I went back to get all the endings of Needy Girl Overdose (Needy Streamer Overload for some) and I want to get some things off my chest about this game.
First - bluntly, it's overrated and the fandom is dumb either ignoring the supposed point the game preaches or treating it as the Newer New Testament.
For those who don't know Needy Streamer Overload is a Raising Sim in which you help out your girlfriend Ame-chan in becoming a successful streamer. Ame-chan is mentally a mess (the game's creator said in an interview that most of her behaviour is based on former partners he had diagnosed with BPD, this is important later).
On the game - The game starts off pretty basic and gameplay wise it doesn't reinvent the wheel or even adds up to its own mechanisms. You "take care" of Ame's stats (affection, stress, mental health and followers) by hanging out, posting online and most importantly, streaming.
The thing is simple, and option (example, going out) is highlighted by a "!" Indicating it will give Ame something to talk about in her streams as "KAngel" the persona she adopted to play as an internet angel.... Yeah.
So in the first ten days you have to get about 10k followers to get your channel monetized, easy. Although for each stream, depending on the topic, Ame's stats might drop or rise and you can help her relieve stress playing games together, going out or having sex while her mental status can be regulated by the use of drugs or visits to thr hospital during the day. All in all, pretty simple.
But for those who already know the game I'll gripe about what I ended up disliking.
First it would be the "twist" that the player/manager/boyfriend "P-chan" is an imaginary friend. Not only it seems like a cheap twist but it also renders most of the endings as absurd or nonsensical.
The endings themselves are plenty, varied but they're such a specific chore to unlock you're better off watching them on YouTube because I, personally, didn't feel like fucking up the psyche of a young girl to get a different ending.
Gameplay wise it's also a drag because the game always plays the same, all the streams are the same with the same options and no real change in how the game itself plays out. It's the equivalent of watching a film a dozen times to get a different post credits scene.
Then there's Ame, the main character. She's painfully annoying and the game zig zags between making me feel pity for her and wanting to slap her, shut down her internet and make her plow a field or do something productive with her life. I read everywhere how this game was a perfect representation of what BPD and depression feel like but honestly it just made me cringe, she acts like a bossy, bratty, spoiled and even manipulative bitch that only wants the attention that mommy and daddy never gave her. My biggest complain would be that all the game does is feed her self pity instead of looking for a sane alternative and in the end she's a poor victim of society in the eyes of thr fandom despite being a streamer who preaches about love and shittalks on her private account to her own fans.
The worst part would be that the game I saw compared the most to NSO was Doki Doki Literature Club, while I can see the similarities, DDLC made the effort of making me care for the characters, all of them, and realise in a twisted way that there was no good or bad or better or worse. DDLC was a game, had different options and different outcomes according to said options. NSO feels like a train ride in which you only get a change in the voice announcing the stops. Nothing really makes me care for Ame beyond surface level, P-chan is a self insert but without any weight to the plot, the plot itself is non existent at best and contradictory at worst. Ame wants fame but with fame she loathes the emptiness of a famous lifestyle. The fact that I had more fun telling Ame to kill herself and making her OD on everything I had at hand just goes to show that the game doesn't want to tell anything deep or profound. It's an experiment, a test. And it's kinda scummy that the same level of fun I could have sawing demons in Doom I had it torturing a young woman in a game, but remember how I said the creator based Ame on former partners? Well, maybe it was his way of saying "you can't fix them but fuck me if it's not fun to break them further". Try playing the game on a safe route, making the right choices and the result is a dull stat grinder with a stupid bittersweet ending. Make her drop acid and slice her wrists and now that's a game that sells.
Well, at least she doesn't suck.