Hiveswap Friendsim Review (prom-t)
Some people may tell you that you have to play Friendsim / read the Epilogues before playing Pesterchum - those people are, IMO, wrong. As someone who fell out of Homestuck before the Epilogues were released and only picked everything back up when the "Homestuck Renaissance" gained steam, I wasn't particularly interested in getting introduced to a bunch of new trolls who would only be relevant in a game with no definitive Final Release Date (No hate to Hiveswap.), and I'm quite simply not reading the Epilogues until I'm finished rereading the comic.
So I jumped into Pesterchum thinking they were largely separate games with similar premises. And you know what? I enjoyed myself. I felt a beautiful swell of nostalgia and renewed joy seeing familiar faces and through new lenses. And then Plot started. And OH our little guy has been on Alternia before. OH they met a bunch of other trolls that deeply impacted them and was forced to leave them behind. Also The Epilogues are relevant after all, but I'm a big boy who's deeply familiar with the way Homestuck operates so like, truly that didn't really phase me.
An Alternate Timeline Dirk shows up because he wants to be the only timeline meddler and thinks that every Dirk would be better off fused into one Absolutely Canon "Ultimate" Dirk and I'm like, Sure this might as well be happening, Dirk's entire Character Arc has always been about Splintered Selves and thinly veiled DID/OSDD/General Dissociation metaphors so why wouldn't he have an arc about incorrectly assuming that the best course of action is Full Integration?
But this is a review about Friendsim so let's roll back here. If you're playing Friendsim now, in a time when it and Pesterchum are both complete, because you like Homestuck and want More then I argue that it is a stronger experience to be played after Pesterchum. Playing Friendsim after Pesterchum gives you a built in reason to care about every character you meet because of the small crumbs of implied prior context given to you in Pesterchum.
Played this way you also might get a narrative experience not Dissimilar from something like Undertale, entering Pesterchum with the illusion that The Reader is a semi-direct insertion of You, only to have that slowly whittled away until you understand that they are, in fact, their own distinct character with lived experiences that go back further than your starting point in their story.
So yeah, short version Friendsim is great, I'm sure that people had fun when it first released, but present day my definitive recommendation is:
Read Homestuck
(Epilogues + Beyond Canon Optional)
Play Pesterchum
Play Friendsim
Play Friendsim 2