Kisaragi Station

The game caught my interest because it received a positive review and a few positive ratings on IFDB, but I couldn't enjoy it. The writing of this game is filled with "AI-isms". They are jarring, unpleasant, and difficult to read. The behavior of the forum posters is also unrealistic.

I will note that the author says no generative AI was used in the making of this game. I'm not interested in playing AI detective, since I consider it impossible and besides the point. (Although the No Dialogue jam does prohibit generative AI usage for its entries.) I'm not inherently opposed to AI writing, and I happen to have read a lot of it, but I am opposed to AI-isms, which make for bad writing whether it's written by a human or by an AI. Nowadays, anyone who publishes writing filled with AI-isms either is using generative AI, doesn't care if it looks like they're using generative AI, or is writing for a fancy institution like the New Yorker where they can get away with using em dashes and so on, and the third case doesn't apply here. It's a sign of carelessness, as far as I'm concerned.

The overuse of em dashes is the biggest AI-ism here. They're in the UI of the English website, they're in various posts by random posters, they're everywhere. One particularly annoying example is when the protagonist is interrupted halfway through typing a message: she sends a message ending in "Good. I think—" and then disappears forever. Why would she be able to add an em dash to the end of her message if she was interrupted in the middle of typing it? Even if she could hit send before whatever it was got to her, there's no reason for the em dash.

There's also a few "Not X, it's Y" AI-isms, such as in the description of the game: "the greatest threat isn't what's lurking in the dark—it's the realization that you might have already left the real world behind", and on the title screen: "You cannot save her. You can only stay."

Since the game takes place on a Japanese version of 4chan's paranormal board /x/, in an obscure thread from 2004, you could pretend that the original Japanese doesn't have these AI-isms and they're an artifact of, perhaps, the text being translated into English using generative AI. But that doesn't excuse all of them, and it doesn't actually make it less annoying to read.

As for the unrealistic behavior of the posters:

1 - Nobody ever doubts Hasumi. As far as I'm aware she never posts any photo or video proof, but somehow everyone takes her at face value. I think there should be at least one person who calls her a liar or roleplayer or says even anything to question the truth value of her statements whatsoever, but this never happens. Considering this is supposed to be Japanese 4chan (I've never been, but I imagine it's similar to English 4chan), everyone is shockingly, unrealistically polite and helpful. Compare real-life 4chan which eagerly tells people to mix bleach and ammonia to make pretty crystals.

2 - Hasumi herself is bizarre because, first of all, she's deanonymized on an anonymous message board where the entire point is to be anonymous. I know that on English 4chan (presumably Japanese 4chan also) you can deanonymize yourself on purpose and give yourself a consistent username, but I've only ever seen it used for roleplaying purposes by people who are running TTRPGs. The fact that nobody ever asks her about being deanonymized or questions it is, again, weird.

3 - Hasumi asks stupid questions and makes stupid choices, and yes, I know she's a horror protagonist, but come on. She asks the equivalent of "should I turn around and confront the scary monster that is chasing me or should I run faster? Should I go into this creepy serial killer's car? I dunno, it seem like a hard decision..." Also, (Spoiler - click to show)she leaves the train station even when every single person on the thread with the possible exception of yourself tells her not to, and this actually does turn out to be the right choice because she dies otherwise, but I didn't know that on my first playthrough and was seriously facepalming. Because how much of an idiot do you have to be to go into the scary dark station that is literally called Demon Station and wants to kill you? - and this makes it hard for me to sympathize with or care about what happens to her.

4 - The posts don't give off the vibe of being genuine English-language internet posts to me, and a large part of that is probably because they're translated from Japanese or meant to be, but it still makes them feel sterile. Some of the translated English posts do use capitalization for emphasis, which doesn't exist in Japanese, so why not go further? Why not add in more use of abbreviations, typos, grammatical quirks, runon sentences, people who type in all lowercase or uppercase, and just more variation in general? There isn't a single typo in the posts that I could find, which just contributed to the inorganic feeling.

Due to this, I really thought there would be a twist where the thread's posters were secretly against Hasumi and trying to kill her or something, or maybe Hasumi herself is secretly evil and she's in on it, but no. The central conflict of the game is mainly that the protagonist is really dumb.

Again, I'm not inherently opposed to AI writing, though I know many people are. If an AI produces or helps to produce a game that's indistinguishable from a good, 100% human-made game, I wouldn't be able to tell and I would enjoy it just like any other game. But "wouldn't be able to tell" is the key phrase here.