Since their inception a couple of short months ago, kjorteo's weekend broadcasts of Hatoful Boyfriend have become one of the highlights of my week (and, I imagine, a pretty unforgettable weekly experience for everyone else who watches them as well). Initially, we were prepared just to laugh at a charming and slightly tacky pigeon-dating game, but none of us were prepared for just how comprehensively mad this game is in breadth as well as depth - and how it continues to impress and terrify us with how much deeper it's going every time it's turned on.

Once, this was the culmination of the game's madness. Now it's just the tip of the iceberg.

We're now in the sort of Silent Hill possessed darkworld version of the game, which reveals itself when you complete all the other chapters - the game's name changes to Hurtful Boyfriend, the protagonist is killed, with her head stuffed in a box and the rest of her delivered in bite-sized portions to the rest of the school, and you have to play as one of the other characters and investigate the murder like a bird-filled episode of Inspector Morse made with the aid of amphetamines. But this week I was to become a greater part of the insanity - I was away at PAX East on Saturday and so missed our weekly recommended portion of the game, and to make up for it I was coerced (after honestly not a whole lot of convincing) to broadcast my own playthrough as I caught up to the place the others had left off - an effort that spanned five chapters in two one-hour sessions.

Part 1 - A 13-minute pause, some audio-related windows flying around, and then chapters 1-3 (without the introduction)

Part 2 - Chapters 4 to 5 and a half

The game provides you with some Japanese names to imagine as the voices, and a drama CD is or was actually/has been being produced, though this is hardly the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past-present impossible never tense (it's sometimes quite difficult to tell what's going on through the author's filter of madness) - though I can't say what the characters were intended to sound like as I do not have a clue who any of these people are. Therefore, my limited ability for impressions was taken frankly to beyond breaking point as I found myself switching rapidly back and forward between various silly accents to narrate a complete cast of frantic talkative pigeons.

• Ryouta: My own unaltered (though increasingly stressed) voice.
  


• Sakuya: I had a lot to live up to for the aloof, contemptuous Sakuya, and started off with my own attempt at the accidental Liquid Snake soundalike that kjorteo had accidentally elevated to classic status, meaning that this was a British person attempting to sound like an American attempting to sound British. This degenerated into just something vaguely posh later on, though I was slightly perturbed to discover on playback that both of these variants left my normal voice basically unchanged.
  


• Kazuaki: I was expecting to have to do snoring noises at least once during this session, but his narcolepsy appears to have been cured for this part of the game! I attempted a sort of doddery, absent-minded Patrick Moore-alike for him, but within about half an hour he had become David Mitchell.
  


• The library bird whose name always escapes me: Squall Leonhart. This was another one that Kjorteo did by accident on first meeting him, and I could only follow suit by sounding dull, despondent and as flat as if he'd just been run over by a steamroller.
  


• Yuuya: After some floundering here, I had tried to give him a calm, floaty sort of Pierce Brosnan lilty voice, only to find that he had now been christened "Stoner Yuuya" in the livestream chat as a direct result of my efforts. That's about as good as this one is going to get.
  


• Shuu: The technique is simple - clamp your teeth together not quite closed, and speak without allowing your lips to touch your gums, drawing out all closed-lip sounds mmmmmmmmmelodramatically. You now sound like Alan Rickman - or at least, like the Potter Puppet Pals' interpretation of Severus Snape.
  


• Oko-san: I was encouraged to do a full Brian Blessed for this energetic dove, but I couldn't oblige because my parents-in-law are staying with us and my basement office is not blessed with a door. After some attempts at that sort of whispered shout that you do when you're giving the impression of shouting without wanting people around you to think you're crazy, I realized someone who was perfect for his obsession with speed and powerrrrr - unfortunately, I only got to use it on the single line he had in the entire second half!
  


• Anghel: Bombastic and a tad insane - as you might expect from those requirements, this immediately turned into Tom Baker (or would have, had I the ability to do so). Now that I come to think of it, he could just as easily be voiced by Sammy Thunder of Limozeen.
  


• One: A bit of a surprise for this one, starting near the beginning of part two. It certainly surprised me when it happened, anyway - apologies once again to Kjorteo, specifically for the distribution of pizza over his monitor and keyboard.

Now I'm looking forward to seeing how everyone else coped with that same session as told through our regular narrator's eyes - something that I'll watch this week before the impending grand finale this weekend. It's been an incredible journey - perhaps we will yet emerge intact.

And then we'll have to do the sequel.