I started up Yofukashi no Uta, the 'vampire girlfriend' anime. I thought it might be relatable since it's about a protag that is socially troubled, and stays up late at night wondering when life is gonna stop sucking shit, while letting the night soothe his anxiety as he walks around town. However, I'm very disappointed in the show and rage quit it near the end of episode 3. Just more fanservicey, wish-fulfillment trash.
I feel like I could write a short essay just on those 3 episodes, but it'd just be a lot of rage-against-the-coomers for setting up a plausibly interesting premise, and then underdelivering, because laser focusing on the relationship (and crotch) of this Haruhara Haruko-wannabe vampire girl is just SO much more important! The story and world-at-large aren't allowed to complexify and become interesting because it would interfere in the ?romance? between this nebulously old vampiress and a 14 yr old boy. Perhaps the show gets better, who knows, because it sure knows how to alienate a viewer that is spending more than two braincells to actually think about what is going on and not just ogling the petite OC waifu.
In anime adjacent experiences, I played "S4U: CITYPUNK 2011 AND LOVE PUNCH Demo" on steam. A game where you act as the mouthpiece for clients who pay you to pretend to be them and speak on their behalf. It's a visual novel at its heart, but the actual story occurs diegetically on a computer using an old chat program. You navigate the computer and select whom to talk to, you 'pretend' to type responses by actually mashing on your keyboard, and then either hit Enter, or backspace if you want to type something else. There's only ever 1 to 3 responses to any given bit a dialogue, so yeah, basically a visual novel, but I found it immersive and interesting. There also seems to be various stories and relationships occurring simultaneously and you can be flipping back and forth between conversations very quickly, just like if you were texting multiple people simultaneously in real life. The "Mouthpiece" job is explicitly just a side-hustle for the protagonist, who's actual day job is as a building architect for some company that she doesn't like and seemingly doesn't pay her enough. Our Protag's ultimate goal is to save up 50,000 dollars, and money trickles in on a job-by-job basis, so it would seem this is a long term goal and the game would go on for a while.
The world seems kind of bleak and interesting. The demo didn't go into great detail, but there was also something called "Cyber Life" which are implied to be AI's that live in cyberspace, but they count as people and so have their own autonomy, and their own bills to pay.
The full game isn't out yet, it seems that it was a Chinese game that was released some time ago and is just now getting localized to English. I look forward to it, the demo was very interesting.