Aside from Undertale and Deltarune, which I assume 100% of my audience has already played, I haven't actually played many indie RPGs. In particular, I didn't want popular RPG Maker games to influence my own work too much. The RPG Maker scene is extremely vibrant and awesome, but there can also be this feedback loop where a lot of RPG Maker games seem to be primarily influenced by other RPG Maker games. (Omori is 100% this to me, sorry lol.) SLARPG certainly ticks several of those boxes—Mother influence, surrealism, meta elements, mental health themes, a scary part, etc.—but I was trying to make something more inspired by classic fantasy JRPGs, which is ironically not what most of the popular RPG Maker games are trying to do even though that's literally what the engine was made for. I didn't want that to get diluted too much with assumptions about what RPG Maker games are "supposed" to be like. I also just didn't want to risk subconsciously ripping off things I'd seen in other RPG Maker games. It's very easy to look at another game and go "oh shit, you can do that in RPG Maker?" and suddenly want to do the same thing. I wanted to explore the engine on my own terms.

Uhhhh but check out Hylics, I guess. It's nothing like SLARPG, but Hylics is cool. I need to play Hylics sometime, now that SLARPG is done and accidental plagiarism is less of a concern for me. I also need to get around to playing OneShot and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. And Small Saga, for something not made in RPG Maker. And CrossCode. And I haven't even gotten around to Disco Elysium yet. I have a very large backlog okay