A question which in 1988 was meant to be rhetorical. But if this game had existed at the time, they wouldn't even have felt the need to ask.

How we laughed. Then cried. Then did both at the same time. Then booked ourselves into the nearest mental institution.

A long and arduous journey came to an end this weekend, as kjorteo streamed the very last section of Hatoful Boyfriend along with his audience/support group. After a three-and-a-half-hour marathon to finish off the last chapters, we have finally emerged with only the slightest of mental scars to share between us, and quite possibly a new respect for what the visual novel genre can do to people.

When I spoke about this last time, I said that it was a sort of pigeon dating simulator, but really the only thing that it simulates is your brain being gradually torn to pieces and stamped on by a steroids-addled bird screaming about it being a foul debasement of pudding. The author, known to us as Moa, was asked where she got the inspiration to make it, and replied that she just loved pigeons and wanted other people to love them too. This description deserves to go down in history as one of the great classics of understatement - it falls so short of giving any impression of this game that I can't believe she's not in on it and deliberately winding us up. But then, perhaps it's better not to try to explain it any further, because I don't think any words have been invented to adequately describe this game.

Part of why I feel the need to talk about it again after completing it is that it turned into a completely different game from the one that I thought we were playing. I went in expecting a silly game about dating pigeons, and while the game certainly delivered on that, I wasn't prepared for the sheer breadth and depth of insanity with which we would eventually be presented. And it doesn't just impress you with its level of lunacy and leave it there - it raises the bar on every single new storyline you encounter, even when the bar is already halfway up a space elevator and the ground isn't even visible any more. During the game, you peel layers and layers back, diving deeper into this onion of madness, until eventually you reach the centre and you find that even that is much bigger than you ever expected...

I'm aware that it will seem patently ridiculous to compare this to the end of Blackadder IV, but nevertheless that is what I'm about to do - it's because comedies have the greatest amount of space in which to swing their mood. This thing is... it tricks you. It's like one of those ancient masters from kung fu films who pretend to be senile, harmless comic relief before suddenly jumping four hundred feet and cutting your head off with a karate chop - it acts daft and allows you to fall in love with these characters, and then suddenly - just when you think you've finished it all - the game does roughly what the writers of Reboot did about two series in. Namely, it goes completely psychotic and throws you into a storyline of tragedy, comedy, horror and absurdity, switching between those emotions within minutes of each other in the rare moments where it's not provoking all of them at the same time.

If this game were in need of a subtitle, "Don't ask" would be quite a good one.

And that constitutes the greatest bait-and-switch of genre and storyline that I've seen in any game ever made. Suddenly, the entire game is revealed to be just an introduction, a collection of scenes played out with these characters before it allows you to progress to the real story. The writing is much cleverer than it has ever let on up to this point through its apparently random gibbering, making things that you learned before suddenly meaningful - we all laughed when Professor Snoozebag excused something by saying he fell asleep in a washing machine, and then forgot about it - but then much later on at the end of the game, you suddenly realize exactly what he was covering up, and you feel like you've just laughed at somebody's singing voice just before being told that they're deaf.

It's because of springing things like this on you suddenly that the game delivers the kind of mental knocks usually only achievable by flinging your brain down three flights of stairs. You're laughing at me right now thinking how impossible it is that a game with these stupid pigeon cutouts could ever provoke any feeling except vague disorientation. But it's only once you've reached the very end that you realize just how much you've been strung along by the author and her cunningly laid trap, and how brilliant this game is for it.

Now that we won't be gathering each Saturday to have our sanities kicked in by birds, I really want to continue the tradition with another game, but the trouble is we've started too high and that nothing - nothing can top this. Like diamonds, the only thing that could upstage a Hatoful game is another Hatoful game.

This just announced: The requested "fling money at Moa" button is available here! Press it as much as possible!