I just tried this excellent game for the first time, and I had to leave some comments to share how impressive nearly everything about this game is.
- The MC is a breath of fresh air. Confidence. Agency. Masculinity. Intelligence. Self-Control. What a fun and interesting character to finally get to play in an Adult VN.
- Solid worldbuilding (the gates and ranks remind me of Solo Leveling a lot), with a compelling storyline and interesting side characters.
- The profile screens showing the LI's kinks and sexuality are a great tool for building anticipation for future encounters with them, and they have the potential to become an awesome and fun gameplay mechanic too.
- The music, visuals, animations, and editing are all very professional and high quality, and they work well together to draw the reader/player in to the story and the world.
- Lots of attractive and sexy LI's, without going overboard in the number thrown at the player (so far at least).
- Good use of visual storytelling, with a lot of "show don't tell", instead of throwing "wall of text" conversations at the player that ruin the pacing. That's another "plus" that sets this apart from nearly every other VN out there.
Basically, I don't remember any other game apart from Depraved Awakening that drew me in this fast, and left me wanting more so early into the story.
As great as it is, I do have a number of smaller criticisms:
- The DAZ model chosen for the Nina character is very overused and way too familiar.
- There are very few choices for the player, and none that make any impact so far.
- There were a few typos, grammar mistakes and misspellings.
- The animations are very processor intensive, and initial rendering causes them to fast forward jarringly when they are first shown, making sex scenes look robotic and unreal for the first second or two.
- There is only a single sex scene so far and no climax is shown for the MC in it, which is a huge missed opportunity (seriously, painting an LI with your cum/deciding to creampie her/etc is pretty much the best part of any erotic scene in a VN). And while I understand that the MC is supposed to have strong self-control, an MC that doesn't appear to have any desires or feel any pleasure is not very interesting for players to inhabit in the long run.
- With the MC being so powerful and confident right off the bat, having the story show character growth for him could be challenging (admittedly, this is not a criticism pretty much any other VN would run into, but this is one of the few with an actual solid story alongside the sex). However, given that the antagonists and other challenges shown so far actually feel significant and threatening, and because of the way the MC is acquiring new powers through sex, plus his clear goal of wanting to protect so many other people that he cares about, I think that a good execution of those elements of the story should end up with the MC going through a satisfying arc.
That's about all for a quick review/bit of feedback. I didn't get any of the crashes others are mentioning during my initial playthrough, but on reloading a save and using the mouse wheel to move around (to refresh my memory about a few events in the game) I did get it to hang completely. An Alt + F4 was required to close it, because I couldn't Alt + Tab to get Task Manager to appear (apps running in Fullscreen mode like that sometimes prevent anything else from being seen if they hang, unfortunately).
