Due to the game's short length (30-40 minutes), all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
31st March, Midnight.👁 Image
is a Kinetic Novel made by the games collective Prof. Lily👁 Image
in Unity. Fittingly enough, it was first released on March 31st, 2024.
The game follows Amy, a woman who followed her passion for game design in college only to find herself unable to find work post-graduation. After moving back in with her parents and working in a mini-mart for some time, her old friend Julie got back in touch and managed to land her a job at an up-and-coming indie studio. In the present day, she has been tasked with finishing the company's latest project by midnight on March 31st, leading to her working overtime to meet the deadline. The narrative switches between the present day and various points in her past, as Amy's mind wanders and the full context of her situation becomes clear.
31st of March, Midnight. provides examples of:
- April Fools' Plot: Downplayed. The present-day portion takes place in the hours before April 1st, as Amy works to create a Dating Sim parody to be released right at midnight.
- Bland-Name Product: Amy mentions that her early love of Adobe Flash games led her to become a moderator at "Konglomerate," a stand-in for the real life website Kongregate.
- Capitalism Is Bad: One of the story's most important themes is how the demands of capitalism end up destroying artists' dreams. Amy, the protagonist, finds herself unable to find work after majoring in game design and ends up stuck working at a mini-mart to get by. Even when she does get a job at a game studio, she's forced into mind-numbing QA work and not taken seriously because she's new. The company also publicly supports the LGBT community while privately only caring about getting their money, putting her (a trans lesbian) off. This culminates in her being asked to single-handedly create a Dating Sim spoof of their most popular game for April Fools' Day, giving her a strict deadline under penalty of losing pay and only crediting her as an assistant writer. By the time she finishes the game — which she internally describes as "another cynical, disposable product meant only to boost the studio's reputation" — she's been driven to tears.
- Cast Full of Gay: In-Universe, all of Rubium's main characters are LGBT. This led to the game receiving widespread acclaim for its representation, though it later transpires that the developers were only doing it out of a cynical desire for profit. Amy's description of a typical scene in the office makes this explicit:"Cishet men and women strolling back and forth, laughing at their gullible LGBTQ+ audience for so easily buying into their crap. All we have to do is say 'trans rights!', and they'll eat this shit up!"
- Central Theme: Alienation and othering. The protagonist, Amy, is a trans Chinese lesbian who lands a job at an indie studio after extensively studying game development. Unfortunately, she's not taken seriously because she's a new hire — Julie, a longtime friend of Amy's, appalls her by telling her to "sit back and let us show you the ropes of game dev!" In addition, while the company ostensibly cares for LGBT representation in their work, Amy constantly overhears comments indicating the (primarily non-LGBT) developers are really just aiming for that community's wallet. Her love of visual novels ties into this as well — the game draws parallels between the studio's lack of respect for Amy and their treatment of the genre (which originated in Japan) as a disposable joke, culminating in her being assigned to create a parody Dating Sim all by herself without proper credit.
- Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Amy mentions that she has a longstanding habit of "randomly blurting out whatever nonsense happens to pass through my head," demonstrated when she muses about not getting a copy of Rubium from the studio after being hired (despite them directly encouraging her to play it).
- Downer Ending:
- In-Universe, 8Rats (the Dating Sim Amy plays) has a Secret Final Campaign that doubles as a Drama Bomb Finale. Most of the route has the protagonist learn about a species of rat people (not the anthropomorphic rat men she dates in every other route) who were driven underground by humans wanting to exploit them and their land. It ends with the sewers they call home being bloodily retaken once again by the humans, with the protagonist having a tearful conversation with her Love Interest as he lays dying. In her narration, Amy mentions that "[she] had to lie down for a while after that one."
- In the actual game, most of the final scene consists of Amy bitterly remarking on how awful the situation is to herself: she's been forced to work on an Rubium dating sim parody entirely by herself without proper credit. More broadly, the company she's working for has proven itself to be entirely profit-driven, appealing to the LGBT community solely to that end — the dating sim is a key part of that, with Amy describing it as a "product" cynically calculated to boost the studio's public perception. Even Julie, her close friend who helped her out at crucial times in her life, begins acting unempathetic and condescending towards her. In the end, with her dreams of game development thoroughly crushed, she manages to finish the game while she's in tears.
- Drama Bomb Finale: The In-Universe game 8Rats begins as a light-hearted (if surprisingly well-made) Dating Sim about courting Rat Men. However, the Secret Final Campaign swerves into much darker territory, revealing a species of persecuted non-anthropomorphic rats dwelling in an old sewer system and ultimately having them massacred by humans for their territory.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Downplayed. The story's present-day takes place over the course of a few hours on the night of March 31st, but there are frequent flashbacks to events outside of that timeframe.
- Foreshadowing: While recounting how she was hired at Rubium's studio, Amy mentions that the team encouraged her to play it — saying "they'd made [it] for people like me" — before wondering out loud why she had to buy it at full price herself. She catches and chides herself for being ungrateful, but it's an early sign of how alienated she is from her coworkers (in particular, being othered because she's LGBT).
- iPhony: The final scene shows Amy using a Macbook-style laptop with a pineapple on the back.
- Mid-Development Genre Shift: In-Universe, Amy's game design dissertation starts out as a Walking Simulator, but she grows discontent with the genre because she feels it doesn't truly get the player involved with the story. When her roommate Julie introduces her to Visual Novels, she opts to rework the game into one (with considerable difficulty).
- Porting Disaster: In-Universe, Rubium's console ports were outsourced to another company because the original developers had little experience making games on non-PC platforms. Unfortunately, the end product ends up disappointing fans with its exceptional sloppiness."Between the inconsistent framerate, graphical glitches, and myriad game-breaking bugs, Rubium was basically unplayable on console."
- Rat Men: The In-Universe Dating Sim 8Rats has the player (assuming the role of a — presumably human — woman) courting anthropomorphic rat men.
- Shout-Out:
- One of Amy's formative experiences as a game developer was playing 8Rats, a Japanese game that initially appears to be a spoof of Dating Sims where the female player character becomes romantically involved with one of eight anthropomorphic rats. Despite the absurd title, the game's writing surprises Amy with its quality — especially when she learns about the secret ninth route that gets far more serious than anything before it. All of these elements parallel Hatoful Boyfriend, though some of the specifics differ (for instance, the latter game uses a non-anthropomorphic birds for its cast).
- At one point, Amy's narration discusses Tokyo Necro in all but name (describing it as "a recently-translated Cyberpunk VN with some zombies in it" and a "chainsaw-wielding lesbian").
- Take That!: Much of the story takes aim at common misconceptions and stigmas regarding visual novels in the Western world, in particular the practice of creating Dating Sims based on existing properties as April Fools' Day jokes. Julie, who introduces Amy to the genre, assumes that the bulk of them are dating sims (including parodies thereof) where the player gets to name the main character. After growing more experienced with the genre, Amy notes that this was a very misleading first impression. When Julie later proposes the Rubium dating sim, she makes a number of similarly ignorant comments (such as assuming that all doujinshi are pornographic). The narrative's emphasis on the genre's Japanese origin and popularity, combined with Amy implicitly feeling alienated from the rest of her workplace because she's Chinese, implies that Western game developers treat the genre as a mere joke in part because of its country of origin.
- Time Title: Amy is tasked with finishing the Rubium Dating Sim by midnight on March 31st — the moment it switches over to April 1st.
- "Happy April Fools, everyone."