공포게임 메이드로 살아남기(How to Survive as a Maid in a Horror Game)

Description / Comments

The protagonist buys a kusoge horror game where the only redeeming factor is the “good art” that has a handsome ikemen as the protagonist, where you’re forced to constantly kill everybody else to sate the demon that possessed the protagonist or he’ll die. But she’s horribly drunk, shit at games, and fails over and over again. She eventually falls asleep after midnight after playing the game nonstop for hours, only to find herself waking up inside of the game she was playing as a maid in the manor.

I feel like the first 20 chapters or so are kind of ruined by trying to shove in tons of game/meme references to be “relatable”, yet the remaining 30 chapters of the first season have little to none of that present and is incredibly well done as a result. They’re almost completely distinct works from each other, where the latter half is an incredibly messy romance about a woman being blind to a pretty boy’s wrongdoings simply because he’s handsome and willing to do anything he asks as a result. Hell even reading random comments on chapters has tons of women acquiescing his proclivities simply because he’s attractive, which is pretty accurate to how murder convicts will regularly get tons of love letters/etc, doubly so if they’re even remotely attractive.

The art in early chapters is fairly mediocre and filled with references, but there’s a ton of brilliant details in the background or even using flower language/etc to signify different moods and feelings without going out of the way to actually state them outright. The work constantly flipflops between something that feels like an amateurish shoujo and a very competent josei that it’s just baffling to me. It keeps hinting to more being underneath but it never fully takes that step so everything is left as an ambiguous mess where the protagonist doesn’t want to ruin the illusion.

Either the protagonist is an unreliable narrator that is slowly losing her mind (similar to the mother) or a lot of events just don’t seem to reconcile with how the protagonist acts in most situations without her being completely and utterly blinded by love. I feel like the work would be a lot better if it was less game-ified with the protagonist thinking/knowing that everybody is an “NPC” and instead there were more consequences to her actions.