Spoilers Abound

"I'm Scared of Girls" resonates deeply with me. I'm a huge fan of any work that deals with gender identity issues, as I suffer from them myself. After getting a hint from the "Wholesome Crossdresser" examples at TV Tropes and finding no wiki page or trope page, I decided to just go ahead and play it.

So began my dungeon crawling experience as a cross-dressing guy, delving into a creepy sort of limbo to fantastic music that can be depressing, unnerving, to downright terrifying.

The format is simple and familiar to anyone who's run a rogue-like or a dungeon crawler: delve deep the levels, fight monsters, look for important items.

My motivation for these was the bits of story with Lamb, the main character. I loved the bits and pieces of her life and how it all went wrong. You learn about:

• how Lamb was always a cross-dresser;

• her meeting with Angelica, a close friend of hers;

• how Lamb got her outfit from Angelica

• Connor, a boy she was in love with;

• how she had this strange ability to see ghosts and teleport by touching items, as exemplified by a trippy flashback with a man and his Swiss Army knife;

• her job as a waitress, how she only seemed to see customers as a writhing black mass, then a less than honest gig after she was fired;

• her troubles at school, and how she never went back to class after she somehow teleported during a test;

And a whole host of other interesting details about her life.

It's a shame most of it is ignored in favour of Connor, and the "all I need is you" ending.

The ending in gameplay terms was also lackluster. You enter a hospital area, and as you further your descent, the screen starts to get hazy. The whole place seems to mirror and loop until you find the right area and go down a step.

Then there is part with the malevolent TVs. Aside from the terrible combat (more on that later), the parts where the screen would start to rumble and shake when you destroyed a big TV gave me a headache. The flashing in and out of the environment as one last puzzle was neat, but ultimately, gave me more headaches than fun.

The sequence of meeting Connor again was pretty trippy, and I'll admit that rushing through the whole thing was a bad idea as I couldn't check out the rest of the background. Though I did understand somewhat what was happening, the whole ending feels rushed as if every single plot line is instantaneously solved right there and then, or just ignored as all that really does matter is Connor.

It's a shame, as there are quite a lot of interesting side stories you can find out along the way.

I was pretty pleased when I saw that Angelica, the friend of Lamb's who had provided her with her girl clothes during high school, ended up dead and in the same afterlife, though not so much that her only purpose is a bit of conversation and a teleport back up.

The bar you find her in is interesting, too. Accessible by dying in the "grey" outfit (and maybe having your soul extracted, I haven't tested it out yet.) It was extremely surprising to me, with the weird signs and the spiritoid standing out, until a conversation with it told me that it and the patrons inside are the chill kind of spiritoids, uninterested in taking away Lamb's Soul, "preferably with semen." (An eye-brow raising moment that was ultimately dismissed as a bizarre, passing comment.)

There were also sidequests in the bar, though sadly, I did not finish them. Mostly this was because there is a huge grind associated with them, running the same paths over and over again to get gems, and the combat just didn't sell me on that. (Again, more later.) I may go back to give the constipated spiritoid 3 sapphires to get the big key to open that mysterious door, maybe not.

(On a related note, this was one of my biggest gripes with the game: I couldn't go back to the bar after cutting the last thread.)

There's also an extremely long walk back up to the surface, and I found the environment for that area--black, with demonic figures weeping blood--very unnerving.

Another scene of interest but has lost me on its significance is the Spirit Acquisition team, who you can pay to extract your soul and keep it in a safe place. (As Lamb is quite the pretty girl, they waive the fee.) The entire procedure was unnerving, trippy, and more than a little scary, but I never did find out what side-effects or effect in had on me aside from less health.

You can also talk to the members of the team, and learn that one of them is afraid of cutting their ties because their life as a bomb defuser has made them afraid of cutting anything resembling wires. It's an amusing detail, but was ultimately worthless in the grand scheme of things.

There are probably a ton of other side areas I've missed, but as they don't seem to have much of an effect on the ending, I feel like I shouldn't even bother. There isn't much incentive to do them, and it feels like they, like Angelica, were just a "hey, here's a neat little detail for those of you following the story!"

And now for my biggest gripe with the game: the combat.

Combat is simple, and I like simple. You run into enemies from the left or the right, you attack them automatically. You or they run into Lamb from above or below, Lamb takes damage.

Problem is it's terrible.

I found that using an analog stick (kudos for controller support!) for controlling Lamb oftentimes resulted in her getting attacked despite facing the right direction. It seems that running full tilt into spiritoids will mean that Lamb forgets to attack. I found that moving straight, stopping just before the monster, letting them come to me then gently pressing the direction was the only way to consistently damage a monster without getting chain-hit to death.

There was also the "clothes" system. There really is no practical reason to use Lamb's default outfit, and you really do need to get the Prison outfit ASAP as its statistically better than everything else, most especially when the spiritoids now have 4-8 health, and the ball-and-chain attacks for 4 and the other outfits only 1.

You don't even need them to solve or access anything, sans the spiritoid bar with Angelica. There could have been interesting puzzles where Lamb is not able to progress so exposed (something like the shame of having done that, even if she was poor and desperate) but the spiritoids and the environment couldn't really care less.

There might be some symbolism in this, but I don't really follow what it's supposed to be. I assumed the most powerful outfit, the "prison" outfit where Lamb is dressed in ribbon strips with a ball and chain around her ankle was a reference to her job after she was fired from the restaurant.

I'll admit the area where you find Lamb's Prison outfit, a jail with a room of 3 Lambs dying in gruesome ways, was interesting, though.

The spiritoids themselves are not that interesting. It's all a waiting game and positioning yourself properly. They have no advanced tactics like ranged attacks, no need to bait them into making themselves vulnerable, and the only traps were the two moving spike blocks that you can easily avoid in the one room.

It's really only hit-and-run, which contributed a great deal to my problems with the gameplay.

There was also the huge bug where playing at 1366 x 768 causes the text to clip into the side, cutting off 1/3 to 1/2 of the first letters of every sentence.

Overall, "I'm Scared of Girls" has a fantastic story, great music, and interesting sequences but it suffers from bad gameplay, a poor ending, and forgetting about sidequests to non-existent rewards for doing them.