the game autosaves. it's about an hour long. it's pretty alright

spoilers below

my first playthrough i accidentally game over'd because i misread/misunderstood a choice about 3/4ths into the game. restarted the game and discovered

1. it's linear/the problems they throw at you aren't randomized
2. i actually got that far by sheer dumb luck

i just played it according to my heart on my first playthrough, which was mostly me unwilling to overwork my moderators (for instance, allowing bots would be so much work), going for the "kindness"(?????) choices (e.g. hiring a translator properly instead of choosing a machine translation upgrade), and forgoing obvious user growth choices (the ideal social media has 20 active users, all of them you know by name). even though i also had a misclick at the first upgrade screen and thus had wasted some upgrade points i genuinely wasn't in danger of game over... until the aforementioned misunderstanding

(this is also how i play visual novels. just play according to heart. get a mid ending. go "thank you for the Cool Words on the Screen" and fuck off elsewhere)

my second playthrough, discovering that it's all the same choices, i try to minmax it and funnily enough i found myself unable to go as far as my first playthrough lol. turns out going with my beliefs was a good strategy for this game in this particular. actually needed a few tries (shaking off the minmax Gamer Mind was actually kinda difficult) before i was able to get to the end. only got 4/5 stars score, but as i said i'm satisfied that i played according to my heart and got to the end.

actually a bit disappointed(?) that the game didn't change my perception on safety & trust in social media; i had thought that it would be this level of difficult, and if one were to simplify it for an one-hour game, it would've been exactly like this. wasn't happy that i was vindicated, because i'm stupid and i tend to miss things a lot, so i feel like a "good" depiction of stuff should have it say, "well, you haven't considered this, you baka dumbass"