The choices that you do get to make throughout the stories are one of two things: completely arbitrary or so important that they can prematurely end the game.
While this is fine for a visual novel, this becomes a little questionable from something that also calls itself a ‘dating sim’ or-even more brazenly-an ‘adventure’ game. Across each of these narratives, there are so few instances of player interaction (beyond clicking to continue the story and entering an optional name) that I could count them on one hand. There are also four short narratives, eight even shorter ‘dates’ (where you can see the birds in ‘human form’), and a collection of radio broadcasts. Holiday Star has four main narratives, which run for approximately half an hour each. If you enjoy clicking your mouse a lot while reading a collection of strange stories about pigeons, then Holiday Star is for you. I am the first to agree that interactive narratives can be fantastic games, but at what point does an interactive narrative become simply a narrative? Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star definitely sits more closely to the ‘visual novel’ end of the spectrum, which is fine, but that makes it difficult to rate in terms of ‘gameplay’.
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