I played The Patient S Remedy and I have strong feelings about it. Let's talk about it! Warning for allusions to adult content without going into too much detail.
I went into this game expecting the garish extravagance of Hadaka Shitsuji. With Hadaka Shitsuji, you know exactly what you're getting. It's literally called "Naked Butlers," c'mon. There's really not much quiet contemplation. It's lurid crushed velvet and gauche gold leaf in a McMansion rented out for adult films. It's like The Aristocrats of visual novels, and I mean this positively. Sure, it does have its subtle, gentle moments, but it's a very "in-your-face" game. And I love it. The brashness is the appeal, at least to me.
I opened The Patient S Remedy, I was expecting, like, the hospital version of that. Again, I do love that. But somehow, I feel the understatedness and the emptiness of the hospital ended up working better than what I was expecting, especially combined with the melancholy inherent to knowing you're about to die, and knowing that you can't do anything to stop your own death, but still wanting to help someone else before you do. It was a really bad idea to play it all in one day, especially because I was full-on ugly sobbing by the end.
First of all, Souta was a much more likable protagonist than Tomoaki. Likable protags aren't everything, but much like everything else about Hadaka Shitsuji, Tomoaki was way over-the-top, and ultimately became grating when playing a several-hour long game. I got through Patient S much faster than Hadaka, in part because there seems to be less endings and less days and less text, but unlike Tomoaki, who began getting on my nerves about 3 hours in, I never once got tired of Souta, even at his most devilish.
This is in part due to how the plot develops compared to Hadaka. It feels much more organic to me, and a lot more grounded. At least to me, the relationships had much more substance to them in part due to the circumstances bringing the characters together. And the scenes that are just Souta thinking and coming to terms with his body are so well-done compared to the ones in Hadaka.
The ending was a little "meh" but I feel like the foreshadowing prior made a lot of things click. Unfortunately, I can't say more without spoiling things! I wish they had explored/explained two of the endings more, because they felt like they came out of left-field.
(Also the H-scene music was a bit grating after a little while -_- same for some of the word choices used by MangaGamer, though still better than it could have been.)
MED'S AWESOME SCORE:
4/5, a solid game!