Sweet Home A heavy story about wanting to be loved

It is 2018, a cold ordinary day in a small town. Ying skips class again, dodging the tension at home, and her days drift past like an old calendar. Then things start to move: a puppy, a chance meeting at the wrong time, a string of unexpected connections. Around her gather a bright, straightforward best friend, a brooding classmate, a nosy teacher, a queen-bee dormmate, a boy struck by love at first sight, and her family, which is its own kind of weather. You decide who gets close and who gets pushed away, and in a town this suffocating, every bond pulls its own weight.

The art is hand-drawn: 40 backgrounds and 50 CG illustrations in a stark, sketchy style that suits the story's grey small-town mood. Nearly 1,000 character sprite variations mean faces change constantly, a raised eyebrow or a look away carrying as much as a line of dialogue. With over 200,000 words of text, the writing does the heavy lifting, and the restrained art keeps you inside Ying's head: nothing brightened, nothing softened. It looks like a storybook drawn in pencil, and it reads like one too.

This is a visual novel in the full sense: you read, you choose, and the story carries you. Three main routes plus one secret route build around three key characters, and your choices decide which relationships grow and which break, unlocking hidden paths along the way. Twelve endings wait at the other side, and replaying is the point: a run is short enough that one more try is tempting, and each route shows you a different Ying. Fair warning, said plainly: the endings are heavy, and none of them is a straightforward happy one. Come for the story, not for comfort.