Like a lot of people I'm positively surprised by this game. The gameplay loop is fun, and the writing pretty good and enganging; with largely likable characters and, well, got eroticism. Plus, there's enough there to get into it without feeling like everything's unfinished everywhere.
I recently had a little bit of time and actually played through the game a 2nd time. Based on that some feedback:
My first playthrough got considerably bogged down by the fact that I didn't find the extra jobs for ages. That meant I lost a lot of time as soon as I was in the phase where I'd have to go outside the starting neighborhood a lot, and, whoa, money spending needed to be considered carefully). Second playthrough of course I knew about the library and cafe jobs and just "grinded Internet" a bit to get them right away.
Felt a bit like a "security through obscurity" thing; once you know, it's too easy, but if you don't, it's too frustrating. I'd alleviate this perhaps by allowing these jobs to also be discovered simply by going to the respective locations (surely there'd be a "looking for part-timers" sign there
).
I felt that's also true for some of the other (somewhat?) optional content. I basically thought I was done with the available content when I randomly ran into Prism. The problem here is I think that so far the world is fairly empty. You aren't likely to explore locations again and again as you know where the heroines are and there's (for the most part) no reason to go elsewhere. So when the game demands that you need random luck in some random location, it's unlikely for you to be there, unless you know you got to be there.
I guess that's something that'll get less as there's more content, but maybe adjustments could be made to that anyway.
The other thing that I found a bit notable in the 2nd playthrough was, since I more or less knew what I was doing, I rushed through the Blaire content pretty quickly and easily. That meant her story was way further ahead than Kiara's. Now I admit I didn't pay attention to all permutations but I felt that occasionally that caused some narrative inconsistencies. Maybe ^^; I could imagine either way slowing Blaire's progress down a bit, even if it's just some skill checks of sorts (not that I'm advocating some endless grind
).
Talking about Blaire, I felt her route struggles a bit from the fact that so much you're kinda just looking at her, or saying 'hello' and not much else. As a character she stays pretty bland. Way different from Kiara, who is excellent fun.
Anyway; just some things I wanted to stay. Great work, keep it up
