Money for Girls: Amortized Debt, dread and a bully to love

You play Cancer Prize, a plucky 20-something girl detective and forensic photographer, attending school with real humans for the first time. Her case: her brilliant ex-fashion scientist mother is severely in debt, and the loan circling the family is predatory in a way that turns out to be almost literal. The gorgeous tropical island of Sororal Quasisland conceals a world of sin, and snooping where you should not is a reliable way to end badly. You take photos of stylish babes for clue reasons, dig into secrets that would rather stay buried, and find that the popular girl at school, Agnel, has taken a disturbing interest in you. The mystery and the romance braid together, and neither one is gentle.

You build your girl before the story starts, and the choices stick. Sixteen stickers let you claim traits like OCD, Horse Girl, Endometriosis, or the mysterious Boyborn, each one a sticky friend or a mark of shame that colors how the story sees you and how you see yourself. Seven outfits keep fashion in your hands: your fashion, your rules. Then the game asks you to maintain mood and hygiene or face drastic consequences, which is exactly as draining as being a girl on a deadline sounds. The hand-drawn art carries all of it, pastel and cute one moment and burning into something dirtier the next, like a storybook that has been left out in the rain.

There are lots of choices, and the game trusts you with wretched ones while hoping you pick none of them. Will you pursue cold avarice or the warmth of love, or something really stupid? You can humiliate yourself for petty cash, spend your summer on scenes that are optional or nonlinear, and generally decide what kind of girl Cancer turns out to be. The many horrible endings that may befall a snooping girl get collected in your gallery, where you can stare upon them and internalize the moral lesson. With fewer than 8,000 unique routes and many scenes branching off the main path, a second summer plays out differently than the first.

This is a visual novel in the fullest sense: text-based, dialogue heavy, carried by prose and pictures rather than puzzles. The writing is the engine. It is poetic, feverish, funny and cruel, often in the same paragraph, and it digs into love, debt, bodies and what the world wants from them. A few hours covers one summer, or more if you chase every route and ending. Come for the romance and the mystery, and stay because the sentences refuse to let go.