First of all: This heavily reminded me of Chaos;Head. The first episode was made in a very similar fashion, with a lot of questions and mysteries coming up. The main character, Okarin (Okabe Rintaro), is, just like the main character of Chaos;Head, highly delusional and downright weird.

Okarin had some weird stuff happening to him when he went to some kind of press conference about an “invention of the century”, a time machine. Pointing out all that work is basically just a copy of some fictional text, he gets dragged out of the room by a cute girl (picture above), namely Makise Kurisu, who Okarin accuses of being with the “agency”. That appears to be just another one of his delusions, though.

Being confronted with the fact he was talking on his turned off cellphone and thus, talking to himself, he runs away. Afterwards, while talking to Shiina Mayuri, his childhood friend, they both hear a pretty creepy shriek of pain. Okarin tells Mayuri to leave the building, goes upstairs again to take a look and finds Makise Kurisu dead on the floor. He leaves the building and sends a mail to someone informing him that “someone was stabbed”. The moment he sends it, he suddenly finds himself on the street without any people around.

It is later revealed that, in reality, the guy who held the press conference got cold feet and never actually showed up.

It turns out that the “someone” he sent the mail to was none other than his friend Hashida Itaru. When he checkes the dates, he finds out his message arrived 5 days in the past. The moment he realized that, Okarin spots Makise Kurisu standing around safe and sound.

Looking at how Chaos;Head turned out, it’s fairly safe to assume that after watching just the first episode, you’ll have no idea what the fuck is (really) going on at all. What seems real might be just a delusion and what seems to be a delusion might be real. The next episodes will likely cause even more questions to be raised and also confuse the viewer even more.

Anime, Steins;Gate