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.