Isekai

NOTE: this review will briefly talk about some sexual stuff (nothing explicit) and is probably not minor- or work-friendly. Also, I talk a bit about identity horror. Also, untagged spoilers I guess?

I generally have very little interest in the isekai genre. I played a couple of games where the protagonist is whisked away from their world and then placed in another, and they all kind of blended together. Many times the world was the same generic fantasy, or a protagonist was the blandest character possible and yet still was the object of everyone's oddly quickly found affections, or they were Gods' Speciallest Boy instantly upon arrival, and I guess none of that is for me.

But I still played Isekai by dott. Piergiorgio when it was first released I believe, back in 2025. Why? I can't remember. What I do remember is that it intrigued me for reasons I can't entirely articulate (I'll try to articulate them in this review; no promises though). Back then, my save file corrupted and I left the game without winning it, only having scratched the surface of available playable content. I just finished my second playthrough, which I won, so while some of my thoughts from the first playthrough had some time to mature, others are still kinda fresh. Unfortunately, for some reason I wasn't allowed to make a save or even start a transcript, as I was getting persistent errors, which I assume could be my fault somehow. I also accidentally closed the interpreter so I unfortunately won't provide you with any quotes. Please just trust me. Thank you.

So, what is Isekai all about? You play as an unnamed human man who awakens to a strange world in the body of an elf woman. Your task? Figure out who that elf is and what is this place. As time passes and your exploration progresses, you learn more about the world and the elf whose body you inhabit. Standard stuff in the "I woke up as someone else in a different world???" genre of isekai.

Some technical things before I get into other stuff. This is a "preview" version of the game and I don't know if it means it's a demo or a beta version of some kind or whatever. Either way, some parts of the game seem to be a little out of order sometimes — for example, text sometimes referred to a bodice which I already took off, or mused about whether or not the elf main character is married to the angel and demon characters long after I discovered that this is the case. I will take the most charitable route and will assume this is something which is meant to be polished in later iterations. I will also not comment on the quality of the prose because I'm sure most of this is a result of English not being the author's first language, and I don't want to pick on that, especially since the author himself requested to not do this in the past. I have to say that some descriptions are hard to follow and my eyes were glazing over them, but this could also be due to the fact that they were long and I had to play the whole game in one sitting due to saves not working. Oh well. Additionally, the narration switches often between "I" and "you", though I'm not entirely sure if it's a bug or a feature, as I'll explain later. I will also refrain from musing about whether or not this work exists to satisfy any particular fetish because if it doesn't, then I'm putting someone in a very weird position, and if it does, then it's literally not my business, good for the author.

(You CAN touch yourself in-game, literally and figuratively, which in addition to some other clearly sexually charged scenes leads me to believe that I might be doing something wrong by excluding the sexual angle, but I really don't want to dissect someone else's sexuality like this. I think it's kinda gross. The author doesn't tag it as "pornography" or anything either, which is yet another reason why I'm not touching on that angle.)

So, we wake up in the body of Etuye Alasne, an elf woman blessed with a pair of large breasts (the game doesn't let you forget about it, and it's even partially relevant at one point when we have to retrieve an amulet from between them) and two wives — an angel named Miyai and a demon called Azuj. (Their real names are much longer but let's keep it like this for the sake of clarity. I don't even mention them again anyway). The wives are out of the house for some reason, but that's fine since it gives us time to explore and find out more about our isekai'd self and the world around us.

I have to say, the world is... interesting, in several ways. This is a world of elves, angels, demons, and dragons. There are mages and warriors, and most stuff you'd expect from a fantasy world. Magic is an art similar to science, measurable and provable, which I usually like. There are some worldbuilding choices which were very fun for me, like elves having six fingers on each hand (the sixth finger being another thumb) and or being able to see temperature, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out how they came back in smaller details later (thermal paint announcing whose house we're in being warm to the sight since we're at a married throuple's house, a base-12 counting system being used instead of a base-10).

Another intriguing part is the strange dissonance happening around things which our world would consider, to one degree or another, taboo, or at least unsavory or unsightly in some way. Urination and defecation, for example, aren't something that is confined to an enclosed bathroom stall, but rather, is something done in an open room where others can watch. Adults can breastfeed each other, which is entirely non-sexual in nature (the text makes sure you know that. It's actually kind of heavy-handed about it). Nakedness is not a cause for embarrassment, just another part of life, and sexual acts are freely represented in the literature. I don't think I'd really think "Wow, they piss in front of each other? How weird and shameless!" because one: urinals exist, two: humanity's been publicly relieving itself even back in Ancient Rome in public latrines which provided no privacy whatsoever. I would also believe that nakedness isn't anything taboo, considering many indigenous cultures around the world have no problem with it. Breastfeeding, perhaps that'd raise my brow, but I could imagine a world where it's nothing but a bonding activity, an entirely asexual show of one's care for the other. But the text is adamant on reminding us at every step about how completely normal and non-sexual all of this is, in turn drawing attention to how not normal and sexual it would be in our world, creating a bit of an uncomfortable space. It's the "don't think about an elephant" phenomenon — of course you're going to think about an elephant now! If we're constantly reminded about how strange and unusual a thing is, it doesn't matter how often we reiterate it's actually fine and normal.

It made me think that this game exists in several liminal spaces. There's a space between the unnamed male protagonist and Etuye Alasne. There's a space between "our world" and the world of Railei. There's a space between shameless nakedness and a reminder that we should be ashamed of it. This is what makes Isekai so intriguing to me, and this is why I wanted to write about it for a long time. This is, also, what makes writing about Isekai hard for me. Because the problem is: how much of it is the dissonance of the author and how much of it is the dissonance of the main character?

The Nameless Man (who we'll call Sailor from now on, since that's his profession) and Etuye are, as the game reveals, the same person, separated by thousands of years. Reincarnation is real in the Materia of Railei-verse, and the Sailor is simply a far younger version of Etuye from the distant past. Over the course of the game, Sailor slowly grows into Etuye's body and mindset, so to speak, but he still starts from the perspective of someone from Earth. Of course, I could read it from the "author just writes what he thinks is hot but is afraid to commit so he says it's not sexual" angle, but I think there's another angle which makes it more interesting for me, which is identity horror, which I love. Do I think it was intended? No, but this is my review, go write your own if you don't like it.

Because think about it for a moment: you wake up in a body that isn't yours, in a world that's not yours, filled with customs which are entirely foreign to you. You are a man trapped in a woman's body, literally, and by gods, there are now two blobs of flesh and fat that jiggle on your chest as you walk, do you even know how massive breasts can seem when you're not supposed to have them, how weirdly conscious you can be of their every move? And the time passes, and you remain nameless as memories of someone else enter your head as if they were your own (because they ARE your own!), and things which you'd never think about become intuitive. Someone else looks at you from the mirror and it's their name you think about as you think about your own name. You read about yourself in a diary written in someone else's hand, with your name rendered in unsure shaky strokes, and you two are one and the same, and you two are separate, and both are true at the same time. All that is natural to Raileian Etuye is strange to Earthen Sailor, and the dissonance comes from their two mindsets melting together as Sailor slowly fades away into his older form. Is Etuye somewhere on Earth with her hand sliding across her uncomfortably flat chest? Is she plagued with a vague feeling that public defecation, which is a completely normal thing, is actually strange and gross?

It's... challenging to try and practice the "death of the author" mentality in a space where the author is very much alive and will tell you where your interpretation sucks, but that doesn't stop me from trying. Isekai is a strange experience, one which I enjoyed in some perverse (Meaning: obstinate in opposing what is right, reasonable, or accepted, not inputting commands with one hand) manner and even found somewhat inspiring due to its strangeness. Recommending it to someone would probably be going a little too far, especially in its current state, but I am waiting to see where a more full version goes, once it releases. I don't know. This is definitely a game which exists, and I'm glad it does, actually.

This review is for the preview version submitted to the 2026 Review-a-thon. I’m going to assume people reading this won’t mind spoilers.

As a player, I don’t usually have a lot of patience for long descriptions and am not especially drawn to world building, and Isekai is packed with both of those things—yet in the end I largely enjoyed it. For 2+ hours I got sucked into the world and the story, despite some uneven elements and rough edges. With some careful editing, I think this could be a really compelling, dare I say wholesome game.

I haven’t played the previous games in this series, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I spent a long time in the first room, looking at everything. And there is a lot to look at in this game (“Which do you mean, (1) the aqua girl’s eyes, (2) the aqua girl’s face, (3) the aqua dress, (4) the aqua girl’s ears, (5) the girl in aqua, or (6) the aqua girl’s hair?”). I almost got overwhelmed. Then I realized looking at things is the main mechanic of this game, even more than in the average parser game, which actually makes a lot of sense in a story about waking up in someone else’s body in a strange world. Ludonarrative consonance! Anyway, whenever I got tired of reading descriptions (again, this is a me thing), I could skim them and get the idea. The important things were clear enough. The italic suggestions that sometimes showed up at the bottom of a description helped move things along.

The thing I thought was particularly strong was the pacing. There was a whole series of revelations along the way, doled out at regular intervals, which kept me interested in exploring to learn more. Up front you realize you’re in a woman’s body, of course. Then you realize you’re an elf, a specific elf, a specific elf with two wives, and you all have magical abilities. The dominos are set up for the explosive final realization (which I’ll get back to later). And I thought the finale really delivered, with revelations every step of the way as I left the library and walked to the landing pad to meet up with my spouses.

Sci-fi/fantasy is not usually my favorite (it’s probably the world-building thing), but when it's truly transportive it can feel therapeutic, and there’s something comforting about spending time in a world that doesn’t have all the obstacles and injustices that we have. This game’s many world-building details made me think about our own society, and how a different life is possible. What if different species lived together in harmony? Wouldn’t it be nice to not worry overmuch about a wardrobe malfunction? How would life be different if people weren’t concerned with using the toilet in front of each other? I’m not sure I’d ever given that last one much thought in the past, but now I have.

I also enjoyed the gameplay elements that weren’t just about looking at things. The puzzly moments where you have to read documents in order of complexity in order to get better at reading the language—the diplomas in particular—were a good example of melding gameplay with storytelling to make the experience more immersive.

The main thing that made the game less cohesive for me, I think, was the portrayal of the player character. Throughout most of the game, I couldn’t tell if the PC, aka the person who got isekai’d in the intro, was supposed to be a specific character with his own personality or a generic PC who anyone could project themselves onto. His characterization seemed founded on being 1) curious about this strange world, 2) fascinated by women’s bodies, and 3) unusually knowledgeable about math and astronomy. But since we didn’t get any concrete background details about him (e.g. name, occupation, what year he’s from, where he was before this happened), it felt less like he was a specific character, and more like an everyman speaking with the author’s voice.

Either way, the PC’s point of view became jarring to me because of the stereotypes and objectification peppered throughout the narration. Nothing I saw was overtly negative (the game is open about being accepting of differences), but there were multiple mentions of the “feminine knack” for improving one’s appearance, for example, and I can confidently say we don’t all have that knack. The mystery and beauty of the PC’s body is emphasized (“You feel more connected to this charming, gorgeous and exotic elfin body”), with far more attention paid to her large bosom than her six-fingered hands, for example. It feels like being a woman and being an elf are treated as equally shocking, which won’t be the case for all readers. Moments like that broke the immersion for me. I can picture a version of this game where we get clearer personality details about the PC that explain why he would be especially concerned with her ample bosom. I also can picture a more adult version of this game where the anatomical differences are an even bigger part of the allure. I found it perplexing how this game walked a line in between those two possibilities.

So that was my thinking for most of the game, and then came the late revelation that the main character has been Etuye all along, and her soulmancy was so effective that she got stuck believing she was someone else. This was an extremely cool moment! (It also helps explain why this guy can calculate astronomical positions and convert decimal to duodecimal in his head.) This realization made me wish even more that the game had teased more of the past-life PC’s background, so that the reveal would be even more of an aha moment. The intro could be a good place for this, since it was uncharacteristically brief.

Speaking of which, my other main wish would be to make everything shorter. I enjoyed “looking at things” as a mechanic, but it got tiring, and most of the descriptions could convey the same thing in half as many words. Just as an example, here’s a snippet from the game:

“You’re surprised at the ease of actually donning for the first time a tight, form-fitting culotte around your legs and hips, pulling them up to fit it around your waist with elegant, gracious and agile hip and finger movement, leavingneither wrinkles nor creases, like you have always elegantly and graciously donned female form-fitting garments, with that feminine knack for excellent appareance.”

Compare that with something like this:

“You don the form-fitting culottes, pulling them over your legs and hips to fit smoothly around your waist with surprising agility, as if you’ve always worn garments like this.”

Word count is an artistic choice, of course, and many people like lengthy descriptions. However, for a general audience, I do think cutting back on words would make the game more approachable. A diligent copyedit would also make the game read more smoothly—there weren’t too many confusing parts, but the volume of typos did slow me down a bit.

So, overall, this game is promising and I would totally read more of this story (though I think this segment could totally stand alone as its own installment). I enjoyed the journey of discovery the game took me on, and the story is threaded through with heart and optimism, as well as world-building that even I could appreciate. In an ideal world, I would like to be able to identify with the protagonist more—or else see more clearly why they are the way they are, without giving away the central conceit—though perhaps I’ll have to wait until the next chapter.

(No star rating since this is just a write-up of the preview)

Exactly at the midpoint of my combined ParserComp/Review-a-Thon list, Isekai loomed, both enticing and dreadful. I’ve already played and reviewed several games related to the author’s magnum opus, most notably The Portrait, which is the very opening sequence of this deep and broad fantasy parser game, and First Contact, which is a choice-based prequel providing some background on the game’s world and the married trio of elf, demon, and angel who appear to take center stage in Isekai. I think it’s fair to say that while there are elements of both games that I enjoyed, like the depth of implementation and the author’s enthusiasm for the world and the characters, there are also many that game me pause – the prose in both was often prolix, with some infelicities that are attributable to English not being the author’s first language, and some that are not, for one thing. For another, those earlier games often treated fairly ho-hum fantasy tropes, like devils and angels being people rather than supernatural incarnations of pure evil or pure good, as revelations, and fairly ho-hum plot developments like a man being mystically transported into a woman’s body, or the existence of queer throuples, as meriting repeated all-caps exclamations of incredulity. And the elephant in the room is their treatment of sexuality, which simultaneously attacls prudery, insisting that residents of this plane are too enlightened to find nudity or, er, breast-feeding inherently sexual, while spending a lot of word count drawing attention to the bounteous, barely-concealed bosoms of the super-hot main characters.

But both The Portrait and First Contact clearly presented themselves as subsidiary works. This slice of Isekai isn’t the complete package – per the author’s note, it’s only about the first fifth of the game – but it is nonetheless the main event, the prime reason for all the worldbuilding and character work foregrounded in the other games. So I was curious to see how this would all work in that intended complex, as well as to see what the gameplay undergirding all this looks like.

Well, Isekai both is and isn’t what I was expecting. Having played the Portrait, I wasn’t surprised to see the level of detail in the game’s implementation of an elvish wizard’s house; while there are some notes saying particular areas or items are works in progress or placeholders, every conceivable item of scenery can be examined or, where appropriate, interacted with, and there’s practically a fractal zoom available, as looking at any particular item often leads to two or three more sub-parts that can likewise be studied. There are plenty of books providing lore infodumps, about two dozen rooms and hallways that make up the mansion, and a solid view of the outside provides plenty of opportunity to learn about your environs in detail.

The flip side of this is that Isekai is also a game with a large number of words, and relatively slow pacing – I suppose I didn’t have to check out as many incidental details as I did, but since the gameplay in this section is purely explorative, it would have felt odd to cut it short. While the prose is still often a bit iffy, with plenty of typos and missing spaces, and does run on a bit, I did find this aspect worked better than in the Portrait or First Contact. Beyond the writing just being overall more polished, in the former, all you had to do was examine every single piece of an obsessively-detailed painting, and the latter had a lot of relatively clumsy infodumps of deep background. Here, you’re getting snippets of detail in response to moving around the house and trying to resolve discrete questions or handle minor inconveniences, and the additional agency – and the dialing-back of implementation depth after that initial, scarily-involved painting – makes it go down easier.

I felt similarly about the sexy bits. Isekai still risibly tries to have its cake and it eat too, emphasizing that the elf babe whose body you’re inhabiting is totally uninhibited and doesn’t find nudity sexual, but having practically the first bit of business that happens to you be a bit of burlesque farce that sees your bodice cut open and your skirts falling down (and for all that you’re not meant to be squeamish about your body, you’re awfully embarrassed by the sheets showing evidence of menstruation). Boobs are less of a focus than they were in the lactation-rama of First Contact or in the Portrait, where the gameplay entirely consists of ogling a picture of three well-endowed ladies, but the game still elicited more than a few eye rolls (like, one of the few books fully implemented in the library is a gynecology textbook).

All of the above is pretty much just a rehash of those earlier reviews, though, even if the particular valence of specific critiques shifts in this different context. I had two new reactions to Isekai proper, though. The first of these is that there is actual stuff for the player to do here, and I thought it was actually fairly mechanically engaging. I haven’t directly stated the premise, but the idea here, per the title, is that you’re a modern male human who has a bad dream and suddenly wakes up inside the body of the afore-discussed elf lady. And so this slice of the game is about trying to understand your new circumstances and surroundings, with regular prompts of italicized text pointing you towards the next revelation. Having played the author’s other games, I can’t say that the new information itself was all that interesting, since I’d already come across it before – though even then, it feels like the game makes a way bigger deal of elves having six fingers than that deserves – but the process of uncovering it feels pleasingly deliberate. You learn this new world’s numeric system by finding a ruler, noting the symbols marked on it, and counting its markings, and you similarly develop your literacy by working your way up from simple comic books to YA novels (the game acknowledges this is unrealistic, pitching it as your brain just catching up with a language your body already knows). My favorite moment in this vein was when the main character – who was a sailor in his previous life – was able to identify that this world was in another part of the Milky Way by finding the Magellenic Clouds. None of this is especially difficult, so I wouldn’t call them puzzles per se, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the emphasis on the way learning new things is helping develop your capabilities and understanding lends some purpose to the infodumping.

The second thing has to do with the isekai-ness of Isekai. I’m not super familiar with this genre, but it’s a version of portal-fantasy centering on the possession of the body of a native of the fantasy world. There’s a lot of dramatic potential in the mismatch between a character’s previous understanding of their identity and circumstances, and how those things have changed in their new reality, and the game is constantly drawing foregrounding the protagonist’s awareness of these mismatches, especially as it pertains to gender and sexuality. There are easily a dozen times – probably more – when the game harps on the protagonist recognizing their situation:

"I realise that my thinking is more than mine, the thinking of Etuye of now. and I realise my being Etuye: Inside me, Inside my soul, I’m myself, I’M ETUYE."

The tone is almost invariably overwrought and incredulous:

"After this realisation, you fight really hard to banish from your mind the surreal mental picture of three females, a demon, an angel and an elf sharing together the same bed… albeit that mental picture gives you an unexpected warmth inside your chest and tender feelings of… love ??"

It can feel comedic, because again, has this guy never heard about trans people, or lesbians, or poly folks? It’d be one thing if what was going on was a conflict between the protagonist’s pre-existing personality and sense of himself, and the way they’re attempting to assimilate these changes. But the protagonist is almost completely uncharacterized; his previous gender is established, and we know his profession, but other than that he’s pretty much an AFGNCAAP.

Because there’s no real interiority to the characterization, no substantial engagement with the subjectivity that shapes the experiences and revelations the game depicts, some moments that are clearly meant to be profound land as comedy. “Can you imagine a man suddenly having a woman’s body??? Or an elf lady being married to a demon lady and an angel lady???” Well, yeah, of course I can imagine those things, repeating this stuff over and over just feels silly – I get it already. But imagining a particular character, who had a particular relationship to their previous, male, body, trying to figure out what that shift means for his understanding of himself – that’d be something different, and more interesting. The same is true on the relationship side: was he married? Happily or unhappily? Was he straight, or gay, or something else? How do those experiences shape his feelings about Etuye’s menage, as he realizes that he might soon be called about to inhabit it? In the absence of a characterized protagonist, there’s nothing for these questions to stick to, no central figure whose form is reshaped by these changes. And so they just float, abstract and insubstantial, with the game reliant on repetition and emphasis to try to sell their impact.

Maybe I’m wanting something from Isekai that the game isn’t interested in providing. But I don’t think so! In fact the whole structure seems to demand an actual character at its center. And that absence is a shame, because having played this substantial chunk of the full game, I do see its appeal – there’s definitely an idea here that could work, and a dedication to craft that could make for something truly unique (plus yes, the sexy stuff, which I repeat is kinda out there but I gotta admit is distinctive). But far more than tightening up the prose or speeding up the pacing, to be a success I think the final game really needs to figure out who the story is about. It could be that actually, it’s just about the elf lady and her adventures, which would be fine, if a bit conventional. If the game is going to emphasize the alienness of its premise, though, I think it needs to go a different direction, and create a protagonist who’s just as compelling as the natives of the fantasy world.