I woke up next to you again.

Waking up near the person you love is obviously a great feeling, but there are times when the person you find yourself next to is fairly unknown to you. Thus, sometimes you are put in the position to decide whether to pursue a relationship with them or just regard it as a one-night-stand. Thankfully, making such decisions in video games do not have any impact on your life.

I woke up next to you again. is an interactive visual novel about love, dating and psychological addiction, since it does go into some pretty dark stuff as the story progresses. You are free to make dialog choices that affect the story, and there are multiple endings you can reach, but the experience as a whole feels pretty much the same, regardless of how you decide to go through it.

To begin with, you are free to choose the gender of the person you wake up next to, although that does not seem to have too much of an impact on the plot. After that, your answers and queries can steer the story in one direction or the other, especially since you are even allowed to cut things short and decide to never see that person again.

It only takes a few minutes to go through the whole story once, and probably about half an hour to see all the four endings. However, the writing is pretty good, and you can tell that the game is also meant to be a tad psychological in certain regards. Thus, weird special effects and creepy behavior on behalf of the main character are just some of the elements that might make you uneasy.

Speaking of which, the graphics are entirely black & white, and the artwork is quite striking most of the time. The interesting special effects added on top create a weird atmosphere, although it must be mentioned that there are only a handful of CG backgrounds included in the game. The sound effects are not bad either, and the music goes very well with the events on the screen.

Even if it’s very short and somewhat unrefined, I woke up next to you again. still has the ability to stick with you for a while if you are at least somewhat familiar with the sentiments it tries to convey. Hence, it’s worth a shot from visual novel fans everywhere.