70%PC

Growing Up is essentially a visual novel where you play through 18 years of a character's life learning new skills, going to school, working, and making friends. Different skills have different attribute requirements you need to meet to unlock them. They all require spending knowledge points, but they also have their own requirement such as intelligence, charm, memory, and so on. The basic gameplay loop consists of increasing these attributes through something called a brain map, going to various areas around town and the school to participate in different activities, taking a test every few years, and rinse and repeat until high school graduation.

The brain map is laid out as interconnected nodes that are slowly revealed as you click through the few revealed ones. These nodes raise your attributes. Depending on the route you want to take in life, you can choose from many different activities like working to make money, playing video games (so meta), studying for exams, sports, and much more. There are two primary meters to keep track of from year to year that you need to keep in balance: happiness and parent satisfaction. The different activities can raise or lower these meters, but also have the benefits of increasing your attributes, making money in the case of jobs, and ultimately determining the path you take in life. I wanted to be a video game designer, so I made sure to visit the arcade often and talked to a couple game enthusiasts there whenever I got the chance.

The gameplay loop is broken up every so often with social interactions and exams. Every "run", you'll meet various characters picked seemingly at random that you can choose to befriend, potentially romance, or ignore completely. There is a high degree of replayability since there are many different people you can talk to and activities to participate in. Every few years, you'll take an exam which presents itself basically like Bejeweled (or I guess Candy Crush for a more modern example).

There are numerous grammatical errors which is unfortunate for a game that is mostly reading. They never detracted from my enjoyment, but it's worth mentioning. I playing this game sporadically over the course of a couple years so I wasn't able to time how long it took me, but I imagine a first run takes a few hours if you actually read everything. Subsequent runs can probably be completed in a couple hours if you know exactly what route to take and skip all the dialogue. The art style is alright but nothing groundbreaking, and the writing ranges from good to cringey. Despite the many different routes you can take, the moment-to-moment gameplay never really changes so you really have to like the characters to keep playing. Still, I had a good enough time and recommend this game to anyone looking for a simple visual novel experience.