This game is a 6-7/10, but honestly it's an emotional rollercoaster of enjoyment, frustration and boredom that somehow still leaves a positive impression on me. If you like QSP games or can tolerate them, this one is worth at least checking out.
Personally, I kinda like QSP games, they're the B-rated movies of NSFW games: you know there's going to be jank sprinkled everywhere, but you come to love it.
I'm usually disappointed in life sims because there's not enough content, but here I am still stuck somewhere at the beginning by the looks of it. The game allows you to progress little by little, so whenever I almost start to get bored by it, I find something new.
This is probably the largest life sim I've seen yet. There is a lot of SFW content, and the obligatory grind seems decently balanced: it has structure, it doesn't take up all of your time if you get into the rhythm, there is a feeling of progression even though the author decided to make it extra realistic and have stuff like month-long internships. Honestly, this game needs a full SFW mode (and some polish), because it's a decent game to play in the background.
The NSFW content is relatively easy to get to, but it varies. On some playthroughs, I would meet a neighbor NPC and quickly get to the sex scenes, on others I would spend weeks doing SFW stuff (which I didn't mind) and have no acquaintances because all the NPCs would ignore me, so I wouldn't see anything besides masturbation scenes.
There still aren't that many pictures and .gifs, and at least one of the gifs is starting to corrupt.
But the way this game handles navigation is just painful.
The amount of places and actions is overwhelming. There is nothing to guide you, you are just thrown out on the streets of a big city. There is a list of all unique locations for every city region, but it's somewhere in the settings and it doesn't describe what is actually in these locations. Other than that you have no choice but to explore. That almost sounds fun, but you have to do it in a game that wants you to find a place to sleep, punishes you for being dirty and gives you barely any money at the start. So several of your first characters are going to be throwaways that you'll use to figure out what is even going on in this game.
Combine that with the extra jank and extra "realism", and the game can become especially frustrating even on first actual playthroughs.
There are so many ways to get food, but you probably won't use any of them except for buying groceries and cooking at home, because there is no reward for eating junk food. But all the options are still there and take up space.
Learning skills takes so much time I started to think that learning is bugged and I don't actually progress, since there is absolutely no indication of progress. If you don't have a level in a skill, it's not shown in the stats at all. And you have to spend a lot of in-game time learning some skills, literally hours, because that's how it works in real life.
There are attributes in this game, like strength, agility, etc. I honestly have no clue what they mean, because I've yet to encounter any situation that requires you to have a certain attribute value or something similar. They just go up if you make them go up, that's it. Maybe they are required somewhere later in the game.
Excessive realism is a quirk this game has, but it's realism for the sake of realism combined with extreme Russian-ness. It's not even pure Russian-ness, it's the zeitgeist that especially drags it down. You can tell that this game was made about 15 years ago, and has accumulated things that were normal for its time.
For example, for Eastern and Southern regions of the city, most items that you need are sold at markets.
Now, I am a Russian. I've lived in Moscow, the city that this game simulates, for about ten years now, in the regions that I've mentioned. Never in my life have I gone to a fucking market in Moscow, because there are stores everywhere. Stores with groceries and household supplies, bookstores, supermarkets, or shopping centers. These stores are what I expect from any game with a modern setting, at least in form of a single shopping center, because that's just how modern life is. And this game has shopping centers, but only in some regions. And they have less items than the said markets. Why?
This is technically a very minor thing, but it genuinely threw me off, because of how I (and probably most other players) imagine real life depictions.
At the same time, some things are up to date, like the exchange rate (yes, this game has RUB/USD exchange), most prices are modern. So at this point it's like an alternate reality of "what-if" Russia that doesn't exist in real life. So even if you are Russian, you will trip over what is normal for you, because of stereotypes and norms of Russian life more than a decade ago.
