NICE TO MEET YOU, AGAIN Review

A nostalgic time-travel romance that blends mystery, emotion, and melancholy choices.

Sakaki Kasa, a publisher of emotionally deep stories such as Kinkoi: Golden Loveriche, AMBITIOUS MISSION, and EVE: Rebirth Terror, wrote the 2025 graphic book NICE TO MEET YOU, AGAIN (Japanese: Nandameka no Hajimemashite) with Purplesoft. The project also included character designs and sketches by artist COQ, who has worked on such titles as Aoi Tori, Amatsutsumi, Kunado Chronicles, and Hapymaher.

This partnership for a game that mainly relies on story-driven characters, emotional tension, and stunning design sets a tone. Sekai Project published the game in English on Steam on May 21, 2026. With this release, more people around the world can experience the game's time-travel romance story — not just in Japan, where it first came out in 2025. Supported languages: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese.

Purplesoft tends to create longer and more complex epics, such as Kunado Chronicles and Aoi Tori. But this entry is intended to be simpler, with a single heroine tale and branching endings, not large, complex pathways. That design adjustment makes a huge difference in the game's feel: compact, emotionally charged, and technically difficult to complete.

Kinou Yumeto, a 30-year-old salaryman who never has fun and only works, is the center of the story.

His days are spent working at a job that means nothing to him, and at night, he numbs himself with meaningless pleasure. Then the sense of being stuck is unexpectedly dispelled when he finds a bizarre iron ring that conjures up a monster-like entity named Lapla.

Lapla has a bizarre proposition: he can return 13 years in the past and live the best week of his high school life. Yumeto accepts, and he wakes up in his younger self’s body, thrust back into a world of friends, carefree youth, and everything he knew. Firstly, it’s liberating — straightforward exchanges with friends, leisure time at school, it’s like an emotional rehab from the strains of adulting.

But when Yumeto meets Choumai Sui, a girl everyone believes is from his previous life, the illusion of ease swiftly crumbles. Yumeto has no memory of her at all. This inconsistency is the novel's fundamental mystery. Yumeto digs further into it, and the story slowly becomes a multi-layered look at identity, memory, and cause and effect.

There's no playing about with time travel, unlike Steins; Gate, where you need to avoid paradoxes. It’s more spiritual questions: what happens to a person when they modify their past? If memories are different in different eras, which "self" is real? As Yumeto’s connection with Sui increases, so does the tension, from love to bewilderment to existential unease.

Sui is not a “love interest,” but a person with complicated feelings and deep thought. They grow close because they went to the same school, but their relationship is always at risk because one of them may not fit in the time period they live in. The game’s emotional heft derives from its blend of romance, mystery, and philosophical science fiction. The pacing is incredibly tight, and the discoveries are spaced to keep the reader guessing and give them time to ponder the topics.

Since NICE TO MEET YOU, AGAIN is a visual novel, there isn't a 'regular' way to battle or solve riddles. The central gameplay loop revolves around reading story snippets and making choices that lead to varied outcomes. The structure is a primary path that leads to various endings, including a horrible one, a normal one, and a true epilogue.

The “challenge” of the game is not to explore freely or play with skills, but to navigate its branching logic correctly and pursue all required story pathways. 

One essential aspect of the design is that expansion is bounded by completion criteria. Before players can witness the final true ending, they have to see all the bad endings, regular endings, and some event sequences (H-scenes are optional). This completes a loop, where earlier parts should be replayed.

In real life, gaming is about making choices and going down your own path: Some options have immediate, terrible consequences and are usually dead ends in the tale. Other choices offer other avenues or affect things in later scenes. Some story flags don't show up until after you have read all the endings.

In a sense, the game turns “progression” into a mechanism to recall memories. Instead of XP or leveling up, a player’s progress is determined by how far down the talent tree they’ve gone. Finishing a tale is like “collecting experiences,” in that it offers you access to more information and the ending.

This way, you can explore extensively, but it can grow monotonous as you have to go back and make choices you've already made. It ensures that the ultimate payoff is achieved only after thoroughly investigating all the story's thematic variations.

NICE TO MEET YOU, AGAIN has no action, no puzzles, no fighting. The closest we come to “mechanical tension” is that it contains branching decision points and terminating conditions. PurpleSoft’s design approach for this game is to have no gameplay mechanisms beyond story-based decisions. It’s not about external challenges; it’s about the internal repercussions of the story. They are more an interpretation than a mechanical chore, each “challenge”.

There are good and bad aspects to this design choice: The good news is that it keeps the immersion centered on character development and story pacing. The player is never at a loss for developing their feelings or pondering the game's topics. On the other hand, it takes away the depth of involvement for players who enjoy various styles of play beyond reading and decision-making. Also, the fact that you need to earn endings in order can make the game feel restrictive rather than open-ended.

There is no typical way to grow.

No leveling up. No mechanics that rely on skill. Instead, the story is the only driver of success. The game appears like the other Purplesoft games already released. The character designs are soft, round, and expressive with a somewhat sparkly sheen that aids in reading emotions in close-ups. The settings evoke melancholy lighting and holiday memories, carrying the game's themes of remembering and passing through time.

Choumai Sui’s character is visually emphasized throughout. Her CG compositions often portray her as emotionally close to Yumeto. Her attention to her pictures helps convey her importance to the tale. There are two types of CG art: slice-of-life classroom interactions with warm lighting. The story has dramatic elements, with significant variation between romantic and private scenes, leaning towards fan service.

The game usually has nice graphics, but there are instances where it overrelies on character fan-service imagery to the point that it makes the more serious aspects of the tale feel out of place. But the art direction is consistent, so the universe feels visually cohesive and emotionally grounded. The music matches the emotional rhythm of the game with a restricted but expressive palette of sounds.

Instead of relying on just dramatic songs, the music often incorporates gentle piano arrangements, ambient sounds, and sorrowful motifs to enhance peaceful moments. Some tracks use lighter tonal shifts to punctuate hilarious or awkward transitions, others to provide emotional weight to critical story points. 

Yumeto, the silent protagonist, has no voice acting, a common feature in this genre. However, all the main characters do. Toda Megumi brings a subtle, emotionally complex performance to Sui's voice. Mizuhashi Kaori's voice for Lapla has a more distant, businesslike tone, making her even more out of this world. Yumeto is not a standard self-insert character, which makes it a little more difficult to get into emotional dialogue moments without a vocal main character.

NICE TO MEET YOU, AGAIN is a tightly packaged visual novel that mixes love stories, puzzles, and philosophical time travel tales into a short yet emotionally rich experience.

What I love most about this is the way the story unfolds, progressively revealing Choumai Sui's enigma while simultaneously posing questions about identity, memory, and continuity across time.

The game’s gameplay is deliberately simplistic, emphasizing branching choices and achieving the story’s ending rather than mechanical engagement. This creates a focused tale experience, but it also leads to repetition as routes and endings have to be replayed again and again. The game has a very Purplesoft look and sound, yet some players may find the tone is off-kilter when there are large amounts of fan-servicey cutscenes.

The Sekai Project will bring the game to global audiences shortly, giving it a chance to reach more players who appreciate character-focused visual novels with strong emotional and existential themes. At its root, the story is about second chances, both in terms of time and what it means to be different versions of yourself.