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Otherside Picnic is a Roadside Picnic-inspired yuri light novel by Iori Miyazawa that takes inspiration from internet horror stories and creepypastas for its ‘zone’. It features two girls with the closest kind of relationship in the world exploring a green and blue wasteland devoid of life; except for the horrors.

The girls themselves are lovely. Sorawo and Toriko can be really different but bounce off each other in ways that feel natural, and you get a very clear sense of how their relationship progresses throughout the story. As I learnt more about how each of the girls thinks and feels I was worried that the story might try to fit them into neat boxes, however Otherside Picnic embraces the messiness of relationships and labels completely, resulting in romances that feel unique and far more true to real life and my experiences.

The world-building is the other stand-out aspect of this series. The way The Otherside pulls inspiration from real-life internet horror stories (all indexed in the back of each novel) is fascinating, and the way this is treated academically in the text results in some of my favourite scenes. You can tell Miyazawa was extremely detail-oriented and asked questions about his own world, usually ones that preempted my own, making for a delightful lack of nitpicks if you’re like me and try to pick apart the logic behind everything.

This detail extends from the horror stories to other aspects like the guns, with not just how they function and are used, but also the logistics of transporting, supplying them and the legality involved, much to the delight of a gun nut like myself.

The primary flaw of these novels is the prose. It might come down to translation, but the prose can be jarring. This sometimes works for comedic moments, however most of the time it results in having to conciously put effort into reading instead of being effortlessly dragged along, as some good books can do. The pacing, however, is excellent. It provides enough space for all aspects of the novels to breathe and provides a surprising amount of falling action, which I’m always a fan of.

This review is short because overall this is just a really solid series with very few flaws and a couple of things that defy expectations. I can strongly recommend you give it a read.