To preface, I have recently tried this game again after about a year and a half, maybe two years of time away from it's earlier state, I do not remember which version number it was. Furthermore, I'm going to be complaining about the story and writing of a porn game, because I'm petty and stupid. If you want the short version:
ART - Art wise, the game is rather unique. A lot of western style games of this sort tend to go for a simpler, rounder look and this one does it quite well. With that in mind, some shots look pretty good, while others look almost childish in how they're drawn. I can appreciate a simpler art style but it really is a mixed bag of what you're going to get outside of character portraits, which do all look really good. But sex scenes are animated at an incredibly slow framerate, basically slideshow speeds, which is still more than most Renpy games offer, but the art style already being oversimplified means that the simple animation almost looks silly. It's still nice to have and it doesn't hurt anything, but when the first sex scene in the game looks like the MC sticking a clay pipe into a mound of clay with a ponytail on it, well... regardless I still think the art is overall a plus.
GAMEPLAY - It's a Renpy game, there really isn't much here. Click around town, click people to talk to, click the person that leads to making money or buying key items or whatever, you've seen it before. It's very simple, but it works. One thing I do have to complain about is that throughout the game, you increase your stats to randomly increase the benefits you get from certain dialogue choices, or to make them have a positive outcome at all. Thats not a problem by itself, the problem is that increasing these stats is just a random dice roll at a certain location at a certain time of day, which can randomly fail (and will once you approach the max level for a stat). Game like Inxexual Awakening have mini-games tied to this kind of stuff and that would A) give you something to actually do and B) avoid random dice roll bullshit that just adds empty padding to the runtime. Thats probably mostly bias talking but I still don't think it's good for this kind of game since all you're really doing is opening gates to new sex scenes anyway, "randomly wait to be smart enough" isn't really engaging or fun, it's tedious.
STORY - The main story revolves around you, the MC, who moves to a new town with his sist- I mean, roommate, and his pare- I mean, landlords. All you want to do is make new friends and new memories, and to make it through your senior year of high school. God has other plans for you though, as you find yourself going through aportal to a parallel dimension where fucking on the streets comes as naturally as breathing. Unfortunately, despite the game being around for several years at this point, your ability to directly interact with this world is (STILL) limited to about 15 minutes of mostly walk-straight sequences, and thats it. You return to the "real" world before having any real chance to openly interact with the new one, and you can't go back. Granted, there is a very real obstacle keeping you from returning, which feeds into other areas of the story later, but the whole draw of the game is "dude there's another world where you can fuck any random chick on the street and they're just smile and wave" and you can't really do anything with it. Not that it matters much in the long run because, as the game might be purposely pushing, the more you talk to the people, the more they all out themselves as whores and degenrates and the like; I mean christ the first female human being you encounter blows you that very same night. Rest assured though that, despite the fact that there is an entire alternate dimension that would fuck the MC silly simply for breathing, the MC is still Chad enough to fuck everything that moves in the real world. It almost makes you wonder "why bother", but that's entering the territory of questioning the writer's intention so I digress. Although I do find it strange that these rather 2-Dimensional characters are given swathes of dialog that literally stretch into the hundreds in terms of back-to-back dialog boxes in certain sequences, while the whole draw of the game is mostly reserved to this one sequence, and a bunch of very short almost horror-like sequences that barely last a minute. It's very imbalanced and completely pointless sequences can feel like reading modern-art novels. I really cannot stress how much dialog this game has and how much of it is skipworthy. There are some really good ideas in here but they're buried beneath so much talking that they're hard to find.
This is already too long any nobody will read it so I'll cut it off here. I could go on about how most of the characters are incredibly flat and boil down to quirky one-liners, and how there are exceptions in the form of Jane and Alliway, but I won't, and I'll direct you back to the TL;DR at the top here. I really hope the game gets better as time moves on but where it is it leaves you wanting more in the wrongest way possible.
A Town Uncovered is an overwritten, underbaked mess. If you're in it for the art, which is (quality wise) all over the place, and don't mind the occassional W.I.P. sketch placeholder, this is still worth your time. If you're in it for the story and the concept as a whole, prepare for A LOT of reading, and a fair amount of disappointment.
ART - Art wise, the game is rather unique. A lot of western style games of this sort tend to go for a simpler, rounder look and this one does it quite well. With that in mind, some shots look pretty good, while others look almost childish in how they're drawn. I can appreciate a simpler art style but it really is a mixed bag of what you're going to get outside of character portraits, which do all look really good. But sex scenes are animated at an incredibly slow framerate, basically slideshow speeds, which is still more than most Renpy games offer, but the art style already being oversimplified means that the simple animation almost looks silly. It's still nice to have and it doesn't hurt anything, but when the first sex scene in the game looks like the MC sticking a clay pipe into a mound of clay with a ponytail on it, well... regardless I still think the art is overall a plus.
GAMEPLAY - It's a Renpy game, there really isn't much here. Click around town, click people to talk to, click the person that leads to making money or buying key items or whatever, you've seen it before. It's very simple, but it works. One thing I do have to complain about is that throughout the game, you increase your stats to randomly increase the benefits you get from certain dialogue choices, or to make them have a positive outcome at all. Thats not a problem by itself, the problem is that increasing these stats is just a random dice roll at a certain location at a certain time of day, which can randomly fail (and will once you approach the max level for a stat). Game like Inxexual Awakening have mini-games tied to this kind of stuff and that would A) give you something to actually do and B) avoid random dice roll bullshit that just adds empty padding to the runtime. Thats probably mostly bias talking but I still don't think it's good for this kind of game since all you're really doing is opening gates to new sex scenes anyway, "randomly wait to be smart enough" isn't really engaging or fun, it's tedious.
STORY - The main story revolves around you, the MC, who moves to a new town with his sist- I mean, roommate, and his pare- I mean, landlords. All you want to do is make new friends and new memories, and to make it through your senior year of high school. God has other plans for you though, as you find yourself going through aportal to a parallel dimension where fucking on the streets comes as naturally as breathing. Unfortunately, despite the game being around for several years at this point, your ability to directly interact with this world is (STILL) limited to about 15 minutes of mostly walk-straight sequences, and thats it. You return to the "real" world before having any real chance to openly interact with the new one, and you can't go back. Granted, there is a very real obstacle keeping you from returning, which feeds into other areas of the story later, but the whole draw of the game is "dude there's another world where you can fuck any random chick on the street and they're just smile and wave" and you can't really do anything with it. Not that it matters much in the long run because, as the game might be purposely pushing, the more you talk to the people, the more they all out themselves as whores and degenrates and the like; I mean christ the first female human being you encounter blows you that very same night. Rest assured though that, despite the fact that there is an entire alternate dimension that would fuck the MC silly simply for breathing, the MC is still Chad enough to fuck everything that moves in the real world. It almost makes you wonder "why bother", but that's entering the territory of questioning the writer's intention so I digress. Although I do find it strange that these rather 2-Dimensional characters are given swathes of dialog that literally stretch into the hundreds in terms of back-to-back dialog boxes in certain sequences, while the whole draw of the game is mostly reserved to this one sequence, and a bunch of very short almost horror-like sequences that barely last a minute. It's very imbalanced and completely pointless sequences can feel like reading modern-art novels. I really cannot stress how much dialog this game has and how much of it is skipworthy. There are some really good ideas in here but they're buried beneath so much talking that they're hard to find.
This is already too long any nobody will read it so I'll cut it off here. I could go on about how most of the characters are incredibly flat and boil down to quirky one-liners, and how there are exceptions in the form of Jane and Alliway, but I won't, and I'll direct you back to the TL;DR at the top here. I really hope the game gets better as time moves on but where it is it leaves you wanting more in the wrongest way possible.
