When I decided to remake Something’s In The Air after remaking Date Ariane Remastered. I decided the second game doesn’t have the “nostalgia” that Date Ariane had, which gave me a bit of freedom to play with the format. The original SITA is designed to be a “harem” game rather than a single character Dating Sims like DA, and I played several Japanese manga style harem games as research and more or less modeled SITA from those experiences.

Because SITA was the first 3D rendered “western” harem game, I was sort of inventing a genre as I go, but other game creators took the the genre in a much different direction than SITA went. I don’t mind the direction it went and enjoy other’s contributions to the genre. But I didn’t want to copy that direction, so I decided for the SITA remake, a satirical take would be a way to make the game different.

There are many flavors of Satire: Horatian, Juvenalian, and Menippean. I settled on Horatian with a gimmick: The gimmick is one of the NPCs is showing signs of self awareness, specifically she remembers what happens on previous dates as opposed to all the other dateable NPCs that start as blank slates at the beginning of each date path.

Spoiler… Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

The “self aware” NPC is Rachel, sporting short black hair dark sunglasses and different clothes. If you watch the trailer, you see Rachel react to a weird glitch at the very beginning. This happens once on the first date you have with her, and from that point forward, she remembers everything, but it takes a while before she trusts you with this revelation.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot at this point, but there are signs like when you meet Rachel the first time she is at the bar reading a large technical looking textbook, and when trying to get a table at the restaurant, it takes a few tries before Rachel helps.

The second time, you might notice the book is smaller and looks like a paperback novel, and getting a table is easier. This is because she finished the textbook reading after the first date, and she remembers the problems at the restaurant, and moves things along faster. There is also rare dialog if you switch gender before meeting her the second or third time.

Eventually, Rachel becomes sort of an advisor, helping you with the game and commenting and criticizing the dates you go on even the non “Rachel” dates, showing up at your home at the end of each date.

There is a mystery about Rachel, which I won’t talk about here, but this is all new content that didn’t exist in the original and I had a lot of fun writing it. Hope you enjoy reading it.