As people familiar with the channel may have gathered over the years, I’m not a particular fan of visual novels, most typically because they often lack a feeling of player agency. With that in mind, you could possibly argue that Bad End Theater would be my ideal narrative experience, since it’s essentially all about making choices. The challenge, aside from the fact that most people will burn through all of its possibilities in a scant few hours, is that for the most part each of the stories you’ll work through are ultimately so short.

The idea here is that you’re able to cultivate quick stories tied to your main character of choice, selecting between a hero, a maiden, an overlord, and an underling. Having chosen that character, you’ll then get pulled into their stories, getting to make a few decisions along the way, but they’ll pretty well all end badly in some way. Never fear though, with each new decision tree you follow to its inevitable conclusion with each character you’ll unlock the ability to construct new ones, making the experience more of a puzzle game in the end as you attempt to work your way through all potential eventualities.

Given the very specific focus, as a game I’d say it’s a hit-or-miss proposition, either something you’ll get sucked into or perhaps bored by. That isn’t to say the individual stories themselves, even as short as they may be, are lacking in quality though. Most of the time you’ll see how the same events will tend to be perceived differently by other characters, giving the experience a sometimes revealing quality, but often simply being weird or a bit funny too. The advantage of there being so many outcomes is that you’ll get a taste of just about everything along the way. Does that make it a home run? Probably not, given its short-lived runtime and very different approach to play, but that doesn’t mean the right people couldn’t find it diverting for a couple of hours either.