Dude, it's the fucking pigeon game.
When I tell people I honestly like HB, they ask me why. I ask them if they really want to know.
If they do, I start with telling them that HB was a trick. A good trick. Infamous as the 'pigeon dating game', a visual novel set in a post-apocalyptic world in which one of the few surviving humans has just started attending an elite school for sentient birds, Hatoful Boyfriend was released on April 1, 2011. Because it was released on April Fool's Day, most people (naturally) assumed the game was a joke. It looked like a funny joke, so quite a few people paid its modest cost and began playing. They found that, despite the silly premise, the game was written with a lot of heart. It was also solidly made, too; maybe a little too thoroughly done for a joke game.
Anyone who stuck it out and played long enough learned that the 'joke' of releasing a secretly good pigeon dating game on April Fool's Day was an actual fucking fake-out. The real trick is the fact that the entire dating game, with eight full routes and multiple endings on those routes, is a prologue to an embedded, connected horror games that unlocks once you're finished at least four routes and hits like a truck.
Hatoful boyfriend is a horror game pretending to be a dating game. The dating game is silly fun; the horror game is pretty good, tbh.
Do I think it's some kind of unappreciated masterpiece? Heavens, no. But as a horror fan who just fucking thirsts for being surprised by horror again and hates the fact that I can't get at horror without having to dodge a million spoilers and/or content warnings on the way, which deaden the actual horror content by half by the time I get to it, I genuinely treasure anything that givs me the sheer rush of realizing I have stumbled upon horror without knowing I was going to. I had no idea there as a horror game inside the dating game until I saw the first corpse. Thank you, Hato Moa.
Before I get to my own fics, I would be remiss if I didn't link to some other folks online.
Shirogane: Really, Shirogane is the only significant HB fic I've written, but I can add unfinished scenes here on my personal website when I never did on AO3. Shirogane follow Sakuya after the end of BBL on his quest to become a normal, functional person. He gets to know his brother, spends time with Angeal as he recovers in an asylum, wrestles with his sexuality, gets a job, starts studying for a degree, and does whatever it is going to take to become a good person. This was supposed to become a multiship fic eventually as he got poly with a ressurected Ryouta and Hiyoko, but I never got there. As this is my personal website I do get to add the scene where I made it incest for no reason, as I am wont to do, but which never saw the light of day before.)
Yuuya Killsteals Both Iwamine and Uzune By Killing Them Both Himself: Really, I should clean this one up and put it on AO3. In this fic, Yuuya watches all of the harm done in BBL be undone by the resurrection of his friends, and then he dashes off to personally murder the perpetrators while everyone else is distracted by the tearful reuinion.