I finally got around to finishing MiSide, and it's easily the best story-based horror game I've played in years. Due to the nature of this game, my review will contain a few spoilers. It's a 3-4hr story game so it's not like I can't spoil stuff, I have a section at the bottom where I interpret the ending that I saw so you can skip to that if you've already beat the game. If there are other endings, I've not seen them.
The premise of the game is your character, a remote tech worker that has absolutely no life, downloads one of those companion games where you take care of an ai girl, and after about a month of playing it, gets sucked into the game world by Mita, the girl character in the game.
This opening sequence is really one of the best written things I've ever seen in a game. I went into it not really expecting it to be a horror game. The title screen is friendly and cute, and your only hint about the upcoming horror is a slightly creepy sound effect that plays as the days in the intro count up.
Soon after being transported into the game, you meet Mita, and after completing a few tasks with her, like playing minigames, cooking, etc. your character gets creeped out by the weird noises coming from her closet. The "good ending" of the game can actually be reached here if you went out of your way to fully embrace Mita and not go against her / get curious about the strange stuff around her house.
Despite doing almost everything Mita wanted, I missed out on one tiny detail, which was to fix the "I Love You" magnets on her fridge that fall off during a creepy event sequence. This is the only task not directly linked to her instructions, so actually pulling it off is probably something you won't do naturally unless you're really invested in Mita from the start.
My interpretation of that sequence is that if you got everything right to achieve the good ending of your own accord, you're likely fully cooked in some way. You have a complete lack of curiosity and a ridiculous level of devotion that would have you get absolutely mentally destroyed by an irl girl.
Following the prologue, your goal is to escape the game by reaching the world's core. Along the way, you meet several different Mitas, including a good one whom your character forms a bit of a bond with, while being pursued by the evil one you met in the prologue. Gameplay from hereon switches between horror sections where sprinting is enabled, relatively easy puzzle solving, and a few decent minigames. There's no combat, aside from some of minigames, so most of the horror elements stem from jump-scares and atmosphere.
Surprisingly, most of the 4hrs of gameplay takes place in the same four rooms that make up Mita's house, but it changes so much that you never feel bored with the setting. It reminds me a lot of Withering Rooms in that sense, another horror game I played last year.
The design decisions and aesthetic are easily 10/10. Every detail, from the subtilties' animations, where they appear dynamically in 3D space + in the pause menu if you missed any, to the unique 3D anime art-style, are perfect.
Overall I highly recommend buying + replaying it.
SPOILERS ON THE ENDING
The game ends on weird note, Mita forces your character to live through 999 days of his irl life, which we can see to an absolute dystopia. He just wakes up, eats ramen, and works at his PC from morning to night, then goes to sleep again. He never mentions having any family, friends, or interests outside of the game that got him trapped in the digital world.
I think it's safe to say that living inside of the game world, no matter how confined or scary it may seem, is exponentially better than whatever he was doing with his life, if you can even call it that.
I wish the developer would've included an option to remain in the game world after that scene, but at the same time, I can understand why someone would choose complete isolation and tedium over something exciting. In general, the more you do something, the easier it becomes.
If you cut yourself off from the world for years, that just becomes your nature, and returning to it to establish connections with people feels overwhelming and perhaps even worse than your current situation.
I think that's the message they were going for, as I find it hard to believe that most loners in his situation wouldn't at least try to stay in the game world.