Anyway, Hyesung basically plans on calling the remaining contestants over to the dressing room where he's going to have one-on-one blackmail sessions to get them to quit, except the first person he calls is Do-yoon who he admits he has no dirt on. (And really, he has no dirt on anyone. He's just grasping at straws.) It doesn't justify what he's doing, but it sounds like Hyesung sees winning Bstars as the only way he can justify being who he is, given the amount of (probably) unjustified treatment he's been given in the wake of assaulting a fellow classmate and getting himself expelled from school. Unfortunately why he has to become a pop star specifically, which even he agrees he's not particularly good at, is still unclear. It doesn't sound like a long cherished childhood dream or anything.

Do-yoon refuses to quit just because Hyesung asked, and then Gyu-hyuk goes in, mostly to try to convince Hyseung to come back to the relative safety of the stage instead of hiding out in a crumbling room. Gyu-hyuk comes back unsuccessful, and then Inha heads out, without being summoned, but just to give the guy a piece of her mind.

Since Hyesung won't open the door to a group, she goes by herself. But after the building shakes, Seil freaks out and runs off to check on her, and Gyu-hyuk and Do-yoon remain in the stage with Juyoung who is having one of her panic attacks. Where everyone is right now is important. Do-yoon and Gyu-hyuk talk, and Juyoung disappears during this time during a delightful fake-out designed to make the player think "Oh no! What happened to her?!" but then she returns safely with Inha and Seil. She just saw Do-yoon and Gyu-hyuk were absorbed in each other and left to find help for herself. (Seriously, I don't usually read into things, but I feel like they're a little gay for each other. If they were opposite gendered characters there would probably be a romance vibe between them.)

Inha reveals that Hyesung wasn't in the dressing room, so everyone splits up to go look for him. There are only three other locations and they pair off except for Do-yoon who gets a funny look on his face as he decides he will check the men's bathroom alone. Gyu-hyuk offers to go with him even though that would mean leaving a panic attack prone Juyoung by herself (which is why it definitely looks like there's some attraction going on there), but Do-yoon insists on going by himself.

So of course that's where he finds Hyesung's body.

I'm rather glad this is a game with 2D sprites because that's some serious "you're about to get a jump scare" vibe going on there with the 3D animation going into the bathroom.

There is a sanity meter in this game and it warns you early on that hitting 0 will be a game over. It had been periodically going up and down throughout my playthrough so far, and I lost a chunk on finding the body, but I still had over 20% left in the tank, which looked more than enough to cover any further hit to his sanity. However shortly after everyone else shows up, S_seungyeon begins taunting about how Do-yoon is next (being in fourth) and his sanity just cratered and hit 0.

He sort of BSODs out and some time passes, surprisingly not giving me a game over. Wondering if that was scripted given the size of the drop, and that the BSOD only lasted about ten minutes of in-game time, I kept playing.

Do-yoon flips out on Phater because of all the trolls, most of whom probably would be more contrite if they knew what was actually going on, but otherwise figure if pop stars have time to be on Phater they clearly aren't in any danger. But what I find hilarious is that after Do-yoon tees off on the trolls, Inha's like "omg how could you be on Phater at a time like this" and the next thing everyone does is check Phater to see what Do-yoon posted. xD

Anyway, Seil presents his conclusion that based on Hyesung's injuries, he was murdered, and the group reports it to the rescue team outside, who seem to be rather blase about the whole thing. The group could be trapped in there with a murderer and their only advice is for everyone to stay on the stage where it's safe(r) from crumbling concrete. It really makes me think there's some sort of conspiracy angle here, that it couldn't be the work of just one person given that Phater, the entertainment studio, and the rescue team all seem to be rather lackadaisical.

For one thing, there's not supposed to be any way in or out of the trapped area, and news of Hyesung's death leaks out to the media. The murderer is trapped inside with them (or is one of them) which means they ought to be dealing with the same spotty phone reception everyone else is.

Seil rules out the two women as potential murderers because they're women (lol), and tries to rule out himself, but really can't find a good reason for why he should be excluded. Personally I don't want to rule anyone out. Since Do-yoon last saw Hyesung alive, everyone has had a moment they've been alone and could have killed him. Gyu-hyuk went alone first, and it's possible he killed him before coming back to the group and reporting he failed to convince him to come back. Inha was alone when she went to speak with him (and didn't find him). Seil went alone to find her. And Juyoung went alone to find them.

What first gave me a clue that I screwed up is that after everyone goes back to the stage, Do-yoon has another moment where he just stops caring and time advances by a full hour this time. I didn't get to talk with anyone and the story seemed to be proceeding on its own without me being able to investigate, which felt rather awkward. Normally I'm used to just getting a game over after whatever meter is keeping me in the game is used up, but now I started wondering how far this is going to go. Was I going to play 80% of the game on auto-pilot and then eventually hit my unceremonious end? That just felt kinda bad.

And as I kept playing, there were more moments where Do-yoon ends up not acting, but clearly under other circumstances he would have had the option. I ended up going through three of those moments, but because those scenes need to work when the player is on the ball, Do-yoon looks pretty alive and dynamic only to suddenly fall into "I don't care" and not doing anything, which just looks weird.

But without the Communication breaks for interrogating people things seem to move a lot faster. (Either that or it's just because we're starting to develop a body count.) Surprisingly we don't even get to S_seungyeon's threat to kill Do-yoon before everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

Inha finds out through Phater that Seil is in the background of all these photos of her and confronts him. As they fight over seeing the contents of his bag, His laptop falls out and we see all these photos of her, making it look like he is indeed her stalker. (I don't really want to say called it, because that's like looking at rain and concluding the ground will be wet, but I'm hoping there's something more here.) He freaks out and in the process of shoving her away, also pushes himself off the stage and ends up impaling himself on one of the steel beams that came down during the collapse.

Inha freaks out and locks herself in the dressing room, implying that she's going to take her own life. Juyoung gets killed in more debris while probably having one of her panic attacks. Gyu-hyuk kills himself with an ominous comment that if Do-yoon hadn't saved him at the start of the game none of this would have happened. (Does he know more than he let on?) And then Do-yoon finally kills himself after everyone else is dead and he lets himself get drowned in Phater hate, all the while regretting that he didn't intervene at the certain key points where he stood down.

So yeah, I can see why Ambrienne said this game is dark!

After finishing the longer than expected bad ending, I suspect the writers didn't want to do multiple "died before knowing anything" bad endings, so the game is designed to have Do-yoon tap out and go on autopilot if he hits zero sanity at any point between the start of the game and Gyu-hyuk's potential suicide, but it just ends up feeling bad the earlier the inability to play kicks in. And now I'm curious how this plays out if Do-yoon is still sane. Would Gyu-hyuk even try suicide if Seil and Juyoung hadn't died due to Do-yoon's intervention?

On reflection, I think I understand a little more of how the game is supposed to work, though it's not a very intuitive system. After using clues on people, you see whether they unlock a new clue for you, as well as the current clue's effect on the character's rapport with Do-yoon and Do-yoon's sanity. Since this information is only obtainable after you've done it (so maybe it's good that I used every damn clue on everyone), your first playthrough is just flying blind, but once you know which clues only carry penalties and no benefits you can avoid using them.

However, the game does not tell you this and that you should choose your clues carefully, so I just expected to use everything because as long as it keeps giving me unique text I'm going to assume I'm intended to read all of it.

Also, following Hyesung's death I couldn't help wondering, but what if Do-yoon just... like... quit? We don't really know why Do-yoon is still in the competition at this point since it wasn't his idea (he originally joined with his band, which got eliminated earlier and it sounds like he got some special dispensation to continue as a solo act). If he quit, would the murderer still consider him fourth or just move on to the next target? I mean, the murderer might not care, but if I was trapped with someone clearly out to kill me, I think quitting would be worth a shot. No recording contract is worth getting killed over.

For that matter, what if everyone just quit to get the murderer off their case? If it keeps them alive and the murderer gets caught later, it seems a no-brainer for the studio to let them back on another season of the show.

Anyway, the way the game concludes in this ending, only Inha survives, having not actually killed herself in the dressing room, which is interesting. At first I thought we were going to end up with a And Then There Were None situation with everyone being dead, including the still unknown murderer who engineered everything, but S_Seungyeon is still tweeting after everyone except for Inha and Do-yoon are dead. Since I think we can rule out Do-yoon, that means we're left with Inha and the mystery character who has a profile and portrait we can't see. I'd rather the killer not be a mystery person we haven't met, but revealing the killer to be Inha just because she's the sole survivor would be disappointing.

[Rune Lai]

Started second playthrough on New Game+. This time the game starts off with a flash forward to Seungyeon's body discovery, but this time overlaid with a series of text/chat messages from PlugHole that I spotted during my first playthrough but was unable to respond to at the time. It shows up after the accident happens and I remember thinking it was really weird, but nothing came of it at the time.

Also, the opening credits play for the first time, the one that's on the Steam page that I thought was a Steam-only addition, which means that you really aren't expected to succeed your first time through. I generally don't mind this when I'm playing a game with mystery elements (like 7'scarlet), but dislike it in something that is actually a deduction oriented game. Like, if you could only succeed in Ace Attorney after getting a mandatory game over, would you feel it was fair? It might be possible to finish on a first time playthrough without a guide, but I'm a little skeptical, which I'll get to later.

My clue data carried over, but now that I look closer it's only the rapport that's marked on the clues and not the sanity, so for this run I decided I'm just going to pick what gives me better rapport, since even if it occasionally takes my sanity down, at least it's not for no reward, and I can't imagine any instance where Do-yoon would gain sanity while subtly ruining a relationship with someone. Unless the game just has no buffer, I'm hoping this will be enough to carry me to a better ending. If not, I may resort to note taking on my third playthrough to choose only answers that give me rapport without hurting sanity. I don't want to use a walkthrough because being a mystery game this means it's impossible to avoid some level of spoiler. Even .things like learning I'm close to the end of the game when it might not be obvious would be a downer.

It took me a while to replay through the game because I ended up rereading most of the dialogue. I normally do this with VN to pick up on things I might have missed the first time around, though I did fast-forward a few times. I have to say, I really like Buried Stars' fast forward. I know quite a few otome games that could take a page from this. It's not flat out skip to next choice (which might leave you with no context), but it's really speedy.

By the time I got back to Hyesung's one-on-one time, I had about half sanity, better than l had last time, and noticed something odd at the end of our conversation. I had the chance to give one last shot to convince Hyesung to come back and rejoin the group, which would prevent him from being isolated and alone when he would get murdered. I think I had this chance last time as well, but it didn't work. This time I was extra careful to pick the clue that would likely convince him the most. When that didn't work, I reloaded and tried all of the choices. None of them worked even though I had full rapport with him, so either he cannot be convinced until I've unlocked another ending, or this is a red herring and the player doesn't actually have a last shot to begin with.

But this time finding Hyesung's dead body went better. Do-yoon's sanity took the hit on finding Hyesung's body as before, but didn't crater at the end of the scene, which leads me to believe that the bad ending I got beforehand was scripted, and thus me not being able to convince Hyesung may be similarly scripted. (One reason I'm annoyed about the possibility of the bad ending being scripted is that once I realized I was on my way to a bad end I seriously considered restarting the game to avoid spoiling later events that the game was clearly skimming through, and doing that might have just put me on the path to the bad end again, wasting my time.)

This time Do-yoon is snapped out of his stupor by PlugHole, who is messaging him asking if he's still alive and to please reply. Do-yoon is wary of the guy, especially since only Bstars contestants and staff are supposed to be able to message him, but at least replies to him before going on to ignore PlugHole so he can focus on his current situation.

This time Gyu-hyuk, Juyoung, and Do-yoon take point on the body examination while Seil and Inha hang back. They quickly figure out that Hyesung likely had no idea he was about to die since there are no signs of a struggle and that it was clearly a murder.

After several round of talking to sort out the timeline of when everyone was alone and where they were (which feels a bit absurd when Do-yoon is talking to four people one by one instead of having a group conversation) they figure out that Hyesung must have left sent his last Phater message from the restroom so he had already left the dressing room, which was empty by the time Inha and later Seil arrived via the central corridor. Since there was all this corridor traffic with Inha and Seil running around and Juyoung near the door, the act of breaking a mop over Hyesung's head hard enough to snap it should have been heard by anyone outside. Since this didn't happen, the group concludes that the murder must have happened right after the Phater message and before Inha had a chance to go into the corridor.

This should eliminate everyone present of being the murderer, though I think Inha still has a chance since she had a long period of supposedly waiting outside the door before discovering he wasn't inside. With some creative use of Auto-Write Gyu-hyuk probably could have done it as well. But I think Seil and Juyoung can be eliminated as suspects, assuming the killer is working solo, because other people were in or next to the corridor when Hyesung was likely killed.

Side note: I really like how the group pieces together the probable time of death by tracking their own movements and comparing against the time stamps of various social media posts. No autopsy reports in this game!

There's also the question of where the murderer went after killing Hyesung. Because of the corridor traffic the murderer would have been in the restroom between 1:40am-1:55am and the body was found at 2:00, so there was only a five minute window to slip out. Shortly after that, everyone split up to look for Hyesung, which meant that the only place unoccupied would have the stage (though this also means the murderer would have had to slip past Do-yoon somehow before he went into the restroom). Of course everyone blanches at the thought of a murderer being in the stage area with them, and Inha tries screaming at them to come out, but there's no response.

PlugHole also comes back and despite being wary of the guy, Do-yoon doesn't share his existence with the rest of the group, so when he ends up having conversations with him, everyone just assumes he's on Phater. PlugHole won't reveal who he is (I assume it's a "he" given the blurry photo and masculine character outline), but assures Do-yoon that he's there to help everyone stay safe and survive. He also plans on taking on S_Seungyeon.

So a Phater fight breaks out as PlugHole tries to discredit S_Seungyeon, but S_Seungyeon responds with a photo from inside the ruined stage area, claiming this is proof that they are inside. This somehow freaks everyone out, even though they had earlier concluded this is where the murderer went and that somehow the murderer has to either be one of them or someone else who has somehow managed to sneak inside the collapsed area.

PlugHole is skeptical though, because S_Seungyeon, despite offering up the image's metadata as proof of the image's authenticity, blurs out the camera's make and model. The timestamp is visible though, and Do-yoon realizes that it was taken shortly after the collapse when all five contestants were talking to each other on stage. That's when Hyesung talked about his smartwatch being the only one of the sponsored smartwatches that could take a picture, and he'd taken a pic as a demonstration.

After going back to his body, Do-yoon confirms that image was the one taken by Hyesung, and he knows all of Hyesung's photos were uploaded to the cloud. Since all the contestants had the same password due to their accounts due to the sponsorship deal, it's not a stretch to imagine that the password has been compromised by too many people knowing it and S_Seungyeon snatched it from the cloud.

The thing here is, PlugHole is convinced S_Seungyeon is just a troll and not inside the actual building. That they had to steal Hyesung's image seems to support that. But Hyesung still died. He didn't die right at the 2am S_Seungyeon predicted, but for someone with no insight into what's going on, it seems strange to claim that Hyesung is dead and Do-yoon is next when Hyesung could have still been alive and immediately refuted them on Phater. S_Seungyeon could well be an accomplice to someone else.

PlugHole suggests focusing on who has the motive, the knowledge of the contestants' backgrounds, and the ability to obtain the password. The evidence gathering is a bit janky in this part because there's a previous contestant who's known to have beef with Hyesung, but you're told she can't be a suspect because she was eliminated before getting a smartwatch. The problem is, you don't learn until literally this set of conversations that the Top 10 all got smartwatches, but then they all had to be returned and by the time the current iteration of watches were handed back out they were the Top 7 and three of the contestants were eliminated. Do-yoon might have known which number this particular contestant was, but the player sure doesn't so I didn't like getting penalized for suggesting her as a suspect.

Anyway, the answers boil down to a former contestant, a stalker, or a staff member. I went with contestant, not thinking that contestant in particular, but PlugHole went "nah," docked me some sanity, and went with a staff member, which Seil sure wasn't going to like since he's very defensive about how the lower ranks of the staff are treated.

So we went back and forth through rounds of Do-yoon talking to his fellow survivors, talking to PlugHole, back to talking to survivors, and after a while it just started to feel weird and surreal that nobody was asking why Do-yoon was constantly messaging on his phone. It would be one thing if he can quick answers to PlugHole, but sometimes it felt like they were having full on conversations. At one point it seemed like someone had finally noticed how weird he was behaving, but then it wasn't about his constant texting at all.

Upshot is, the group finally figures out that S_Seungyeon is probably the young staffer who got unfairly fired as a scapegoat, and had previously been mentioned following the building collapse when the contestants found out about all the corners the production cut. PlugHole runs with this, outs the guy on Phater, and then S-Seungyeon closes up shop, which is meant by immense relief by the people trapped inside, until their brains finally realize this means they're still trapped inside with a killer, because if S_Seungyeon was just a troll with no inside scoop, then he didn't actually kill anyone.

It makes me feel like PlugHole has skewed priorities in helping Do-yoon, and maybe he's not really a nice guy anyway since we don't know why he's helping us, because right from the beginning he was pretty sure S_Seungyeon was not inside the building and was just a troll, and if that was the case and he really wanted to keep everyone safe, why would he have them focus all their energy in figuring out who the troll is rather than, you know, figuring out who killed Hyesung? An internet troll isn't going to hurt murder them from his computer.

[Rune Lai]

Since Hyesung's killer is still unknown (referred to as "the attacker" in what was probably a translation choice made by a non-native English speaker), we need to go back and revisit the timeline of everyone going in and out of the hallway. It's decided that Juyoung didn't go far enough away from the stage to have gone into the hallway, and no one even considered that it would be possible to forge the time of Hyesung's death with Auto-Write (a missed opportunity!), so it's down to Inha and Seil, who both had periods of time when they were alone.

Now, because of the bad ending Inha is a little suspicious to me, because she was the only one who got out alive, but Seil is also, if not actually her stalker, very suspicious with stalker-like activity, which was confirmed in the bad ending, and as her stalker it would not be out of the realm of possibility that he might want to kill Hyesung who was threatening to blackmail her into quitting the show. Neither of the two contradict the other when interviewed separately about what they did in the hallway, so at least their stories match up.

After the initial round of talks, the scene I'd seen previously where Inha pulls Do-yoon aside and shows him the photos on Phater with Seil stalking her still happens, but there's a lot more that goes on in between her initial pulling him aside and when she starts grabbing at Seil's bag. This time, because Do-yoon is sane, he's able to guide everyone though a discussion before it gets to bag-grabbing time so Seil has some time to explain himself before Inha takes matters into her own hands.

It felt like a lot of interviewing, which is really what drags the game down for me. The mystery is good, but when you don't know what's relevant to the current line of investigation when speaking to a particular character, sometimes you just have to go through everything, and all that takes time. It might help if it wasn't the same batch of characters in the same scenery every time. When you have multiple communication rounds in a row without even leaving the room it's like "Another one?!" I like it when the plot is moving along between communication scenes or when Do-yoon is putting his conclusions together, but the interviews are starting to feel more like interrogations.

Anyway, Seil goes full bore into his persecuted staffer complex, especially as we learn more things about him that he never discussed before, though in all honesty it's not like he was obligated to discuss most of it. We learn he used to be a Bstars hopeful in a previous season, and he may have some sort of grudge against those who succeeded where he failed, having wiped out during the preliminaries himself. This could explain some of his attitude towards Hyesung, who in his opinion, lacked the actual chops to make it as a performer.

But he was also an ass to other performers who failed to make the finals, and despite the fact he says it's the staff's duty to look after the contestants, it's pretty clear that he only considered his obligation to be towards one contestant. Someone, I forget who, says that Seil actually behaves more like a protective manager towards Inha rather than a staff member who is obligated to treat everyone equally.

Seil also really hates everyone trusting randos on Phater over him, who has done so much for them (or rather Inha), but at the same time he refuses to explain himself, even when presented with mounting evidence. At one point he said he'd explain as much as he could while still protecting some things, and it's clear he at some point investigated everyone on Bstars as part of his job, but it all felt very superficial and didn't answer the stalking question, which eventually leads to Inha demanding to see his bag and regretting that she stopped Hyesung from searching Seil earlier. (She later confesses she found Seil sometimes annoying, but was grateful for the help, which may have been why she decided to spare him from Hyesung's search earlier on.)

Things don't go as far south as they did last time, but Inha grabs the bag, spills its contents out, and everyone sees the tablet and Inha's photos fall out, along with a lot of other stuff. Seil grabs what he can, calls everyone ungrateful and says things about how he was protecting Inha from Hyesung, and runs off the stage, presumably to hide out in the dressing room since the central corridor is open, the staff corridor is narrow and a dead end, and the bathroom has a body.

In the stuff that remains though, there's some creepy level surveillance that Bstars was doing on its contestants. There's mail taken from Inha's family home, which should be fairly unknown since she keeps her past a secret, there's a paternity test for Gyu-hyuk to confirm he really is the son of a famous K-pop star, and medical records for Juyoung, confirming her mental illnesses. Do-yoon's is pretty mild since he was just in a band. Hyesung's gives us a little more information about how he got expelled, and it seems more like he chose the wrong person to fight with since the other boy was the son of a politician, which explains why he feels he was unjustly targeted but couldn't do anything about it.

There's also more translation errors that I presume are due to Korean being able to talk about events using context to fill in omitted words, which results in the mostly obviously bad translation yet, with Do-yoon hoping Gyu-hyuk's deceased mother (who he has never met) didn't think badly of him, and Gyu-kyuk assuring him she didn't. I really suspect that this was a spreadsheet translation job, where someone who knew very good English translated everything in a spreadsheet or a specialized translation database, and then the translation was not reviewed after being inserted in game by a native English speaker to check for context, which is why we end up with something like this, where the translator guessed at the missing context to make it understandable to English speakers and ended up with a translation in perfectly good English that makes no sense in context. Doing a spreadsheet translation also explains why periodically characters are referred to by the wrong he/she pronouns. The translator is taking a stab at the gender of the character being discussed and sometimes gets it wrong.

Anyway, the information Seil left behind covered everyone about equally, but he got away with his tablet and the Inha photos, so the group decides they're going to have to haul him out. They march over to the dressing room, but Seil refuses to open the door. They realize that there might be a master key used by the staff that could open it. Seil might be the only living staff member, but there's still Seungyeon's body.

Do-yoon and Juyoung go back to search her, find nothing, and return to the dressing room door to find Gyu-hyuk by himself. He and Inha split up with her watching the other door that exits to the staff corridor, which is supposed to be blocked by debris, but maybe they thought he'd dig his way out?

Seil goes quiet at this point, so the concerned group busts down the door to find Seil has hung himself. (Or has he?) He's dead, and no longer able to answer their questions. We find out that his tablet is broken, and since it has a swollen battery that means it's been dead for days. Previously they thought Seil could have used his tablet to call out Hyesung since it would have had the message app, but that can be ruled out now.

Honestly, though I was interested in what happened and the possibility that Seil was actually murdered instead of committing suicide, the investigation here felt rather clunky. You normally go in with certain baseline assumptions, come to certain conclusions, and then those are carried forward into the rest of the story. But because a lot of the characters are in denial or we lack evidence, it's really weird when we agree Seil could not have called Hyesung to the bathroom with his tablet in order to murder him, but everyone still rests on the conclusion that Seil was the attacker. It's like we had 1 + 2 and everyone concluded it was 4. Worse, I got the freaking achievement saying I learned the identity of the attacker, but I don't feel like I found the smoking gun to prove it.

Yes, Seil had the motivation, but I don't think he had the ability. Without leaving the stage and without using his tablet, he would have had to call Hyesung out of the dressing room and over to the bathroom before Inha left to go talk to him. With the information we have, I don't see how that's possible.

It's brought up that it's very strange that Seil previously insisted he had nothing but his notebook in his bag, when he also had a broken tablet as well. If it had been working it might have been understandable he would want to hide its existence, especially if he'd been doing something illicit, but hiding a tablet that didn't even work is weird, and the other characters know it.

PlugHole encourages Do-yoon to put together all the clues in order to figure out what really happened, and Do-yoon is also unwilling to push things under the rug with the conclusion that Seil killed Hyesung and then killed himself. But I just can't get it to happen. He got far enough that he narrowed down the suspects of who killed Seil to two people, but in another "could've been translated better" set of choices, I needed to pick between Gyu-hyuk and Inha as the murderer since they were the people guarding the doors.

Realistically, Gyu-hyuk was the only one who could've murdered Seil since he was the one with access to the open door, and it's not lost on me that he was the one that suggested searching Seungyeon's body for what ended up being a non-existent key. I don't like the idea of Gyu-hyuk being the murderer, since he seems to be a guy who's been through a lot, but he's the only one who had the chance.

But because of how the question was worded I ended up answering Inha, who flips out over being accused, and backs away from the group in a way that gets her killed by falling debris just as the rescuers arrive.

I would have liked to reload and try Gyu-hyuk, but since I can only manually save during communication rounds I didn't have anything close to reload from.

The ending gave me a lot of achievements (or challenges since they're only an in-game thing) for seeing various endings where some characters survived, or didn't. I don't know if Seil and Hyesung are saveable in any way, Do-yoon doesn't express the same sort of regret he did in the bad ending where you learn nothing, so they might only have posthumous epilogues. PlugHole also doesn't show up, even though he suggested they would meet in person after Do-yoon's rescue. The wording in that conversation between Do-yoon and Gyu-hyuk though... If that's not meant to be romantic, they are going to be the tightest pair of platonic life partners. Though Do-yoon's still voting for Juyoung in Season 5 of Bstars lol.

After the ending card came up, it gave me a hint to raise my rapport with Juyoung. I did take a lot of hits with her later in the game, but she was still at fully trusted last I was able to check, so maybe I need to be perfect about it. But that also annoys me that the game acts like I should be able to solve something (PlugHole telling Do-yoon to look at the conclusions he's drawn so far), when I'm actually blocked.

So now it's time for round 3 of running through the game. But I have even more data on clue cards, so it should be easier this time around.

[Rune Lai]

Round 3 took longer for me to get back where I wanted to be than I thought, even with the generally pretty good fast-forward. Ugh. But thanks to talking through all the clues on previous runs, Do-yoon's sanity was absolutely fabulous and he was good friends with everyone. I really wish, though, that we were able to save whenever we wanted as that would make it so much easier to litter the game with saves without having to replay my investigations, which, even with a generous fast forward, takes time.

(Side note: I wish decision points and clue assembly moments would allow me to review the chat log immediately prior to it, since the translations are sometimes vague and don't give me enough context so I half-assed a few answers to questions because after fast-forwarding I couldn't remember or reread the exact context.)

I was super good friends with Juyoung this time, but I'm not sure what that did other than give me an alternate epilogue for her. What did change my third time through was getting the murderer correct. Since I knew which answer to pick this time between Gyu-hyuk and Inha, I was able to correctly choose him this time (though I had to reread both Do-yoon's "Are you sure this is the right reasoning?" confirmation requests because again, vague wording).

And of course, it's Gyu-hyuk. Having already concluded it had to be him, I had noticed more foreshadowing my second time through the scene where Seil locked himself in the dressing room. I knew from before that it had been Gyu-hyuk's suggestion to get the master key, which sent Do-yoon away during the time of Seil's murder, but this time I also noticed a narrative cue after the voice recording of Seil plays (since Seil is already dead by the time Do-yoon and Juyoung come back) that shows Gyu-kyuk using his watch. The line of narration comes after the recording plays to avoid giving the immediate implication that Gyu-hyuk is causing Seil to speak, but it's close enough to be noticed.

Also, in another move I didn't realize until later, when the corridor begins collapsing and everyone heads back to the stage, Gyu-hyuk says to bring the bodies and he explicitly sends Do-yoon to grab Seil's body while he gets Hyesung's, allowing Gyu-hyuk to put back the watch he had "borrowed" from Hyesung's corpse to make and play the vocal recording. (Presumably Gyu-hyuk had picked up the wrist watch after they broke into the dressing room and everyone else was busy staring at the corpse.)

I also like how revisiting Seil's death lets us revisit Hyesung's once we get into Gyu-hyuk's motivation. Once we realize Gyu-hyuk killed Seil because of the digging into his background, it easily ties together with Hyesung's blackmail attempt, since the two of them would have been drawing from the same well of information.

And Gyu-hyuk altered the perceived time of death via the Auto-Write forgery I was previously calling a missed opportunity, so that he could give himself an alibi. I was quite happy that came back in! Gyu-hyuk confesses that in his hurry to cover his tracks he screwed up Hye-sung's original Auto-Write message when changing it back after borrowing one instance of it for his alibi. He didn't use the right punctuation, and when I checked due to an unrelated reload of a previous save I found out that was true. Hyesung is very excited and uses two exclamation marks at the end of his sentences in his original Auto-Write. After Gyu-hyuk makes the change there is only one. But it's so subtle I doubt anyone would notice.

I did notice that Hyesung's Auto-Write was going off post-murder and didn't know when Gye-hyuk would have fixed it, so the revelation that he did it when the group was examining Hyesung's body was pretty ballsy of him.

So all the pieces came together pointing to Gyu-hyuk, which I found I liked precisely because it emotionally bothered me even though intellectually I knew he was the only candidate after the second murder happened. Throughout the game Gyu-hyuk has felt like a level-headed and overly considerate friend/romantic interest. One of the first things he says to Do-yoon in game is that he's grateful that Do-yoon saved his life and that once they're out he'll do everything he can to let people know Do-yoon is a good person and not the betrayer the reality show made him out to be.

Flipping that around and making Gyu-hyuk an actual betrayer of the group's trust and murderer of their companions while playing the part of a thoughtful and considerate person is like "Do I know this person? How much of his personality was a lie?" It made me sad, it made Do-yoon sad. It was quite good, even though I never eliminated him as a suspect.

I did make a couple more flubs at the end though, the first of which was figuring out why Gyu-hyuk killed Hyesung and Seil. The game gives you enough information to know that it has something to do with his personal history that he didn't want getting out, and that there is a contradiction (which made me want to shout "Objection!") between what Gyu-hyuk personally told Do-yoon as part of his rapport event and what Seil actually found during the background check.

I realized that Gyu-hyuk's story of how his mother died was different from the official investigation of when the wife of Gyu-hyuk's father died, which to me meant that either Gyu-hyuk was illegitimate or he'd lied about the circumstances of his mother's death. But picking the right combination of three clues to point to that proved irritating as the game wouldn't tell you if any of them were right unless you got all three right (which isn't normally the case so you can discard the wrong one). And I still couldn't figure out why either of my conclusions would be reason enough to murder someone.

I just kept circling around and around while the other characters would individually discount every piece of evidence as not being enough reason for murder. Eventually I just decided to watch the "normal" ending where Gyu-hyuk commits suicide without revealing his reasoning and everyone's epilogues play as before, except that Juyoung has a different, better one, and Inha is alive this time and has decided to retire from the public eye. (And Gyu-hyuk is dead. No happy ending cuddling with Do-yoon this time.)

Since it was late and my last manual save was a fair ways back (the auto-save being overwritten by seeing an ending) I didn't reload and try again until the next day.

After a bit of a replay gaffe (trying to speed too much and messed up some answers that made confronting Gyu-hyuk impossible) I got back to where I left off and very carefully picked out three clues involving the mother discrepancy, and this time got it right. It was really weird not hearing everyone nitpick the same clues when they did so the night before.

Basically, the mom that died in the car crash and the mom that died from an overdose were two different people. The translation is inconsistent regarding whether Gyu-hyuk's biological mom was actually a first wife or a mistress, but I think the first wife mention was a mistranslation because it wouldn't be as much of a scandal if his dad simply remarried and it would be really weird for the show to do a paternity test on him if he was born inside a marriage. But for an out of wedlock child claiming to be the son of a famous singer, I could see a show looking for an angle.

But Gyu-hyuk was never close to his dad, so being a bastard didn't seem like a secret worth killing for.

Fortunately, cornering Gyu-hyuk about his two moms is enough to get him talking, and it seems the gist of it is that he both wanted to avenge his biological mother and protect the memory of her. (The actual telling of it is a bit jumbly because there are character profile unlocks that tell you what happened before you learn about it in dialogue.) He knew who Seungyeon Shin was due to a business card left behind by his mother after her death and he joined Bstars because of that loose connection.

After the building collapsed he wanted to dig out Do-yoon, who saved his life, but Seungyeon was trapped by part of the rubble and insisted he free her right away. When he refused out of concern that Do-yoon could be dying, she threatened him and also insisted that she knew he was here trying to get revenge for his mother's suicide and it wasn't her fault his mother couldn't handle some reporters. Gyu-hyuk hadn't actually known Seungyeon's involvement until she admitted it, and then once he knew, he saw red and killed her before going back to dig out Do-yoon.

When Seil's bag spilled open and all his personal effects fell out, Gyu-hyuk saw the business cards that showed that Seungyeon and Seil had worked together prior to his mother's suicide, and knowing that Seil was Seungyeon's gopher, he killed him as part of that same revenge.

Hyesung was not supposed to be murdered. On hearing his blackmail terms Gyu-hyuk actually agreed to quit the competition as long as Hyesung did not reveal the facts about his mom, but Hyesung had recorded the conversation and told Gyu-hyuk it was for some insurance, and known Hyesung's impulsive personality, Gyu-hyuk couldn't take the chance that it would get out and killed him. (I don't understand this particular killing. Hyesung might make a big deal out of Gyu-hyuk being illegitimate, and maybe it'll blow up some tabloids, but he can't hurt Gyu-hyuk's mother any further and he wasn't involved in her suicide.)

In the true ending Gyu-hyuk talks about his guilt and how he's turned out to be a betrayer unlike Do-yoon, who was only the betrayer as part of his show character, and he gets ready to kill himself by letting the collapsing ceiling fall in on him as he had in the other ending, but this time a choice comes up.

However, never put your player in a position where they're on a timer and their two options make them go "Huh?" The options are to reveal the truth or bury the truth, and the thing is Do-yoon knows the truth the choice is asking about, but the player does not. The player might think it has to deal with Gyu-hyuk (I certainly did), which makes getting the choice right confusing. I actually chose correctly the first time, saw Gyu-hyuk disappear beneath the falling rubble and heard the air-headed rescue team ask everyone to stand clear after dropping a mountain of rubble on the stage, and then reloaded because I didn't want to get caught by an autosave. But the other answer did the same thing, and being irritated by this point I checked a walkthrough very carefully to verify the right answer.

The thing is, Do-yoon has been carrying his own secret around the entire game, so revealing the truth is him telling Gyu-hyuk that he shouldn't presume to know him, because he is a betrayer.

It turns out Do-yoon voluntarily took the offer to continue in the competition after his band failed to qualify. He was thought to be the most talented of the bunch and he still wanted a chance at glory on the stage. And that's fine. I never thought he was forced into it or maliciously ditched his band for glory. I know fans get broken up when their favorite group breaks up, but his band from high school clearly wasn't going to make it out of the indie scene and they had already failed the contest, so Do-yoon wasn't taking anything away from them by going solo except the possibility of continuing to perform together if he ended up winning the competition. If I was Do-yoon's bandmate I would be happy for the guy to get another chance to make it.

But Do-yoon felt bad about it. He wanted to keep together a band that was growing in different directions or not at all and he already ruined a potential recording contract their vocalist worked to get them by refusing to kick out their lower performing members. Taking this offer and chucking the entire band likely made him feel like a hypocrite, though oddly the game doesn't frame it this way. Seungyeon was the one who pointed out that what Do-yoon wanted had already fallen apart and seeing that she was right, he agreed to her offer and in turn she would ensure that his reputation as a betrayer would be purged after the completion of the season.

So when the debris comes down, Do-yoon saves Gyu-hyuk's life to tell him that the best way to face being a betrayer is to live on, and not take the easy way out by running away. I get what the game's trying to do here, paralleling them as betrayers, but it's rather weird because ditching bandmates to jump at a career opportunity and murdering three people are vastly different in scale. Gyu-hyuk buys it though, probably because it's Do-yoon, who saw him as someone worth saving, and survives the end of the game.

I have to say that even though I think Gyu-hyuk is pretty good at covering his tracks and putting up a friendly mask for someone who literally just one day became a murderer, it's refreshing that this mystery doesn't have a mastermind behind it, rather being a series of unplanned events brought on by extraordinary circumstances. As a villain too, it's nice to have someone who wrestles with self-esteem issues and doubts about his own worth. We don't usually get those kinds of people in villain roles.

I suspect that in the end Gyu-hyuk wasn't upset that he killed three people, and he didn't try to kill himself to pay for his crimes. He was afraid of letting down Do-yoon and killing himself would be better than being judged less in Do-yoon's eyes (because notably he doesn't kill himself in the ending when Do-yoon doesn't accuse him). Since Do-yoon judged him as a person worth saving for a second time, Gyu-hyuk agrees to continue living.

Oh yeah, and PlugHole eventually shows up. I think his name is probably a pun based on his actual because you can hear the characters say "PlugHole" in English when referring to him, and when they finally meet face to face PlugHole just gives Do-yoon a Korean name and after taking a moment to think about it, Do-yoon realizes he's PlugHole with no further explanation given.

PlugHole is disappointingly not really related to the rest of the story. He had given us a clue earlier on that he was helping because his little sister asked him to, and since she went unnamed I figured she could be an existing character whose identity was being kept secret. But no, she's just a pushy Do-yoon fan who got injured during the collapse and asked her brother to help out.

There's a wacky post-credit scene with them that is tonally different from the rest of the game. I have no idea why it's even there. It just shows us his wheelchair bound sister (who has no name) and that PlugHole isn't really the one in the driver's seat. I don't know if the creepy close-ups of her face are supposed to be genuinely unsettling or make us laugh. I just wish those two had tied into the story better. At one point I was thinking PlugHole could be Seongyeon's older brother, hence knowing how to get into the smartwatch channels only available to people on the show and showing up during the collapse because of a long standing request left by his sister, but no such luck.

I also feel like Seungyeon got the short end of the stick. The best posthumous characters feel like they're still a part of the cast even if they've been dead the entire time, so as we learn more about them our perception changes just as it would for living characters. But Seungyeon never really changes from being a cutthroat producer to anything else. We just get more information about what she did.

Anyway, there's still more to do.

I haven't failed to notice that only Juyoung and Gyu-hyuk were giving me rapport scenes after the initial round to introduce the mechanic, even though I had maxed friendship with everyone. After the true end, the game opens up what it calls a multi-scenario option, so I suspect I'll now be able to save Hyesung and Seil as well as fill out the remaining rapport scenes.

Filed under random localization question, why is there a hyphen in names like Do-yoon and Gyu-hyuk, but not in Inha and Juyoung? Wondering since Seil is written without a hyphen in the translated dialogue but you can see it's Se-il on his business card graphic.

[Rune Lai]

Was super busy these past several weeks, so it took a while for me to get back into this game. Saving Hyesung was next on the agenda, and it turns out to be specific enough that I had to use a walkthrough to make sure I got everything since it seems that you need to unlock all his profile information in a single playthrough before you confront him, but the clue cards aren't marked in a way to tell you that they hold profile unlocks (they only signal approval/disapproval for friendship and whether they unlock a keyword), so I ended up skipping like four of his profile cards that I'd already found in earlier playthroughs because I was trying to streamline everything for replay.

*sigh*

I did notice a few new things though. There's a rumor on Phater that the building they're in used to be a laboratory that I'm pretty sure wasn't there on my previous playthrough as you can ask everybody what they think about that rumor and I'm pretty sure it would have stuck out like a sore thumb my first playthrough if it'd been there.

Also, there are new timed decision points. The first one I found was obviously saved for a second playthough, and it lets Do-yoon get concerned about Gyu-hyuk and Hyesung when they're having their 1-on-1 and the big tremor happens. Normally he stays on the stage and this is when Gyu-hyuk commits the murder, so having Do-yoon walk into the main corridor when Gyu-hyuk is exiting the bathroom is kinda hilarious. Since Do-yoon doesn't know the full story, but Gyu-hyuk still really likes Do-yoon for saving his life, a clearly rattled Gyu-hyuk ends up confessing to the murder but without telling Do-yoon why he did it. It's a somewhat abbreviated what-the-hell ending, though with new artwork.

The other new option might have been on my second playthrough after getting the bad ending, but I'm not sure. There's a timed choice after Hyesung's death where Do-yoon can choose to go nuts on Phater or stay quiet about it. Venting on Phater goes to the first extended bad ending, so it's now possible to see it whenever you want regardless of sanity, and staying quiet goes on to the main story.

But frankly, the real thing I was here for was saving Hyesung. Saving him results in all his rapport events spewing out one after another during the 1-on-1 conversation between the two. I'd actually got one of them on my first playthrough, but the other three were brand new. I suspect it is not possible to get all of them on a first playthrough, due to the multi-scenario unlock message that plays after getting the good ending where Gyu-hyuk is both revealed as the murderer and saved from killing himself, but it might be possible to get more than I had. (I hadn't bothered calling Hyesung at all on my first playthrough and he might not have been fully maxed.)

Hyesung still kicks Do-yoon out, same as he always does, but for some reason the extended bro session allows him to survive Gyu-hyuk's head bashing. When Do-yoon finds Hyesung in the men's bathroom he's only unconscious instead of dead. But he's still gravely injured in a way that he's unlikely to wake up soon, so the group carries him back to the stage.

Of course Gyu-hyuk's still as cool as a cucumber and oddly doesn't immediately push the theory that the murderer ought to be a person other than someone in their small group (whereas he was very invested in S_Seungyeon being the killer in the default route). I was mildly curious about whether he'd have a brown pants moment when Hyesung turned out to be not dead seeing as this means Hyesung can accuse him as soon as he wakes up, but then, Gyu-hyuk has been very good about hiding his emotions to the group members he has no intention of harming.

Several things spill out earlier than they did previously in the conversations over the attack on Hyesung, most notably his relationship with Seungyeon and the fact Seungyeon had approached Gyu-hyuk for a relationship as well, when these facts came out much closer to the end originally. Since Seil hasn't felt cornered yet he ends up lying about the contents of the blackmail letter to Seungyeon (which we know he sent from the previous route), and Gyu-hyuk reveals to Do-yoon that he knows the contents of the blackmail letter because Seungyeon thought he had sent it, since she had previously approached him about a relationship which he turned down. This immediately outs Seil as suspicious to him.

Also, despite Hyesung surviving, outside events play out in a similar fashion, though it's a bit odd how S_Seungyeon is (or rather isn't) dealt with, which perhaps signals that they weren't really as big a deal as we thought they were. The thing is, the online discourse on Phater eventually changes from S_Seungyeon's trolling to Seil being Inha's stalker, and we know this happens regardless of whether S_Seungyeon is dealt with since Seil being a stalker also shows up in the extended mandatory bad ending as well when Do-yoon is mostly in a fugue state and not doing anything.

But while our assumption in the bad ending is that S_Seungyeon is still yammering away in addition to the Seil is a stalker conversation, it turns out that after the topic of Seil being suspicious comes out, S_Seungyeon nopes out of the online discourse and starts deleting all their posts. Though there's no explanation for this (other than Phater peeps suggesting Seil and S_Seungyeon are the same, which we know is not true), it's likely that once people started suspecting S_Seungyeon was a staffer, the actual former staffer running the account got spooked and decided to pull out while he was ahead. Which sadly means that despite the fact S-Seungyeon was treated as a major obstacle in the main timeline, they actually could have just ignored the troll and everything would have resolved on its own, which is kind of disappointing.

Notably, Do-yoon ignores PlugHole in this route, so there's none of this outside pressure to get to the bottom of S_Seungyeon's identity, and without PlugHole's assistance/interference the survivors likely would not have had any way to deal with S_Seungyeon other than ignoring them anyway.

But the fallout of S_Seungyeon leaving Phater is handled a little differently on this route, Whereas in the main timeline this makes everyone uncomfortable, because they no longer have a primary murder suspect, that doesn't happen in this one because Seil has inadvertently outed himself as a liar just before the stalking photos show up on Phater. Though people aren't looking at this as a murder since Hyesung lives, they know that one of their group attacked him and Seil is looking like the shadiest guy in the room.

The ganging up on Seil starts to play out similarly to previous confrontations with Inha grabbing his bag and all the seemingly incriminating stuff falling out, but this time before Seil can run off (which he might not have done because he no longer has to fear a murderer is out to kill him), Hyesung stirs. He doesn't fully wake up, but he moves a little, which gives Seil some hope because if Hyesung is awake he can clear him of blame (at least of being his assailant, I don't know if he'd be able to repair his reputation over all the other stuff). I had never seen Seil so interested in Hyesung's well-being before, though it's likely more because he needs an alibi rather than because he's glad Hyesung is alive. Do-yoon actually has to drag Seil off of Hyesung to avoid making his condition worse by trying to shake him to consciousness.

While going through this part of the story I was thinking, Seil's self-persecution complex combined with being a terrible liar who lies regardless, is why it's so easy to make people not want to believe in him. It's like he intentionally makes it harder for everyone to trust him.

And Do-yoon actually takes him aside this time, back to the dressing room, so they can talk privately when it becomes apparent that Seil is too wound up to say anything meaningful. This private conversation is actually pretty good, because it sheds some light on why Seil hid the truth about his activities even though they painted him in such a bad light (i.e. making him look like a stalker).

We learn about how he asked if he could work for Seungyeon after she unexpectedly comforted him after he failed the Bstars preliminary. Seil loves music, and we know this from an earlier flashback. Seungyeon commiserated and explains that's why she works behind the scenes instead of as a performer. Seil realized that he wanted to do that too and stay involved with the industry. In fact, he reveals he knows about Do-yoon's offer from Seungyeon (to leave his band and continue with the show) and compares it to his own situation as something you just have to do to get where you want to go.

Even though he eventually hated working for Seungyeon, he also knew he only got into the industry through her, so he didn't feel he could refuse any of her instructions, which is how he ended up doing grunt work like shadowing show participants for dirt. He also didn't want to reveal what he'd done because more than the hatred of the show's performers, what he feared most was being kicked out of the industry and losing his career. Now that Seungyeon's dead, he's acutely aware that if the corporate office is looking for a scapegoat for any kind of trouble, it's going to be him.

It doesn't necessarily shine a new light on Seil, who is still extremely prickly, but at least it explains much of his behavior and makes his viewpoint more understandable. And after some prodding from Do-yoon, he comes to realize and accept that even though he blamed much of his lot on Seungyeon, it's an arrangement he accepted voluntarily by asking to work under her (and presumably because he stayed under her instead of leaving and getting another job). Once he accepts that, Do-yoon calls everyone from the stage to the dressing room so Seil can explain his actions in person.

But only Inha and Juyoung arrive. Gyu-hyuk supposedly stayed to watch over Hyesung (though a part of me wondered if he was going to try finishing the job and finding an alibi everyone would believe when they came back). Seil agrees to share the contents of his bag and I really wanted to know what was in that dead tablet he's carrying around because it's dead and has been used multiple times now to startle people into thinking he really did have a connection to the outside world. Alas, Gyu-hyuk calls asking Do-yoon to come to the stage alone so they can talk privately.

The message sounds urgent, so Do-yoon heads out immediately while everyone else goes over Seil's things, and when Do-yoon finds the stage more or less empty, it's not much of a stretch to figure out that Gyu-hyuk has decided to commit suicide, and sure enough, he's hung himself. Do-yoon finds that he's left a note with a final request for him, but he tears it up and we never get to see what it said. However, knowing what we do from the main route of the story, it probably was a confession that he was the one who attacked Hyesung and a request for Do-yoon to share that fact with the world.

But Do-yoon does not, and simply says that Gyu-hyuk left no note. When they're rescued, Gyu-hyuk's death is attributed to stress from the stifling environment, and Hyesung's injury is attributed to the accident, which he initially goes along with after waking up. Everyone gets their epilogues, with Juyoung and Inha's being repeats that I'd seen before, but I like Seil's. I wish it had been built up better, but I think I got a premature normal ending so it might have played out better if I'd gotten all his rapport events. Basically, Seil has decided to seize life by the reins again and plans to enter Bstars Season 5 as a contestant. Of course this is a big deal since he tried before, then became a staff member, and is now auditioning again, which is causing a lot of gossip. Do-yoon even expresses doubts in the epilogue narration about whether or not this is a good thing, but I think it is. Seil actually looks happy and comfortable for the first time the entire game.

The final part of the epilogue is Hyesung visiting Do-yoon in the hospital (for some reason the guy is always laid up longer than anybody else post-rescue, even if he wasn't badly hurt). Hyesung is having difficulty getting signed by any agencies now that he no longer has Seungyeon to back him up, and he often hangs out with Do-yoon under the impression they're birds of a feather due to their damaged stage personas. In true Hyesung fashion, he tells Do-yoon that he plans on grabbing some media attention after WBS dumped him, and it's not hard to guess that he's going to reveal that Gyu-hyuk attacked him. Do-yoon picks up on that, and Hyesung in turn realizes Do-yoon knows something too, but just shrugs it off. He's gonna do what he thinks he's gotta do.

While I'm glad Hyesung lived, he's still an idiot and it seems despite surviving a murder attempt that only happened because he tried to blackmail someone he hasn't learned any kind of lesson. Or maybe he feels it's fine since Gyu-hyuk is dead now.

Anyway, I'm at the point I really want to wrap up this game and start a new one, so it's back to the walkthrough to try carefully playing to the final/best ending of this particular game route.

[Rune Lai]

Well, apparently the ending I got where Gyu-hyuk kills himself when left alone with Hyesung is the canon ending of Route B (aka the Hyesung lives route). That's disappointing, since it feels so incomplete. I think these post-game routes aren't really meant to be full fledged alternate ways things could have played out, but more of a what if and to allow a little more exploration of characters like Hyesung and Seil who get short changed by the main story. (I wondered if Inha's story would be covered in the last route, but after checking a more thorough walkthrough it looks like her rapport events are in the main route but I probably missed unlocking them for reasons similar to Hyesung; overlooking necessary profile unlocks on a later playthrough due to a lack of friendship/sanity improvements.)

Since I didn't get to do Seil's rapport events (since the guy is so easy to piss off) on my last playthrough, I replayed Route B, but I really needed a walkthrough (in fact I had to find a more detailed one than the one I was previously using) due to the fact it's not enough to have full trust with Seil and unlock all the necessary profile details. You also have to question him in just the right away in the final 1-on-1 conversation with him.

The final conversation has something like six starting clue cards for discussion, and if you pick something he doesn't like, he'll talk about it, but will pale or otherwise give a bad reaction to the topic while the game warns you about pushing him the wrong way. I was fairly certain I would get a bad ending if I didn't keep the topics relevant to whatever we last discussed, and I successfully got one of his rapports on my own, but I needed the detailed walkthrough to get the other three because he's so darn prickly.

If you complete Seil's rapport events though, he comes clean about being the blackmailer and says he's going to confess to the police, which is unexpected of him because some of what he did under Seungyeon was illegal. And he puts on a pretty brave face about it.

Which the game undercuts with the police not really caring, telling him it was a victimless crime, and to go home. So Seil ends up feeling awful about not being able to pay for his crimes and ends up posting his sins on Phater where people will surely crucify him.

It felt terrible and did nothing to fix his persecution complex or show any growth as a character. I much prefer his normal ending where he goes back to performing. Having him realize how much he still cared about the industry and that being the reason he stuck with Seungyeon even though he didn't like working for her, was the the moment when Seil shone the brightest, and he deserved a better ending. (Though he still aggravates me the rest of the game.)

I'm not sure I'll go back to clean up the rest of the game, but I wanted to at least finish off Route C, the final one, so I went back and pissed most of the group off by bringing up the fact the stage used to be home to a laboratory. Apparently, though this seems to have been lost in translation somewhere, since everyone talks about the topic like it was already discussed, people went missing or died in this laboratory, which is why some of the group dislikes Do-yoon bringing it up. They've got a serious situation here and Do-yoon is bringing up urban rumors.

But after talking about it enough, the story just flat out changes tone when Hyesung would normally storm off. Inha seemingly vanishes. Like, she was here a second ago and no one can find her. So the group leaves the stage, looks through the hallway, the bathroom, the dressing room, and the staff corridor (all the non-stage areas they can visit in the game), and not only do they not find her, but Juyoung vanishes as well. Everyone starts panicking and splits up to look for the missing women, and I just started laughing while Hyesung was panicking (since he's clearly the kind of person who doesn't want to believe in spooky stuff but is very bothered by it).

Surprisingly, or no, everyone else makes it back together and the four guys decide they'll keep looking for the women and try to reassure the nervous Hyesung that there are still places to hide. No one can give Hyesung an answer for what they're going to do if they don't find them.

I was mostly enjoying this as a silly joke route, at least until the four collectively search the dressing room. Gyu-hyuk moves to check something so his back is to Do-yoon, and then Do-yoon sees something, like a scaly hand reaching down from above for Gyu-hyuk's shoulder. Do-yoon is startled, but doesn't know exactly what he saw and realized that Seil and Hyesung didn't see anything. Gyu-hyuk, without turning around, begins to ask if Do-yoon saw something, but Do-yoon passes out.

I was mildly expecting a "this was all a dream" moment because the atmosphere when he wakes up is a lot lighter. Gyu-hyuk seems fine, and Seil has gone off to look for the woman, but then Hyesung asks Do-yoon what he saw before passing out, only Do-yoon can't recall what it was. And this bothered me, because I don't actually like horror games, and while it's funny that they seem to have stumbled into the wrong genre of visual novel, I would prefer not to be scared at the same time.

Since the game has been fully willing to play with the camera, sound effects, and use black screens for effect, it has been pretty good at cultivating a creepy atmosphere in the main storyline without adding elements of the supernatural. Now that they were in play, I ended up playing the rest of the route with two-third of the screen covered (most of the time, unless text was moved to the center of the screen for effect).

In a nutshell, the whole game just goes sideways and like an Asian horror flick you don't know exactly what happened other than it was weird and definitely creepy. People on Phater talk about dismembering and killing people. Do-yoon passes out again and gets separated from everyone. Gyu-hyuk reappears, only Do-yoon figures out that it's some other entity and not Gyu-hyuk. Bloody handprints end up everywhere. Seungyeon's body is no longer where it was, and it's suggested she wants to meet Do-yoon. Do-yoon wakes up in a hospital room and thinks he was in a nightmare after being the only survivor of a collapse that killed six other people. And while wandering around the hospital he hears that all seven people trapped in the collapsed had died after committing suicide.

And that's it.

I think because there was a pharmaceutical lab and Hyesung smelled gas, the suggestion is that all of this is a crazy hallucination.

Anyway, I've been disappointed by Route B and C, and while B was kind of nice for the extra backstory with Hyesung and Seil, it didn't feel like it added much given the rushed nature of their Rapport events, with them all being crowded together.

Overall, I feel like Buried Stars had a lot of things the team wanted to do going in, but as development time passed and the project evolved, certain possibilities were dropped and the result is the rushed Rapports for the characters who die in the main Route A, Route B is much shorter than Route A, and that every segment of the story concludes with the ranking and votes of the surviving contestants even after it's plainly irrelevant to what's actually happening.

I'll give them credit that making a sympathetic killer and having most of the cast fear a murderer that wasn't interested in killing them at all was pretty neat and not what I would have expected based on the premise of the story, and I really liked the critical examination of the k-pop industry and how its talent is manufactured, but they probably could have saved some dev time by cutting Routes B and C and used it to clean up Route A (maybe weave in Seil and Hyesung's rapports there) and clean up the common UI, like maybe removing the ranking screen after S_Seungyeon is dealt with.