It's like a TV show that devolves into 20,000 filler episodes just to get to the plot. There IS good content in here, but finding it is like pulling teeth, and by the time you reach it, you won't even be horny anymore.
A tl;dr of the experience is that it starts out incredibly linear, and it does okay with this formula.
Somewhere along the way, it develops into a more "free roam" formula, and does ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE AT IT.
To give you an idea, you have 4 different times during each day to do an action in: morning, noon, afternoon and night. You can also influence what kinks you want the wife (and others) to have via an app, and this takes time to kick in....a LOT of time.
A typical three day period goes like this:
You wake up, check the messages and phones of anyone you're spying on for something new, then you click "go to work" for both morning and noon.
There is not actually any other option of things to do for morning and noon, and the money you earn is like "Whose Line is It Anyway?" The money doesn't matter whatsoever because the dev gave you a comically large debt that isn't feasible to pay off regardless of what you do. You can safely ignore the debt and not even go to your job and absolutely nothing bad happens as a result.
In the afternoon, you might have a date with someone, which usually just involves in.....more dialog. Or a selfie. Or some other mechanic of questionable value.
And night? What is night for you ask? Night is for you to press the "skip time" button. I am not kidding: Night as a time slot has zero function and just exists for you to skip it.
So you repeat this for three days and you get a message: the brainwashing program you've been using on your wife FINALLY did something! You are now 10% done with corrupting her! Huzzah! Only like 30 more days to go before it actually does something! MORE MEANINGLESS CLICKING!! HOORAY!!
To make it worse, for some reason the dev thought it was a brilliant idea to flag the brainwashing methods you send your targets as new messages FOR YOU. This means you will periodically get an indicator there's new content that needs your attention, only to discover no, it's the same generic brainwashing message your targets got that you MUST READ before it stops being marked as new in your inbox.
There's also "quest paths" that simply get resolved over time, and instead of simply ending, the dev programmed the final step to repeat every couple days. There's no variation here and no reason to repeat these, so it just floods you with more time-wasting mechanics. These CAN be turned off in the quest list, but now you have to dig through the game's quest list to find the culprit and shut it off.
Speaking of, there's near-zero direction on what to do at all. There's one little checklist app that if you find it, you will get info on what to do, though in a questionable format. By questionable format, I mean it usually says something like "Wait 0 days and talk to wife. Step 55 of Wife and Alanah must be triggered." This then has you hunting for "Wife and Alanah" to try and trigger that first. The actual sexual content behind these paths is usually vague, so you don't know what exactly you're getting. For example, one path with one character seemed to lead to group sex scenarios, but from the names of the characters alone, you can't deduce that.
And you might think hold on now, step 55?! Surely it can't be that long.
I was young and naive too once, and unfortunately now I can confirm that step 55 is as ridiculous as it sounds.
Let's imagine a scenario: you want to see your wife participate in an orgy. So you look up the appropriate content and discover it has 70 steps; this was the longest length I spotted. And what do these steps entail...?
"Wait 3 days then check your messages."
"Wait 7 days and check your wife's messages."
"Wait 14 days and check your wife's messages."
EVERYTHING about this game is an absolutely infuriating time sink. It is not even GRINDING, because grinding implies the player is somehow engaged and has to do something. If I'm grinding in Final Fantasy, I'm at least engaging in combat or the like, but here...? You can legit play this game by spamming the "skip time" button.
And the excuses for why these things take so long are absolutely asinine. Two real examples I discovered while playing:
-You find out someone has set up your niece to be brainwashed by the app, and you want to stop this. After ~5 days, your niece contacts you and you tell her to check people's phones at work and delete a certain app if she finds it. After another ~5 days (sometimes more, sometimes less) she informs you she didn't find it, so you tell her to try checking the bosses' phone. After ~5 days she says oops nope couldn't find anything. After another ~5 days you're warned whoever used the app on her can read her convos, and thus you must change your approach. After another ~5 days, an ex-co-worker contacts you offering to help and check phones at work. He finally finds someone (after another 5 days) and you check their phone and.....IT'S A DUD! He doesn't have it! He got the wrong guy! Someone ELSE has it. You contact the co-worker to tell him this and of course, he needs another ~5 days to check the stupid phones again. He doesn't find anything, and AFTER 5 DAYS, you're contact with a hint to "look closer." You deduce this means the ex-co-worker is behind it himself, but since you can't contact him directly and the DEV IS SUPER SUPER INTENT ON WASTING EVERYONE'S *#$!ING TIME, after 5 days you establish contact with his wife and lead her to do it.
You thought it was done...? Oh no: she fails to get into his phone, you wait 5 days, then he "hasn't been home since" and you wait ANOTHER 5 days, and then OH WOW HE STILL HASN'T BEEN HOME!!! +5 days!! Finally he admits to it when he shows up at home and you are FINALLY at the resolution of this stupid quest. Holy crap. And don't worry: even the resolution where you see what happens to the niece in the aftermath is segmented by needless time gaps.
-Your wife is considering an orgy or sleeping with another man or whatever. I'm not going to waste your time like the dev with another "5 days" wall-of-text, but basically imagine the above scenario with just as many delays, except instead of any actual plot, she just repeatedly needs 5 days "to think about it." Your wife spends so long thinking about going to an orgy party that the actual party goers have probably died of starvation just waiting on her to make up her mind.
And what sparked me writing this and fueled my anger: once she finally went to the damned orgy, OF COURSE she got absolutely drunk and can't remember anything that happened. That means it's merely insinuated she participated, she has no recollection, description or emotion attached to whatever happened, and you are left waiting AGAIN for some further step in the quest where something might FINALLY happen.
For reference, skipping a day is 4 clicks to skip 4 stages of the day. It's actually more like 8 because hitting the skip button causes a slow animation informing you of the new time of day, and this is skipped by clicking again. This means if you see "wait 7 days," this actually translates to "click on the skip time button 56 times." But not TOO fast! If you click TOO fast, the game bugs out and you need to back up and try again!
This is like Dragon Ball Z except instead of spending 200 episodes shouting at each other, it's always "Will your wife finally decide to become more adventurous? Will she get another text message from one of her slutty friends??? Will she change her mind? FIND OUT NEXT TIME ON THIS STUPID #$%!ing GAME."
I should also add the conversations aren't short. FFS at some point I'm pretty sure I was rushing through dialog where the antagonist's wife was negotiating gas prices per litre or something for her job or something. It's like the dev focused on making the messages realistic to an absolutely painful degree. Dude if you're simulating 10 minute conversations as loyally as this, then it means people also spend a good chunk of time just thumbing through them and constantly scanning for relevant info.
I have no idea why the dev insists on torturing people with this kind of asinine time wasting, but trust me, he does. There is soooooooooooo much in this game that is somehow WORSE than ordinary grinding, because it's not even engaging in the slightest. This is "spam the time skip button: the game."
There are SOME moments this game is alright, and under calmer circumstances I might give it 2 stars.
Given how this game is genuinely rage-inducing with how mind-numbingly stupid the design decisions are and how little respect it has for your time, I think the 1 star is fair. The sheer stupidity of the needless time wasting heavily outweighs any good this game has, so much so that I feel dragging the score back down to 1 star is warranted.
INFURIATING GAME.