The University Life GalGame I'm Planning — Notes from the Trenches

“Let us settle this equally — by the height of our diplomas.”

About the Game

Score release. College application. You think it’s the start of something new — but it is a carefully designed piece of black humor. In Let Us Settle This by the Height of Our Diplomas, you play an ordinary university freshman, and from the moment you fill out your application form, every choice nudges you toward a different ending. The genius who plays lectures at 3× speed. The silent classroom. Mountains of filler courses and pointless activities. Formality and bureaucratic cells everywhere… Layer by layer the halo falls off, and you can only watch yourself slide toward some terminal point.

This is a visual-interactive novel soaked in tragedy, despair, dark humor, hell jokes and ultimate edgelord taste. It comes with multiple endings: the Fall Line, the Surrender Line, the Million-Yuan Salary Line, plus a hidden True Ending and a Bad Ending.

Take the classmate who ended up in some watery “International Relations”-style major at a 211 in Liaoning — memorizing foreign place names, living a filler-course life, dreaming of transferring majors but burning out under Hengshui-style pressure, eventually scraping the edge of academic probation. That classmate is a portrait of your possible self.

Features

• Realistic College-Application Simulator. Based on your high-school background, scores, whether you survived Hengshui-style training, your family’s situation and more, the game generates a personalized admission result using historical admission lines as reference. (Wrong major + poor family conditions + broken high-school mental state = express lane to a bad ending. Our job is to perfectly and deeply portray the numbing process of such a college student.)
• Progressive Disillusionment Engine. The university halo sheds itself week by week — from shock (the lecturer reading the script verbatim) to numbness (filler courses becoming routine), to finally learning to fight formalism with formalism.
• Economy-Cycle Simulator. The in-game graduate job market moves with the real economy; your major may have flipped from hot to dead by the time you graduate, and your expected monthly salary may collapse from ¥15,000 to ¥5,000, or just pop up a tip: “Consider flexible employment.”
• Mental-State Dashboard. Involution index, despair value, zen-mode buffs all update in real time. High stress triggers late-night emo scenes, and pulling consecutive all-nighters may unlock the “Edge of Sudden Death” achievement.
• Relative-Pressure System. Family group-chat one-upmanship, elders’ civil-servant obsession, interrogations during New Year visits — every unread message eats your SAN value.
• Multi-Branch, Multi-Ending. Every half-hearted skip of a filler class, every compromise with bureaucratic procedure, accumulates into a butterfly effect that eventually funnels into a completely different life.
• Romance, club, and useless-activity subsystems that fill your college life with pointless busywork — by the end of the day you are exhausted and discover absolutely nothing got done.

Sample Endings

The Fall Line

You scrape through four years of make-up exams and grab the diploma. Recruiting season: two hundred resumes sink without a trace. You start delivering food and discover three master’s graduates and five bachelor’s graduates at the same station. At night, in a 10-square-meter partitioned room, you scroll Douyin and see a headline — “Youth unemployment rate no longer published.” You tap “like,” then keep fighting for tomorrow’s lunch rush.

The Surrender Line

You pass the civil-service exam on the third try and finally land a township post — ¥3,800 a month, rotating between pandemic duties,文明城市 inspections, fire prevention and flood prevention. Every day is filling in forms, building ledgers, and welcoming inspections. At thirty, you drain six wallets for the down payment on a presale apartment; two years later, the developer walks away. You still repost positive-energy articles every day, because that is your job.

The Million-Yuan Salary Line

Junior year, you pivot to coding. Senior year, you join a big tech company. Ten years later, you are P8 with a million-yuan salary plus options. At thirty-five, at 2 a.m., you run a hand over your thinning hair, see a college classmate who quit to open a B&B in Dali, and want to reply “so jealous” — but DingTalk pops up an emergency meeting. At forty, your name is at the top of the layoff list, and the mortgage still has twenty-five years to run.

Taglines

• “Let us settle this equally — by the height of our diplomas.”
• “You can’t out-involve me. Believe it?”
• “Finals week: please pass me, teacher.”
• “How come university goes strict-in, loose-out? That is just evil.”