~ Yandere Simulator Review ~

I, like many zoomers who were given unregulated internet access as children, consider Yandere Simulator a core part of my childhood. It was a game I was once obsessed with. I read fanfics. I scoured the internet for fanart. I watched those retarded MMD videos. I desperately waited for drops of lore to be released from the developer.

And yet the game only recently got a second week. It’s been almost 12 years since the prototype build was released. And I honestly forgot the game existed until I watched that guy’s video on an entirely different game inspired by Yandere Simulator. Which is shocking, considering I was once part of the anti-YanDev brigade.

Yes. You read that right. I was one of the—I believe he called us—gremlins. Most of my memories of this game and its online shitstain flooded back to me during this YouTube rabbit hole deep dive. Games made in spite of YanDev, r/Osana, redesigns of both the characters and game entirely, etc.

Now I personally wasn’t a part of the drama. I was a full-time internet lurker until I turned 18. And I’m still a part-time lurker. But at the time, I read all of the shit going on. And while I can hardly remember most of it now, I do vaguely remember some stuff about the developer being creepy and he might’ve done some weird shit regarding minors. I don’t know.

Thankfully, that’s not what this review is about. This is going to pretty much only be about the game itself. I don’t have the energy, nor do I care enough to actually look back into the whole 2023ish Yandere Simulator drama.

But, without further ado, I give you my review of Yandere Simulator’s March 15th, 2026 Build.

Opening up the game

I was a little annoyed by my screen resolution not being on the graphics selector, but my resolution was in the settings of the actual game. I chose high quality, wondering if my laptop would even be able to handle the game. And to my shock, it worked mostly perfectly. I did turn off anti-aliasing—mostly because I think it makes games look less visually interesting—and fiddled with a few settings. Bloom was something I was grateful to be able to turn off. I’ve always hated the brightness and blurriness of it in every game that has it. Yes, even the ones people claim it’s used well in.

But I digress. Once actually starting the game, I was given options to choose a difficulty. I’m a new player, so I chose baby mode. Before moving on, I checked the other difficulty names and I was pleasantly surprised by the Yandere face changing from disinterested to full-blown crazy the harder the difficulty. It was a nice touch.

And so the game began. It started with a nice little cutscene on what’s wrong with the protagonist, Ayano. She’s what I call a BPDemon. A fictionalized and exaggerated version of someone with BPD. I mean I have friends with BPD and Ayano sounds like a person with a very fucked up version of it. She’s probably got psychopathy and maybe some OCD in there too. She's not seeing a therapist, so she may never get to the bottom of her mental illness. Maybe in another world, she gets help. But in this one, her mother encourages her mental delusions and eventually Ayano fixates herself on this random dude that bumped into her in the hallway of her school, Taro Yamada.

Before moving on I forgot to mention that I was able to customize Taro, or Senpai as he’s referred to most of the time (I forgot his name was even Taro before having to look it up). You get the option of a male or female senpai. Female senpai isn’t implemented though so male was the only option. The customization options weren’t as in-depth as I would’ve liked. I didn’t like that the color options for the hair and eyes were so ugly/vibrant. Also the hair I chose had a different texture than the others, and I preferred that one because the texture made the hair look slightly less ugly than the rest. The uniform choices were a bit boring. I went with the summer high school uniforms because I thought they were at least a little cute compared to the others.

So after all that, I can finally start the game. Well more like the tutorial. Of which I finished all but the final test. When it comes to the final test, you are supposed to put all your knowledge you have learned together and kill Kokona as stealthily as possible. I was unable to do so because unfortunately Kokona kept seeing me holding the circular saw before attacking her. And after three unsuccessful attempts, I figured I knew all that I needed to know and began the actual game.

Before starting the first day of the game, you’re shown multiple ways to get rid of Osana, the first rival. I think I would’ve preferred being shown the tutorial ways and then locked routes that you get a hint for before unlocking them and being able to see the picture for that elimination method. I hope that made sense. But basically having the simpler methods unlocked and available to see and then still being able to unlock the more complex ones, not necessarily being locked out of doing them.

I chose to wing it and finally started the real gameplay. You have a nice little bedroom where you can look at your Senpai Shrine, skip class, or change your panties. I only had one pair of panties so I explored the house a bit. In the basement there’s a postcard addressing Ayano’s mom from some random lady about going to America. And of course in the living room there’s a note saying Ayano’s mom has left for America. Coincidence? I think not. Ayano’s mom also mentions that she left some cash in the fruit bowl but she has no clue on how long she’ll be gone. Unfortunately for Ayano there’s only a measly $100 in the bowl. If Ayano’s mom expected Ayano to focus on her studies, she’s doing a shit job. I don’t see why her mom didn’t just set up a bank account and transfer money there each week. But I guess her mom is just kinda all around a terrible mother and her dad is complicit in the neglect because he’s a doormat.

The house doesn’t have much else. There’s a vanity where you can change Ayano’s hairstyle. I gave her straight bangs and the gyaru ponytail with a cute braid. I wish there was some more customization. Like choosing different socks, bracelets, piercings, tattoos, hair length, etc. Honestly I think my first big critique is the lack of customization. I mean I’m being teased with it so I figure there should be more. In school you can also change her demeanor. I liked the gentle demeanor but I was a little irked at Ayano’s lack of expression change. The only time she looks different is when taking selfies or laughing. I wouldn’t mind seeing a gentle smile if she has a gentle demeanor or an angry expression for the more brutish demeanors.

Assassinating Osana

Anyway, on day 1 I eavesdropped on Osana and Taro’s conversation. Some bullshit tsundere-baka stuff about lunch. And that’s when I decided to poison her lunch. Now I know there’s some lethal poison somewhere in the game, but I had no clue how to go about getting it. So I went to the garden club because I remembered the circular saw being in there and I’d need it anyway if I wanted to chop Osana up to dispose of her body. I stole the key from the garden lady—thankfully that wasn’t too hard. And what do you know, the rat poison was there too. So I grabbed the rat poison and tried grabbing the circular saw too, but couldn’t hide it so I just quickly moved it to a bathroom that I hoped would be the one that Osana ran to throw up in (I was right, thank god the pathing wasn’t crazy). No one saw me and so I was off to class. I wasn’t really sure what to put my points into so I chose physical, thinking I needed that to run with a corpse in hand. I didn’t because I was playing on baby mode, (but that didn’t stop me from walking most of the way to the incinerator and almost getting caught multiple times).

Now I was onto lunch and my plan was about to go into effect. I watched as Osana ate the poisoned bento (after her conversation with Taro) and ran to the girls’ bathroom. I drowned her. The perfect crime. If only I could find tarp. I spent the rest of lunch searching for tarp. (I would end up finding tarp the next week and wondering how I missed it when the garbage bags were right next to it) I almost gave up, but I eventually found garbage bags. I grabbed them thinking it was the same as the tarp. It wasn’t. Instead of hacking Osana up into tiny pieces, I put her body in a suspiciously body-shaped garbage bag. And I couldn’t figure out how to remove it so I tried to figure out a way to move this suspicious-ass body bag to the incinerator. And so I did the long process of walking the body through the school, alerting a bunch of classmates in the process and almost ruining my reputation.

Thankfully I finally made it to the incinerator where the delinquents were just finishing up their lunch and I finally realized I could run with the body in hand. I dumped Osana and boom, she was gone. I actually ended up coming across the manhole on my way to the incinerator and was going to dump Osana in there but I had no clue how to find a crowbar.

The next few days I leveled my skills and worked on my reputation. I joined the light music club thinking it might help my reputation. It hasn’t done anything from what I can tell, but the little music hairpiece is nice. I tried the little rhythm game and that shit was not easy. I’m not a pro at rhythm games but would it kill the developer to make the “easy” song actually easy?

I kinda got bored after killing Osana. There’s not much to do. I mean yeah you can talk to people, but there’s hardly any incentive. No new events play out from my knowledge. I mean there should be some cool event that happens if I befriend all my club mates right? But it’s also kinda boring to befriend them because like I said, not much incentive. Are they gonna somehow help me murder the next rival? Probably not.

Onto Amai

But I trudged along. I noticed that the school’s atmosphere was back to 100% which is nice to see that it can be fixed. So moving to Amai, I wanted to eliminate her using the matchmaking option. So I stalked her the entire day to hopefully find someone that might have an “unknown” crush lurking near her. Why it took me so long to realize it was the guy filling in for her as club leader is anyone’s guess. Okay I admit I forgot that I could ask people for tasks and figured that maybe befriending Amai and her friends/club members might help. And it did. But apparently I had to befriend all of them for this guy. Which sucked cause I could not, for the life of me, find Saki’s bra. Also I was hella confused about the carrot task. And then the ramen shop task wouldn't be done until the next day. So I was sweating a bit on whether I’d be able to do this elimination method or not. So I thought of a backup one. It would take a lot of gossip though. But it wasn’t the end of the world. If all else failed, Amai’s reputation would be terrible by the end of the week.

And of course I forgot to go to the ramen shop that night. (I would continue to forget.) Ruining Amai’s reputation was looking more and more like I’d have to follow through. On Wednesday I figured I was running out of time. But of course I fucked up befriending the last cooking club member, Ajia. This girl just did not like me. I ended up restarting the day and just getting Info-Chan to dump her interests onto me. Then I finally managed to befriend her and get Amai’s final social media account, her Sai.Space username.

I was on my way to matchmaking. I told the suitor what to change about himself and then got their relationship up a bit. And just in case I failed at matchmaking, I made sure to start gossiping about Amai to the bully girls and most of the people I had befriended. Just in case…

But I didn’t realize Amai would withdraw at -100 reputation. I thought Taro would just reject her. But to my shock the end of Thursday resulted in Amai saying sayonara to the school and never returning. Oh well. As they say, “all's well that ends well.” I mean, the suitor had wooed her pretty far, but it was too late. I jumped the gun a bit. On Friday the suitor was back to being the club leader. Although I couldn’t trigger his club leader dialogue so that seems like a bit of a bug. I was happy to see that I was still able to turn him back into the much cuter, original version of himself. Although I kept the tan and jewelry just to see what would happen only to remember it’s Friday, aka the last day of the game so far.

Playing Amai’s week got me interested in playing the rest of the game. Maybe it was because Osana was just too easy and therefore I had nothing to do for the rest of the week after I got rid of her. I think the developer should brainstorm some ideas to add something fun to the game. Kinda like how in farming games you can farm, but also you can fish, mine, etc. But it’d need to have an incentive to do such things. Like maybe gifting npcs? Maybe making befriending npcs a little harder? Not the rivals though. You only get a week with them. Unless the developer changes that to pad out the game more? I know that’s one of the main critiques of the game, feature creep. And while I do agree we don’t really need random minigames and anime lore, I wouldn’t mind more events with the students. More things to do with them. Anything to make them more interesting really.

And finally the ending cutscenes that lead into the third week were interesting. I can’t wait to eliminate Kizana. I wanna cause an accident in the middle of her play. That sounds like something fun to set up. Oh and the voice actor change (maybe it wasn’t a change, but Ayano sounded different to me) was kinda jarring, ngl. I figured they changed due to the developer drama.

But with the main gameplay finished for now, I was essentially done with the game. I might come back to add my thoughts on the 1980s Mode but for now, I think my thoughts on the main story are enough.

My final thoughts (for now)

I mean, I haven’t even finished going over everything I wanted to yet. Like I completely skipped over the graphics of the game. I was really happy to see that my shitty laptop was able to run the game fairly well. There were some lag spikes here and there but nothing major. The loading screen though. Those were… intense. The art style—I guess you would call it that—was quite nostalgic. Although I do dislike the faces of the characters. Especially Ayano’s. And there’s a few issues with the custom hair having a bald spot for any of the non-default bangs which annoyed me until I dyed Ayano’s hair blonde which kinda hid the problem. Another thing that annoyed me was the bigger boobs on the models. It looks so off. They’re too perky and almost jagged. It’s weird to look at.

But onto the positives. I really liked that Ayano’s underwear actually changed when you choose a different pair. As weirdly perverted it is as a feature, I appreciated any customization I got. And I kinda would prefer a second week with each rival and making progression harder. I think that would make the game less boring when you get rid of a rival super early like I did with Osana. Oh and it’d be interesting to do something with Raibaru after Osana’s gone. Like being able to pretend to help Raibaru investigate Osana’s disappearance or murder. That could be fun.

Oh and the soundtrack is really nice. The shopping district music is very fun to listen to.