Kouko: ♡galgame♡ by UsuMidori

made by UsuMidori for Ludum Dare 58 (JAM)

Screenshot<em>2025-10-09-20-42-24-656</em>com.DefaultCom.jpg

Overview

Meet your pen pal Kouko. She has no face. No expression. Just… blank. Spend a day with her, collect CGs (and other mysteries), and see if she can handle finally getting her missing… something back. Tons of gorgeous CGs. Charming music. Confusing humor. Mild existential crises.Slight self-deprecation, and subtle existential dread (if that counts as a selling point).—all crafted in just 72 hours!

和你的笔友香子见面。她没有面容，没有表情，只有一片空白。游戏中你将花一天时间陪伴她，收集CG（以及其他秘密），看看她能否最终找回自己缺失的...某些东西。海量精美CG，优秀的配乐，一点令人困惑的幽默，轻度的存在主义危机。略带自嘲与若有若无的生存焦虑（如果这也能算卖点的话）——全部内容仅在72小时内完成创作！ Screenshot<em>2025-10-09-20-42-42-192</em>com.DefaultCom.jpg

How to play

This is a visual novel. Yes. A visual novel. Classic. Traditional. Old-school. All you do is point and click. Point. Click. Collect. Become the ultimate collector of… well, you’ll see.

Team

Game Design & Writing: UsuMidori

Programming: Huaqing

Character Design & Backgrounds: Edwithknife,LinWenyi

UI Design:LinWenyi

Cover Art& Sound Design: lululeila

Music: lululeila,ZelenkaS

**10/8 – Major Update ε(*･ω･)_/ﾟ:･☆**

(only on itch)

Reading experience UP

Text color changed to black for maximum readability.

Faster text speed!

Fixed those mysterious “□□” symbols—now you can actually read stuff!

More Kouko unlocked

Added 1 mysterious new sprite and 1 background illustration! (They were shy before and refused to show up.)

10/9 - Auto Mode added

(only on itch)

An auto-play mode has been added.

Fixed an issue where dual music was playing on the ending screen.

Added new sound effects for dialogues and puzzle collection.

Link	https://sarinstar.itch.io/kouko-ld58
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/kouko-galgame

Ratings

Overall	43^th	4.147⭐	36🧑‍⚖️
Fun	252^th	3.574⭐	36🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	331^th	3.338⭐	36🧑‍⚖️
Theme	145^th	4.088⭐	36🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	1^th	4.829⭐	37🧑‍⚖️
Audio	19^th	4.294⭐	36🧑‍⚖️
Humor	316^th	3.197⭐	35🧑‍⚖️
Mood	15^th	4.456⭐	36🧑‍⚖️
Given		28🗳️	48🗨️

Feedback

Exia Sun

Oct 06th · 22:19 UTC

I love the art style and graphic so much! Although lack a bit "collector" elements but rest are amazing!

Change0202

Oct 06th · 22:25 UTC

It is scaring sometimes,but a good story.:)

SergS Workshop

Oct 07th · 01:39 UTC

Great sound design with a mood soundtrack. The visual style, story, and artwork are all outstanding!

LAPSE

Oct 07th · 03:58 UTC

art is excellent

liumeishan

Oct 07th · 08:39 UTC

gal いいね！～～

Raymond_Soros

Oct 07th · 14:52 UTC

如此恐怖的肝力，好多CG！！72H真的辛苦了！！

Iriska

Oct 07th · 19:22 UTC

Its really hard to read white text with white background :((

Purrseus

Oct 07th · 19:22 UTC

Really impressive! The absoletely gorgeous artwork (!!) and the amazing soundscape tie the story together really well, what a great mood!

Some things I noticed:
The contrast between the light grey textbox and the white text is really low. You might want to increase it for accessibility purposes and reduced eyestrain. Often, squares appear in the dialog, I guess there are some missing symbols? Also, the text appeared way to slow for my personal reading speed, so I formed a habit of doubleclicking. Due to this I missed all the puzzle piece grapphics 🥲 Maybe some kind of failsafe for these scenes could be an addition to consider.

Anyway, you created something really special. It was a joy to experience!

GreenRadiation

Oct 07th · 19:27 UTC

A very interesting story and such a cool connection to the Collector theme. Great job!

gamebuilder

Oct 07th · 21:58 UTC

A remarkable story, no doubt there are layers of hidden meanings. Sadly I lacked patience, and ended up using the skip option at times, but that's just me. The artwork and music fit together very well. Overall, very creative, and very unusual.

duvdvan

Oct 08th · 01:12 UTC

I'm usually very biased towards visual novels, especially on the Ludum, since it's hard for me to be interested in just a story without some game elements, but here I can say with confidence that it was good! It's a short and sweet story (at least for me, since I got a good ending) with a great atmosphere, which was contributed by both visual style and musical accompaniment! Among the disadvantages, I can single out the fact that the text is very difficult to read due to its color (I would recommend making it more contrasting), and the slow speed of the text. Since I was constantly clicking to make the text faster, I accidentally missed the inserts with the collection of puzzles :( If you correct these points, everything will be great! Thank you for such a wonderful novel and good luck!

corruptde

Oct 08th · 09:08 UTC

Kinda hard to read because of the speed. the colour is ok, but it's rly uncomfortable to read especially if u usually do it fast. The artwork is very catching and it was nice to look at it. The plot is also good, actually kinda simillar to the game out team worked on :D
I had some triubles reading it in sense of text, it was splited in a weird way.
in particular, the game is nice. The vibe of it is anxiously-calming lol

HANASAKI

Oct 08th · 12:28 UTC

Love the story and the perfect artwork!!The idea of collecting moods is full of surpirse too.It amlost made me cry when I reach the end.

Ultraviolet

Oct 08th · 14:27 UTC

A very cute game. I like how the theme of collecting is explored! The art style is good. However, it seems that some symbols in the text have been replaced with squares.

🎤 UsuMidori

Oct 08th · 15:46 UTC

@iriska Thank you for your suggestion. We have changed the color to black. You can now experience the game again!

🎤 UsuMidori

Oct 08th · 15:51 UTC

@purrseus Thank you for your detailed and sincere feedback. We have changed the color, removed the □□, and accelerated the text display speed. Of course, the skip function still needs further optimization...

danicoredj

Oct 08th · 19:45 UTC

very good

Hap

Oct 08th · 20:00 UTC

Artwork is absolutely amazing! Only thing that made me enjoy less this experience was the text: sometimes it was too fast to read it and sometimes I accidently clicked and didn't read the phrase. I think that the typewriter animation doesn't serve well this type of dialogue.

marudziik

Oct 08th · 22:17 UTC

Oh god, am I a sucker for this type of game - poetic, narrative, emotional. I not *that* big on visual novels and they rarely work in LD format, but this one actually does.

I think the idea and theme adoption was clever, and the music and drawings illustrated the text very well. IMHO the interface could be more responsive (i felt not all clicks registered) and could be more aligned with the Ren'Py GUI standards of visual novels, but it's overall a very solid entry.

Maybe it's just me, maybe it's after Doki Doki - but for a while I was pretty sure Kouko will eat my face or something like that. 😱 I'm glad she didn't and that I made a friend in this journey.

I enjoyed playing very much, thanks. Congrats on your entry!

sakuraya

Oct 09th · 01:57 UTC

Super cool art style!!! I had seen it on social media before, but since it was an all-English story, I never had the courage to play it. However, I was still attracted by the style! The story was written very well. By the second chapter, I thought there would be some scary plots, but there weren't. Finally, I helped Kouko find her mood. Kouko is a lovely girl. While I was playing, I turned on the automatic mode, but because it would sometimes paused by me, it turned out that starting in automatic mode required manual operation later on, and not starting in automatic mode was actually the problem with the automatic mode itself.

SkySakura2005

Oct 09th · 05:22 UTC

Love this avg game!!! Art style is so cooool! And the story of collecting the emotion of kouko is so fun, I like the idea!

bzz_nsk

Oct 09th · 06:47 UTC

Cool idea and well done game! One thing I wanted to see the text more clearly, it's a bit light-hued for my taste. But overall style and idea are perfect! And the story is soooo classic but it same time deep. Thank you for this experience!

Huaqing

Oct 09th · 11:52 UTC

@bzz-nsk Thank you for your kind words! I've adjusted the color and font to make it more legible. It's now available on itch

Huaqing

Oct 09th · 12:09 UTC

@marudziik Sorry about that! I know the skip feature wasn't working smoothly. I have optimized the skip function on itch yestoday. By the way, it will automatically pause when skipping reaches key moments, such as background changes, music cues, or decision points.

Huaqing

Oct 09th · 12:12 UTC

@corruptde Thank you for your feedback! The launch was a bit rushed, but I've since fixed the issues you mentioned.

Huaqing

Oct 09th · 12:29 UTC

@sakuraya The auto-play worked correctly in my testing, only pausing at choices. There must be some instability in my code that's causing these bugs I didn't catch.

Ruolin Zhao

Oct 09th · 14:30 UTC

omg how did u guys finish it? it's crazyyyy, i love the idea and the story is so soft and touching

YuRenHuo

Oct 10th · 13:18 UTC

天呢！如此美丽的画面，我喜欢这个画风！音乐也是自己写的吗，感觉好好听，甚至不同场景有不同音乐！而且主题也很有意思！

Fin1717

Oct 10th · 15:32 UTC

没想到72h还能做出galgame！而且情节和沉浸感都很棒，音乐、美术搭配上文字的情绪气氛渲染很到位！尤其喜欢收集情绪的插画和动画效果，很有感觉~

Ginger_Kyoko

Oct 11th · 22:12 UTC

Wow! This is a truly great visual novel. It's amazing you finished it in three days. The sound, visuals, and narrative are amazing. I was so moved, thank you!
The text for me was quite readble, idk. And also if you wish to read the text faster just click on to it (not on to "skip")

Amiuke

Oct 13th · 14:03 UTC

喜欢你们的故事！不只是帮这个女孩找回情绪，更是通过陪伴了解一个灵魂真正的样貌。对于Collector 的主题很厉害的诠释！![Snipaste_2025-10-13_21-59-58.png](///raw/50e/36/z/6f5a1.png)

fusionnist

Oct 13th · 16:44 UTC

Very pretty drawings, I think the story idea worked great for the theme, along with being pretty original!!!

dasMaichen

Oct 13th · 18:27 UTC

I like to play visual novels! Very nice entry :)

LDJam user 372012

Oct 14th · 10:19 UTC

A breath of fresh air on this Ludum Dare. World needs games that help you reflect on your experiences

ellaris

Oct 16th · 09:27 UTC

Nice story, it was interesting to discover the story and collect this girls emotions. There were a few text errors (like no space between some words) and I would have liked for more text to appear on screen at once then having only a couple of words per click.

🎤 UsuMidori

Oct 23rd · 02:21 UTC

@marudziik Thank you very much for your detailed suggestions! We are very glad that you discovered Kouko's little secret (?!). Actually, we initially intended to create a psychological horror effect. Perhaps this content will be developed as a separate ending in the future (in an unpredictable distant future).