Yandere Simulator

Yandere Simulator is a stealth, horror, simulation game where you play as an innocent school girl who stalks a boy while eliminating any female who is interested in him. Yandere is Japanese word for a person who is protective of their love interest to the extent of using violent means to keep the person to themselves. So, Yandere Simulator attempts to simulate the actions of a yandere.

Plot

The game features a girl called Ayano Aishi or Yandere-chan who wants to eliminate everyone competing with her for the attention of her crush named Senpai. The final game will takes place over the course of ten weeks, with Yandere-chan eliminating one rival per week.

Gameplay

Yandere Simulator largely depends on stealth tactics similar to games like Hitman. You are placed in a large environment with many characters. You must track a specific character and eliminate the character. You have various means of eliminating the target. You can use stealth attacks without any witness or you can stage an accident. You can also choose to go all out with a blood bath. But you must clean off all evidence to prevent the police from arresting you. You can use weapons like a baseball bat, a katana, and a kitchen knife. You can use murder tactics like drowning, electrocution, poisoning and torture.

You could get rid of your target by framing her for one of your crimes, thus getting her expelled from school. You can also spread rumors about her to make everyone in the school to hate her so she commits suicide.
No matter how you choose to play the game, you must ensure that the boy you love doesn’t catch you murdering a rival. Once he catches you in a bad act, there is no chance of him loving you again and the game becomes over. Act too suspiciously and students in the school will gossip about you and act more careful around you. Act innocently and students will trust you a lot which will fetch you a good reputation.

Kill too many people or act too violently and your sanity insanity level will increase. If your sanity level is too high, people will notice. Once, your crush notices that you are insane, he will never love you and the game will end. But, if your sanity is too low, your killings will be poorly executed. If your sanity is high, your kills will be efficient.

You also have special moves like the Yandere vision that highlights important objects and characters and make them visible through walls. You can take panty shots and exchange them for special favors, items, plans, and weapons,
You can customize your character at the beginning of the game. Yandere Simulator also has school simulation elements that are borrowed from the Persona game series.

Future Updates

The game developer has planned to bring in things like voice acting, modding, gender change, more languages, more weapons, more environments, more game modes and non-lethal elimination methods to the game.

Pros

• Diverse ways to play
• Critical thinking needed to eliminate rivals

Cons

• The game might be too mature for some because of its violent and sexual elements

The troubled development of Yandere Simulator and the history of its developer, Yandere Dev, have become something of an internet legend. That said, just how well do the game’s mechanics work?

At its core, Yandere Simulator is a stealth game where the objective is to reunite your character with her beloved senpai – making sure that no other girls in your school live to steal him away from you. This darkly humorous game has its moments, yet its convoluted mechanics and questionable art direction make it a tough sell, even for fans of these anime tropes.

Always in development

A quick look at the history of Yandere Simulator will reveal that the game has had a turbulent development. The unbridled ambitions of Yandere Dev have infamously forced the game to remain in development hell for years. Now, we finally have a playable build of Yandere Simulator in our hands, so we can see if the many promises made by Yandere Dev are real or not.

As a stealth game, Yandere Simulator is very simple. Don’t expect complicated stealth mechanics, like those you’d see in something like Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain; this is a basic, hide-and-seek game where you have to kill your romantic rivals to be the only girl worthy of your lover’s heart.

There’s lots of morbid creativity in how to dispose of other girls, featuring a variety of executions that will divert attention away from you. However, the player’s character feels too sluggish to control: something that could be easily fixed by modifying the default walking speed in a future update.

Blocky visuals

We can’t talk about this game without addressing the elephant in the room, and that is Yandere Simulator’s atrocious visuals. Many models clash with each other, looking like they belong in completely different games.

While there are tons of animations for the different killing methods, the basic animation loops like walking feel floaty and unnatural. That wouldn’t be so bad if the performance was at least somewhat decent: fluctuations from 100 FPS to around 20 FPS are common, especially when using the game’s camera tool. Thankfully, most character designs look well enough, and their voices actually fit the characters well enough. That’s actually something extremely rare to see in an indie game, especially one that is still in beta: quality voice acting that fits the game’s aesthetic perfectly.

Never get lost

Although the main objective of Yandere Simulator is clear enough, the school where the game takes place is a big place that’s easy to get lost in. Luckily, Yandere Dev has included an option to track your objectives, working similarly to the “guiding light” in Dead Space games.

Additionally, there’s a “Yandere Vision” mode that lets you track your enemies and objectives with ease, at the cost of your character’s sanity. Think of it as this game’s version of the Detective Vision from the Batman: Arkham Asylum series. This is an apt comparison, as using this vision mode too much can make the game feel trivial, and the penalization for overusing it isn’t enough to dissuade the player.

Pros:

• Lots of execution methods
• Easy to keep track of objectives
• Good voice acting

Cons:

• Very little content
• Ugly visuals
• Poor performance