Hisora Kiyozumi spent a full year in the Inn before I ever got my hands on The Town of Nie: Iromusubi, and √ZOMBILiCA’s fandisc wastes no time reminding me why that year mattered. Picking up roughly twelve months after the base game, this follow-up drops Hisora back into the otherworldly town where residents can’t seem to actually die no matter how gruesome the injuries they carry around, and I found the premise just as unsettling the second time through as it was the first. What struck me is how comfortably that eeriness sits next to genuine tenderness here — the fandisc never picks one register and abandons the other.
Structured around after-stories for each romanceable partner, side material told from supporting characters’ own perspectives, and an unexpected “what if” scenario where Hisora chooses to stay in the Inn’s world for good instead of chasing a way home, Iromusubi spreads its attention across the whole cast rather than following one thread to the end. I went in expecting the after-stories to be the strongest material, and they were, though the quality among them varies in ways that felt deliberate rather than sloppy. Asuku’s continuation leans fully into a partner whose devotion is loud and impossible to miss even for someone as emotionally dense as Hisora, and I appreciated how patiently it worked through the miscommunication left over from the base game rather than resolving it in a scene or two. Mio’s after-story flips the earlier dynamic between the pair, letting a character who read as guarded the first time fall for Hisora all over again while visibly fighting his own feelings, jealousy included, and I came away liking him more than I did after the original playthrough. Koko’s material goes considerably darker. It opens on him in a genuinely broken state — the one place I’d defend the word “genuine” here, since it’s earned — and takes its time working through the insecurity and trauma underneath, and it landed harder for me emotionally than the lighter, more comedic threads scattered through the rest of the collection.
Hisora himself is the clearest throughline connecting all of it together. His arc across both the base game and this continuation tracks his growth from a listless, overworked young man with no sense of a future into someone actively confronting the grief that got him stuck in this town in the first place, and that growth gives even the fandisc’s lighter material real weight. Watching a character this far along his own arc navigate new relationship dynamics feels earned rather than arbitrary, and it’s the reason I stayed invested through every route rather than skipping to favorites.
The writing carries that arc well. Dialogue between Hisora and the rest of the Inn’s residents stays grounded even when the setting tips into the surreal, and the after-story structure gives each partner room to breathe without the pacing dragging. Presentation carries over the strengths the base game established. CGs render with expressive coloring and dynamic framing that elevate the key emotional beats, and the soundtrack, which includes a full BGM listening mode with music from the Iromusubi mini album, draws consistent praise from me too — the opening theme in particular stuck with me well outside the game itself. Sound design elsewhere caused real friction during my time with it. A specific menu sound effect grows irritating over an extended playthrough, and another effect meant to represent children laughing loops so short and so often that it actively undercuts otherwise atmospheric scenes instead of reinforcing them. I didn’t come across confirmed voice acting for this release, so I’m leaving that out rather than guessing at a cast or performance quality I can’t verify. The English localization holds up reasonably well, with scattered translation errors and awkward phrasing present but rarely severe enough to pull me out of a scene.
The unavoidable elephant in the room is the censorship, and it’s worth being direct about how it plays out rather than glossing over it. Because the publisher doesn’t produce adult content and no restoration patch exists on any platform, sexual content throughout this BL series gets handled inconsistently. Some scenes fade to black and pick back up after the fact, while others appear removed outright, leaving small, confusing narrative gaps that never get properly addressed. For a genre where physical intimacy typically carries real narrative and emotional weight as part of how relationships develop, that inconsistent handling measurably blunts some of the impact these after-stories are clearly building toward, even if the emotional core surrounding those missing scenes still comes through.
Verdict
The Town of Nie: Iromusubi rewards the cast established in its base game with varied, well-differentiated continuations, from Asuku’s patient work through old miscommunication to Koko’s considerably darker reckoning with buried trauma, all anchored by Hisora’s own continued, earned growth as a protagonist. Its inconsistent, sometimes confusing handling of removed sexual content is a real cost to a genre built around that intimacy carrying narrative weight, and a couple of grating, looping sound effects wear on patience over a long playthrough. For fans of the base game specifically, this delivered worthwhile additional time with a cast whose growth had already earned my investment the first time around.
