$10.99Ad Nauseam - The Wrong Side Every choice remembered
Wake in a strange hospital with no memory, untangle its mysteries and steer a dark hand-drawn story through hundreds of decisions.
Is Ad Nauseam - The Wrong Side worth it?
Ad Nauseam - The Wrong Side is worth it if…
- you want a story-driven horror game where your choices genuinely shape the run
- you like worlds with their own alien rules and secrets worth hunting down
- you're drawn to yami kawaii and pastel goth aesthetics, glitter and gore side by side
- you're after a slowburn romance route with real weight behind it
Screenshots
A hospital that never ends
Tsurine wakes from intense reconstructive surgery with no memory, a mutilated body, and a missing family. Finding them means digging into what happened to her, and that pulls her into conspiracies far larger than she expected. Her search plays out across the Sanitoria, a medical-themed world with its own rules, cultures, conditions and supernatural happenings: inhabited and abandoned rooms, atriums, stores and vistas, all strange and visually striking. It feels like an endless liminal hospital, and the more of it you see, the less of it makes comfortable sense.
Choices that stick
This is a game that remembers. Hundreds of branching moments, big and small, react to what you do and say, and your choices carry forward into each next entry of the series, building a run that differs from everyone else's. Exploration follows suit: open areas offer multiple solutions, so how you get through a place is up to you. There are no failstates, which keeps the pressure on the story rather than on punishment. Keep your eyes open, the game says, and it means it: secret rooms and characters hide throughout, and telling documents on weird happenings reward anyone who reads everything.
Reading between the bandages
At its core this is a visual novel, and the story carries everything. You read and choose your way through a large, colorful cast, picking their brains to piece together an enormous interwoven narrative web of secrets, mysteries and conspiracies. Point & click moments and RPG systems fold into the reading instead of interrupting it.
What does it look and sound like?
What does the game look and sound like?
The art is hand-drawn, in a style built from yami kawaii, liminality, traumacore and pastel and modern goth looks: cute and clinical, pastel and grim, often in the same frame. The long, dark soundtrack by lolratz mixes breakcore, hyperpop, witch house and scenecore into a Y2K mash, so even a mental breakdown comes with its own music video. Several artists share the work, from backgrounds and sprites to CG and splash art.
Is there combat, and can you lose?
There is a combat system, and it blends narrative and gameplay rather than sitting apart from them. Romance partners aid you in fights. The game has no failstates, so combat is part of the story's flow instead of a wall you can hit. It's one more piece of the genre mix, alongside the visual novel writing, RPG elements and point & click exploration.
