You know, the more I learn about Ryukishi07, the less I ever want to "play" his """games""" like Higurashi or Umineko. From all I've seen of them or read of people discussing them, it sounds like the most pretentious, self-indulgent garbage imaginable.
It's the stupid person's idea of what smart writing is.
Higurashi is really good and as it's one of his first works, it's not very far into the 3deep5u shit. The Question Arcs with headphones still rank as one of my best decisions to sit down with during Halloween last year. Very spooky with good sound direction and also some very real shit going on (so long as you can deal with the slow burn aspect from the beginning). The resolutions you get in the Answer Arcs are also really good and I overall think Higurashi is his most digestible thing. Also the first episode is free on Steam.
Umineko is also really good but it also gets super metacontextual and actively tries to fuck with the reader so it has a lot of very ardent haters. I think the resolution is quite good and I still rank it as one of my favorites, but it's also a bigger commitment than Higurashi and not as 'fun' to read as you go through it. Higurashi starts slow but then is enjoyable until the end whereas Umineko starts well, plods in the middle as R07 rakes you over the coals, and then ends well.
I wanna say sometime after Umineko is when things got really weird for R07. His newest WTC VN, Ciconia, is on perpetual hold due to the Ukraine war but it's full of transhumanist gay prog shit. The story is good if you can get over the 2010s reddit ideology he spouts off during the initial bits but it's also just... never going to be finished so it's not worth getting into.
And then the sequels to Higurashi, which came out in animu form, really went all in on lesbian schoolgirl angst to the point of kinda making Higurashi pointless. In Japan, they're not well-liked but the western fanbase tends to be split between, "these fucking suck" and "how dare you not heckin validate these murderous gay girls, chud"
Honestly, SHf doesn't feel very R07 in a lot of ways. Higurashi, for example, spends a lot of time on its characters so you get a sense for who these people are supposed to be when the weird shit starts happening. You spend a lot of time in a normal, rural Japanese town before the horror starts to leak in and it's never an all-consuming horror. A western work I'd compare it to would be something like Twin Peaks.
The fandom can definitely be pretty annoying though, especially after so many people 'got into' Umineko when pretentious media literacy faggot Joseph Andersen streamed the entire thing to his audience of fatherless zoomers. WTC is generally pretty good if you can commit the time to them (Higurashi and Umineko are both individually longer than the entirety of LotR by a significant margin) but they're definitely not "ZOMG THE GREATEST LITERATURE EVER WRITTEN"
tl;dr SHf isn't very R07 so I wouldn't look at it as representative of his good shit
