The visual novel Days With Ollie is one of the latest Hololive games and revolves around Indonesian Vtuber Kureiji Ollie. But while Ollie herself is a born entertainer, Days With Ollie unfortunately fails to match her infectious energy. It instead ends up as an unfortunate and frustrating slog of dead ends and recurring bugs.
Developed by P.T. Digital Artha, the game was directed by Ollie herself with art from Hievasp and ClozyOzy. It plays as a choice-based, but fairly linear, visual novel that follows the story of an unnamed protagonist attempting to become Ollie’s personal reporter, while avoiding the many, many pratfalls along the way. There are four chapters in Days With Ollie, and succeeding will earn you some special art screens, but you’ll be getting well acquainted with the quickload system long before you reach them.
My first dead end was also when I encountered my first bug, where the game would revert back to the Indonesian language for certain screens even if set to English. Luckily, it was on a screen where the only two options were “quit to title” and “retry,” so I figured which was which fairly quickly, but later on every choice and even some story segments began appearing in Bahasa Indonesia too.
The game previously encountered a brief delay to fix bugs, but a great many appear to have stubbornly remained, including one that stopped me progressing altogether. At a certain point towards the end of the first chapter, answering a question would freeze the game and reloading. Choosing different answers and even re-installing didn’t help. I was finally able to progress after finding a solution online, which involved switching back and forth between languages again.
The game has a number of other issues with spelling errors and the like, but while annoying, these are more easily fixed. I think the bigger problems stem from the script itself. With the meat of the gameplay essentially being to search through all the bad ends before moving on to the real solution, having those bad ends be entertaining is paramount. Unfortunately, Days With Ollie swings many times only a few ending up as hits. Some of the gags involve running into other Hololive members or recurring in-jokes, while others are ridiculous and follow a sort of logic. My favorite was an early encounter with a rich kid who you can attempt to scare off by acting possessed, resulting in him calling an exorcist on you. But others are simple “Rocks Fall, You Died” screens that add precious little to the experience.
The choices also rarely manage to be meaningful or even entertaining, which is a shame. Sometimes in games like these, there’s a sort of logic the developer expects you to figure out after a fashion. Say, if reasonable responses fail you, then perhaps flowing with the game’s moon logic is the answer and you should pick zanier options. But in Days With Ollie, there doesn’t seem to be any such logic, other than in some specific trivia questions. Sometimes the answer is to be a decent human being, and other times the correct response is to freak out. But not too much, of course, as that will get you arrested.
I know I’ve been very negative towards Days with Ollie, but I hope it doesn’t come off as mean-spirited. It just feels like a missed opportunity to explore some parts of the relationship between fans and entertainers, bridging that para-social gap so to speak. It’s not like the game is totally devoid of charm, of course. Once you actually meet Ollie, the pace picks up a fair bit. Some of the music is quite nice, especially the intro theme.
If you’re going to play Days With Ollie, I recommend doing so as a group, rather than on your own. Having friends or even a streamer chat to riff with will likely make the experience more enjoyable. I wonder if the particular vein of absurd answers is intended to cater to that kind of setting. But on its own, Days With Ollie just doesn’t manage to be compelling as a visual novel.
Days With Ollie is available now on PC via Steam, and it is also Steam Deck compatible.
