Needy Girl Overdose - Double-bottomed Japaneseness

At first glance, Needy Girl Overdose seems to be a cross between a badass Japanese hackie flick and the bottom of the indie game industry. And indeed, what could be more luscious than a pixel-art streamer simulator from a Japanese developer? It's hard to think of a sillier, uninspired simulator...

...But opinion changes with the context of what's going on. You're not watching a silly but attractive courtesan on Twitch, but a clinically mentally ill man... a silly but attractive schizoid.

The Nature of Mental Illness

Needy Girl Overdose was the work of the WSS playground team. One of the developers had not quite trivial knowledge about life - about the nature of mental illness, symptoms, development and the final stages of insanity and loss of connection with the real world. Whether the game was created to reveal the psychotherapeutic abilities of its creators or so the cards were laid is unknown.

Needy Girl Overdose centers around a girl named Ami, who has a naive, childishly ridiculous dream: 1000000 subscribers on a streaming platform. Ami is a typical gyaru, a doting chick with the wind in her head. Unlike many Japanese titles, where stupidity for a woman is not a sentence, the world behind the scenes in Needy Girl Overdose has not spared the protagonist. This is not a story about fantastic superpowers or meeting a dream kun. Needy Girl Overdose is a story about those things that it's not customary to stutter about in mainstream culture.

Needy Girl Overdose greets us with an Ami computer loading screen, a parody of Windows 2000. Through a pre-modern interface where all the shortcuts on the desktop are gaming activities:

Ami is a teenager without a view of life, but with quite serious problems. Already at the beginning of the game, she receives an e-mail asking her to pay off her rent arrears. Ami can't find a normal job, she has no experience, no education, and not even the desire to learn something new. Already at first, the player is given to understand that Ami is on the edge. There's no question of any feigned depression: the girl smiles, tries to attract attention, but inside she is falling apart and cannot even express in words the depth of the mental hole she is wallowing in.

The young streamer couldn't think of anything better to do than spend every night behind the webcam as Kawai Angel, short for K-Angel.

The idea of the image is not much more intricate than its creator. K-Angel comes to the streaming platforms to bring light and positivity...except it's all lies and narcissism. Ami wants attention and money, and deep down she despises her audience, calling them nerds and losers behind their backs. Low-paying jobs and worldly problems have not made a girl a stoic, but have turned her into a lovable monster with no moral compass. But until the goal is reached, Ami struggles to put on a smile and squeeze out goodwill.

And the longer the session in Needy Girl Overdose goes on, the more the streamer's simulation resembles that of a fallen marginalized person. Ami's behavior becomes more and more deformed with each passing day, subject to her first emotional impulses. By leaps and bounds, the girl's actions become more and more provocative. It begins with debts and vague prospects for the future, continues taking medications not as prescribed, and ends...in different ways. Needy Girl Overdose has 22 endings and only two positive ones, but how do you get to them?

The knife is already lifted up behind the back

Ami is completely helpless, so she trusts the player her entire career. In her slang, he will affectionately appear as "P-chan. We don't know the gender of the player, but the role is already arranged for us - we'll become Ami's lover/lover and part-time producer.

The game imitates life in social networks, so all communication with Ami will take place via messenger, and the main task will be to guide a young mediocrity to stardom. Needy Girl Overdose gameplay is a kind of Tamagotchi, but with a lot of variables. The main characteristics are four: subscribers - a measure of in-game experience; stress - this is Ami's burnout and endurance, if the stress reaches 100, the girl, like a fidgety child, will abandon the player and her dream; attachment - responsible for the attitude to P-chan and obedience girl; and mental health - Ami is mentally ill, so bring the scale to a maximum fraught with meeting with the inner demons.

Needy Girl Overdose has three phases of the day: morning, afternoon, and night. In the daytime it is important to pay attention to the girl and come up with ideas for future streamers, take a walk, or spend your leisure time playing video games. In the daytime you need to solve pressing problems, and at night you need to stream. Streaming topics can range from innocent conversation to erotic - it all depends on the "Attachment" and "Mental Health" characteristics.

Once you get a girl to confess, you can and should manipulate her. Ami will do anything you don't tell her. You can even send her on a date with a total stranger on the local equivalent of Tinder. This will reduce the "Stress" somewhat, but it will reduce the "Attachment".

Most of the time I have to do simple tasks: moderate the streamer's chat room and prevent Ami from bullying. Over time, the streamer will begin to behave more and more provocatively, causing a wave of outrage in the chat room...all for the views. Ami knows she's good looking and will go to any lengths to get a million subscribers. It's not her dream that motivates her, it's the banal hunger and blackness of life.

She posts everything from a trivial walk to her impressions after having sex with P-chan on her Twitter account, and everything flows into her social network. At a certain point, K-Angel's channel gains weight and monetization, and this is where Ami's rotten nature can surface. If the player only cared about the girl's well-being, he would only get a ban in gratitude. Well, what did you think? A fairy tale? Women...

If you lead a girl down a slippery slope, she will become addicted to substances. So addicted that she falls out of reality into a hallucinogenic trip. As in life, it all starts with some cough medicine...

...continues:

...and ends up completely out of touch with reality.

There are many paths to degradation. Surprisingly, Needy Girl Overdose turned out to be an exorbitantly difficult game, it's very easy to make a mistake. So complex, in fact, that it's impossible to pass the game for the true ending without a guide. As long as you perceive the game as an inhumane social experiment, Needy Girl Overdose is fascinating.

But worth spending a little more than a couple of hours on the game, you notice the sparse content. All events seem to obey a strict script, which prevents the player from juggling cause and effect relationships.

Is it worth it?

Needy Girl Overdose, despite its controversial concept, is able to attract the attention of the pretentious gamer. The game has an original idea and sometimes frightening, sometimes sad message. Needy Girl Overdose is one of those games that leave a trail in your soul, but the experience depends only on your empathy for the main character - Ami. If the player understands the drama of this fictional person and thinks about what depression truly looks like, they can draw non-obvious parallels to the tragic fates of Chester Bennington and Kurt Cobain. And if Ami initially provokes disgust, we suggest returning the money and not waiting for the game to unfold.