Thoughts On Needy Girl Overdose

11 2月 2024

this game makes me feel old in a good way.

needy girl overdose is a game made by nyalra, a subculture writer i follow on and off. if you like amelie doree’s stuff, you may have seen her vid on barcode fighter — and well, nyalra’s post convinced me to look into it (i talked about it here). you can thank them for the video's existence. their writings are very off-beat and full of unhinged stuff to say, so in a way not that different from the stuff you read in ngo.

you play as a producer (referred as P) and you need to help ame who is this needy girl who’s overly dependent on you for every needs imaginable become the most important streamer of all time. by doing different activities like going out to akihabara, writing social media posts, and even sex, ame can come up with new ideas on what to stream. you can guide ame to stardom by encouraging her to stream games, conspiracy theories, and of course whenever she wants to break down live on stream.

as a streamer simulator designed through dating sim mechanics, this game is pretty interesting. unlike most dating sims (heh), the game reveals the multipliers and stats that each action will increase. most of the endings don’t require this math attention, but it’s nice to see how this game is mostly deterministic. you can route the game and know more or less where you will go after going through the game many times. it’s fun to plan ahead and do some theorycrafting on where to go next. this game is a pretty streamlined dating sim and it’s quite nice to play for this reason.

the game does add some annoying details intentionally or not. ame tracks how much you’ve been looking at your LINE convos with her; too little and you hit the bad ending where she leaves you because you’ve essentially ignored her. details like this turn the player into this obsessive control freak dominating ame’s life and she’s just kinda consenting to whatever you want to do.

indeed, the best streams come from abusing her mental health. you can emotionally manipulate her and make her do drugs. several endings in fact require some drug overdosing. if she gets too stressed, she will cut herself and even do a stream about it (which can give her a good chunk of views). you don’t want ame to be too unstressed or she will lead a normal life with you instead. you want her on the verge of despair and confused about what she thinks of you as you send her to go fuck someone else on tinder. there is no resistance from ame; at most, she will suddenly decide that she needs to do something at a change of pace but she will never say no to you. going for the be invoked ending (999,999,999 followers) basically requires you to send her to the hospital and then giving her drugs.

but what you cannot control is the things she does on stream. you are just a chat moderator deleting messages and pointing out superchats for ame to read. whatever she says comes from her stream of consciousness. her sponsored streams are great for this reason: she can't muster an ounce of deception and she'll just spit out the drink, saying this was the worst thing she's ever tasted. on other streams, she'll discuss schrodinger's cat and the meaning of life. she will joke about how steins;gate is a popular vn that might be milked too much or point out how the director of twilight syndrome is really into wrestling. she has no filter, too much subculture knowledge, and a "good face", which draws otaku viewers to her.

it makes one wonder why you the player need to be there for her. while her mental health is all over the place, it's not like she needs our help to take hallucinogens to stream her mental breakdowns or buy sayooshi to stream it. she's a fairly independent person and the co-dependency is artificial.

you can have many reads on this, especially if you are able to get the true ending. my read on this is perhaps influenced by the nyalra articles i've read the most though. needy girl overdose and nyalra's articles as a whole are about the overt romanticism of a japanese internet/otaku era that has long disappeared.

you can see this in the streams that she's poured all of her soul into: her subscriber milestone celebration streams. she brings up how, despite knowing that the internet is a drug to her, she keeps going back to it. she's addicted to the internet (and otaku space) because it's a toxic playground of hope and despair. we'll lament about the parasocial relationships everyone has with idols and seiyuu, but we also have them because we "need" it. just like how ame "needs" P in order to function, even though she doesn't need to, many people "need" the internet and otakudom even when everyone knows it's declined into a mess.

the isolation and "overdose" the internet cause people like ame to keep living in the "good ol' days" where people feel connected. facing late capitalism, people believed they could foster a sense of community if they shared enough subcultural knowledge to be in the cutting edge. rather than disagreeing with azuma's shitty thesis of database animals that we see everything as content to be consumed, otaku accepts that this worldview is actually how we can go beyond the hedgehog's dilemma: we can connect with each other by talking to each other about the content we consumed. Sharing Content is how we all live.

this is why a good chunk of ame's streams are about proliferating obscure knowledge. her creepypasta net lore stuff is an amalgamation of famous japanese urban legends (i'm sure people will be familiar with the train station one thanks to urasekai picnic). her stories and incidents resonate with viewers because she's "one of us", an otaku. the internet brainwashed many people into becoming an "otaku" and this was awesome: there was a garden of eden where we can become yukkuri and tell each other about quasi-scientific theories and analytical philosophy from the subahibi essays we've just read.

this is likely the theme nyalra arrived at because of their deep engagement with sayooshi, a game about some dude who doesn't know how to say "goodbye" to the normal life that he once led. in the sayooshi stream, ame says the denpa waves got to her since she started saying weird stuff. and this is clearly the intent of this game: this game knows it's a cognitohazard and the banger songs aiobahn feat. kotoko have pushed out are all songs about the near-impossibility of quitting the internet; they're all catchy and remind us that we can't quit the internet. we are stuck on the internet because we have grown to be dependent on it.

and well, it's hard not to resonate with needy girl overdose for me. my partner said that nyalra is basically me if i took drugs and was unstable, which isn't too far off from my own assessment when i was reading ngo. ngo articulates my hope and despair for internet communities. we have to constantly fool ourselves that this internet overdose is actually good for our thinking, even though we're in fragmenting communities on the verge of declining. subcultural histories are now disappearing because platforms are merging all of us into one big mainstream space. the only true path to recovery is to touch grass.

but we spiritually "need" the internet and otaku media, even if we don't need to. even when games like chaos;child exist to tell us to stop checking conspiracy theory boards, we'll keep doing that. we're hopelessly addicted to them in a way the WHO cannot really define.

i said the game makes me feel old in a good way. it's not the references that make me go "haha that makes me feel old" but rather ngo's philosophy. i feel old because, after all these years on the internet and real life, i haven't really changed my thoughts on how much i "need" the internet. i know people have "retired" from the internet and led happy lives and i know i can do that too.

but here i am, on the internet posting my thoughts on needy girl overdose. nothing has changed, even if the situation is getting worse, and i guess that's what the game is about. i'm watching my 20 year old-ish subculture brain poison play out as a raising sim and i'm going to play some shmups and rpg maker games after writing this post. this is the same "content" that ame will read and be nostalgic about years down the line.

in a way, we are the internet's needy girlfriends and i wonder when we'll be properly independent from it.