How To Take Off Your Mask Remastered Review (Switch)

Game: How To Take Off Your Mask Remastered
Genre: Adventure, Role-Playing, Visual Novel
System: Nintendo Switch
Developers | Publishers: Ratalaika Games
Price: US $14.99 | UK £14.99 | EU €14,99 
Age Rating: US T | EU 12+
Release Date: February 05, 2021

Review code used, with many thanks to Ratalaika Games PR 

Once again, I spent some time away from reading novels to play a visual novel. This time I tackled How To Take Off A Mask Remastered. Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with why we’re currently wearing masks, and instead is a romantic title from Ratalaika Games.

Read on to find out what I thought.

Story

Ladiesgamers.com. How To Take Off your Mask Remastered. One of the characters standing in the bakery while Lilia tells him to stop bugging her and eating all the bread.
Look at all that bread!

Lilia works with her grandmother in their bakery and spends time with her childhood friend Ronan. All is well until one day Lilia wakes up and finds she has paws, ears, and a tail! Why does she suddenly look like a cat?

Lilia’s journey to solve why she’s changing back and forth from cat-like to human (in her cat form she’s known as a Lucrettia named Leea) leads her on the path to finding out Ronan’s secrets as well.

Gameplay and Writing

Ladiesgamers.com. How To Take Off Your Mask Remastered. Ronan and a black cat. The black cat is telling Leea that human's can't understand it.
Being a Lucrettia comes with the ability to understand cats!

This is a basic visual novel. You make assorted text selections. One interesting feature is a meter that tracks not only your relationship status but whether you’re closer to being human or a Lucrettia at any given moment. This controls which bonus chapters and paths you unlock.

You can set text speed very fast in this game. That is a major plus, both for fast reading and setting the skip as fast as possible. I also like that a chapter map is included.  Once you clear a chapter, you can go back and replay that chapter by going to the map instead of trying to find your save file.

I wasn’t crazy about the writing in this game. I’m unsure know if it’s the translation, the story, or both, but it didn’t grab me the way a lot of visual novels do. I was intrigued (at least until the problems mentioned below became too much), but it never fully immersed me in the story.

Music, Animation, Voice Acting, etc.

Ladiesgamers.com. How To Take Off Your Mask Remastered. A graph that shows where you are in the relationship and between being human or Lucrettia.
This graph is at the end of each standard chapter.

The music is pleasant but repetitive. I did have some of it get stuck in my head on occasion, so you’ve been warned! The animation is are very cute. Absolutely no complaints there. There are no cut scenes in this title like there are in many visual novels.

I had a lot of trouble with the voice of Leea. It’s very whiny. I’m sure this was an intentional choice, as the character is in cat form, but I did find it irritating. All the other voices were good. The bonus features include a gallery and music player.

What I Didn’t Like

Unfortunately, this game had some major negatives for me. I’ll start with the lesser issues. If there’s an emotional outburst by a character (which is fairly frequent in anime style), the image on the screen shakes. I found this very annoying. Occasionally, fine, but this felt overused.

A couple of the more standard tropes are tiresome. I’m not a fan of the characters talking down to each other, and this one also has some girl cries to manipulate men stuff going on, both of which are common, but still frustrating to see.

The big issue for me is that Ronan spends quite a bit of time complaining that Leea’s too young and he shouldn’t be attracted to a child. For most of the game, I thought this line of thinking was uncomfortable, but since the reader is always privy to the knowledge that Leea and Lilia are the same people, I assumed they were the same age. Unfortunately, it is revealed that she is considered young in Lucrettia form. How this can be is not explained (and I suppose it’s always possible there’s a translation issue or misunderstanding here), but it had the effect of making everything that was already a bit cringy for me personally, much more so.

Ladiesgamers.com How To Take Off Your Mask Remastered, Ronan saying that the speaker is being silent again.
I’ve been called out.

Conclusion

This title has a cute design and hits on some common tropes (I couldn’t get into them because of spoilers) that I did like. The idea of a race of people who can turn into a kind of cat isn’t new but is often entertaining.

However, I ultimately found the issues mentioned above too annoying and disturbing to really enjoy this game. Furthermore, the price point is high for the length of the game (around 3 hours to complete both routes). For these reasons, I must give this one a thumbs down.

Final Verdict: I Don’t Like It

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