This one pains me a little. I actually really like this game and have been paying attention to it for probably about 4 years now - discovered it during Covid lockdowns.
The art is great, the animation is some of the best you'll find on this site, the initial story premise is great (and actually unique which is rare) the characters are each well developed enough to feel like real people with their own foibles, traits, personalities, and interests as opposed to being interchangeable with one another or mindless sex dolls which is awesome. Even the sex is pretty paced out which for me is awesome. With the exception of the succubus Rae (who is best girl by the way), there's an actual build up of relationship with each character before they sleep with you, so it feels like the sex scenes are actually meaningful which I like. And even Rae gets a pass because she's literally a succubus and besides has a lot of relationship building outside of the sex scenes so she feels like a full character who has an actual relationship with the MC.
So if I have so much praise, why 3 stars? Simple, three words: bloat and pacing. It's been like 5 and a half years since this first came out and yet it feels like very little has actually happened in the story. Sure each LI has gotten more side quests and whatnot, there's plenty of content that has been added, but little of it actually matters, little of it actually moves the main story forward. We've been stuck in the same "huh, we're in a fancy magic house but don't know why and have no way out" for ages, the only real main plot developments being the occasional addition of a new woman to the house and some tinkering with dream-travelling to different worlds which is cool but hasn't really gone anywhere narratively speaking yet - outside of helping each girl with her side problems, and don't you worry I'll get to side content.
I also don't love some of the pacing. In general I love it when story-driven games are willing to take their time before getting to sex in order to build up romantic/sexual tension and relationships, I even praised this one for it earlier. But sometimes it's just too much and too slow. There are some characters who despite having been present for literal years have very little sex/romance content i.e. Naomi and Yona, (and Blair but she gets a pass for being the newest one), and even Cait while having a lot of content is mostly foreplay - I'm not actually sure if she has a full sex scene yet.
Meanwhile getting to the scenes is a bit of a chore, each LI has a billion little side quests and moments that you need to do, most of which require visiting them at a specific time of day but only if they're in a specific part of the house which isn't guaranteed to actually happen on any given day, sometimes made even worse if they also need to have specific other character present too., all of which means it can take what feels like hours of mindlessly skipping through days to actually access new content.
As for "gameplay", there's are some stats, lewndness and intimacy. But frankly they never seem to matter to the point I question why they are even in the game, they never really serve as a real limiting factor - the actual progression is based on completing the thousand little side tasks each character has and you usually get enough lewdness and intimacy as a byproduct of doing those things. As well you get to make dialogue choices, which would be cool except basically every single choice in the game is entirely irrelevant. The average dialogue choice you get can be summed up as A.) normal response, B.) weird response, and C.) lewd/flirty response. However regardless of which one you choose it won't actually impact the outcome of a given scene outside of a sentence or two. Sometimes you might gain or lose a stat based on a choice, but again since stats don't actually matter it's not enough to make me actually care about what option I choose. A bit lame in that regard.
It wasn't so bad when the game first came out, and if you're someone who has been following this for years and is mostly caught up then it probably isn't so bad for you to complete each update, but the idea of starting a new game and trying to do it all again, or being a new player entirely, is daunting. WAY too much filler content. It would take so many countless hours to go from the beginning to the current content, most of which would be just clicking the "skip time" button over and over until the right characters are in the right room at the right time, and then skimming the dialogue until you get the option to make a conversational choice that doesn't matter and won't change anything anyway, and then doing it all over again a thousand more times.
I get the vibe that the dev is maybe losing themselves in this a little. Every update is adding more and more side stories and dream/holiday scenes but not really moving anything forward. It's like they just love the idea of living their fantasy of being in this magic dream house with all of their waifus so much that they just want it to keep going forever and are afraid for it to actually end. Or I suppose the more cynical take would be they like getting the patreon money and don't want that to end, but I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, it's probably too far in to change things now, but the game needs to drastically cut down on all the side content, make some of the progression faster and stats/choices matter more, and get the train rolling on actually progressing the story. As of now it is way too bloated and doesn't feel like it's story is interested in going anywhere anytime soon.
