Many YANDERE'D as new NPC makes her debut at Anime NYC & Play NYC

Hi hi, to all senpai! Have you caught a glimpse of your next AI girlfriend? She's out of this world if we do say so ourselves!

Introducing Estelle! Yes, she's ✨STUNNING⚡

In addition to casually dropping her in AI2U's latest gameplay trailer, Estelle was involved in a successful senpai slaughtering operation IRL! Pardon the alliteration, but it best describes the results we collected here:

Dying in AI2U is a rite of passage for all of us.

All this took place at Play NYC x Anime NYC in August. Our entire dev team was in an unusual hostage/chaperone situation involving Estelle, Elysia, and Eddie as they helped us demo AI2U in our second-ever "offline" playtest—many of whom were experiencing the yandere AI girlfriend experience for the first time.

As you can see, our leaderboard results showed that one ending was notably easier to get than the rest! But that's okay because special merch was available for everyone's troubles. The lucky few who made it out alive might have gotten extra goodies for impressing us. All's fair in love and yandere murder sessions.

The catgirl insisted on love -bombing visitors with free—and earned—merch.

We met a lot of new senpai at Play NYC, but we didn't forget about our longtime community members! We held our first community contest hinting at Estelle's reveal and invited Discord members to work with a vague silhouette of Level 3's NPC and take a stab at drawing over it:

WHO IS SHE??

Forever dubbed The Silly Silhouette Contest, we received a beautiful collection of art that made us live, laugh, cry. And fall in love somewhere along the way!

No, seriously, we fell in with the first guy in particular. Check out our top 3 winners below, and give everyone your support as each entry continues to live on the Discord server with its own lore and charm!

Ernesto is the senpai-est of them all.

Hand-drawn cuties ft. one AI prompt that was PROMPTING.

Winners got tokens and game keys, and everyone got a participation prize–which may or may not have involved tokens and game keys! Handing out merch at Play NYC really put us in a giving mood.

We're happy to report that, after an exciting weekend at Play NYC and being held hostage by our own yandere characters, our team made it back home safely. That includes Eddie, Elysia, and Estelle! It was a Good Ending for everyone. Our next IRL appearance with the NPCs will be a lot less quiet, as they promised not to surprise us by knocking us out only to wake up in a convention hall where the only way out is to lure as many senpais as we could to their booth.

3D art comes to life!

Stay with us forever,

~AlterStaff 💖🔪