The writing is a weird combination of extremely cool concepts mixed in randomly with very dumb and contrived concepts. It is like picking through a bag of randomly flavored jelly beans, most of which are good, some of which are awesome, but every so often you'll land on a black licorice with no warning. The editing and sound design in particular do an excellent job of building suspense and mystery, but you figure out the patterns pretty quick. This is a magician who accidentally reveals his secrets fairly regularly.
Generally speaking, it strikes me as a good show that could have been a great show but kept shooting itself in the foot. The characters are likable and interesting, some even have a hint of a pretty deep character arc, but their development never quite reaches its potential. Likewise, the relationships between the characters are treated as important but without much development to actually convince us. It could have been a truly stellar anime with those missing potentials lived up to! Likewise, the plot keeps doing cool things, introducing psychologically interesting tensions, but then in the same breath comes up with some random convenient contrivance out of nowhere that tempers the quality. The animation itself also feels slightly limited, especially the character animation, so that scenes meant to be horrifyingly graphic sometimes fall flat just in terms of budget.
As a result, we wind up with an overall pretty average-level anime instead of anything groundbreaking. But as a horror fan myself, that was enough to have a lot of fun anyway and be watching eagerly for the next episode. It keeps up tension well from start to finish, the mystery does have some great ideas involved, and the over-the-topness is more fun than groan-worthy. It's borderline campy at times, but what self-respecting horror fan doesn't love that?
This is probably one of the best horror anime out there in a not-particularly-outstanding pile of examples, so I would recommend it to anybody wanting to explore more horror in the medium.
