The incredibly long review I had written for the game was gone after an unfortunate accidental click somewhere outside this box, so I'll try resuming it without dying of exhaustion.
I'll start by admitting I have been looking forward to this game's release for a long time. Watching it reaching its VERY ambitious Kickstarter goal filled me with joy, as its Demo has been the single most promising one I've seen in a Western, exclusively-gay game to date.
Part of it was thanks to the brief 3D animation it featured, which made me hope for further typical science-fiction scenarios and backgrounds, maybe some more views of the ships and the prison itself, something that would justify the astronomical (for an indie game) budget this product demanded. Alas, it was not meant to be. Not many more backgrounds were added to those already in the demo, and the ones we get are 2D and nothing too special.
That will be a constant through the whole run: promises that failed to be delivered. The product that was advertised has almost nothing in common with the one we actually get.
It pains me to say that the credit they earned with that first sample of their work gets sadly squandered soon into the full version. The tension and menace they succeeded in creating on that initial release do not translate well into the final product.
All the fear, otherness, and impotence the character experience in his hopeless situation go down the drain the moment the game very clearly establishes that all interactions between the characters ought to be consensual. Even those with an oh-very-scary warning of dubious consent lean towards well-received, happy sex.
With the impending danger of physical and sexual violence now off the table, the component of menace and urgency disappears too, and this title loses one of its major selling points. Nobody expects much vanilla in a prison, love. That's not what people fantasize about when they think of bars and bunk beds, and the author must know it.
The main problem of this game is that it had the potential to have been much better if not for self-censorship. They tease, they play with some interesting, suggestive ideas, but don't have the stones of actually going for them.
It ends up giving the sensation that this was never the game they had in mind, but a decaffeinated, soulless travesty of their original idea.
I get that these are trying times, with certain fetishes getting heavily criticized and prosecuted by self-righteous crusaders, but come on! This is the magical Porn-land, my boys, the place where all dreams are allowed and no one gets hurt for real! Leading your players towards some kind of content, catering to them only to blue-balling them with rants about consent is never a good idea.
We are adults and these things were never supposed to be educational anyway.
I'd like to think of it as a business decision, as many platforms are known to systematically ban noncon, and that would allow an already funded game to be more widely distributed, but it still hurts. Great potential going to waste always does.
I'd love to know what their supporters think of all the changes they introduced...
Regrettably, that's not the only thing they botched, IMHO. Both the mystery and suspense we were introduced to get solved fifteen to twenty minutes into the game. All secrets get easily exposed, and by the time you get to one character's route you already know almost everything there's to know about him and have lost interest in making new discoveries.
That applies to the hidden stuff, too. You know what you are getting far sooner than expected.
Miguel is a good character, but some of his narrative gets...permeated by political stuff, which is not the wisest decision from a Dev. I know full well that every game is a product of their time, but experienced authors like Y Press Games should have known better than to lay those things so heavily. Letting racial themes leak into the plot is always tricky, a double-edged sword, especially if you victimize the MC only to turn him into a walking stereotype that spews gratuitous Spanish and longs for commonplace "ethnic" things. He tries too hard to be identified as Latino, when his race is the least important thing of all. He's a human in a hostile environment and that should suffice. He's a mathematician and an astronaut, so why speaking about he entered the University thanks to a racial quota, instead of due to his own brilliance?
They ham-fist ideas with the subtlety of a charging horny were-rhino, without considering that for every sympathetic reader they move by catering to those sensitivities, they may be driving another one away. I'm speaking as a Spanish man myself, btw.
As I said, they decided to take risks on the most pointless things, only to neglect what attracted people to their game in the first place.
And don't get me started on the deformed sister sob story...
Another big change is the LIs. These are supposed to be convicts with a fearsome record, and the first time Miguel hears of them, they do appear that way, but that impression dilutes the very second the demo content is over, only to release their adorable, misunderstood goofball personas on the MC.
All become too fluffy and tender, too needy and effortless. It has been love at the first sight for all of them. None of them asks for something unreasonable or merely morally challenging, none of them is cunning or malign.
Even the stuff presented as intolerable abuse is incredibly mild, but then again, this a game with no gore... and no guts.
The endings hold punches too. Some are deaths, but they are not described. None of them is truly ironic, or gut-wrenching. Most of them are almost one-liners and the few more elaborated just reuse the same CG's for all the characters.
There are 70, but with that little effort put in them, they could have been 70 thousand.
There's something that I found really refreshing in this game, that paradoxically may be considered triggering content by others: the sharing. This is the part where they exceeded expectations. The team promised threesomes in every route, and they went the extra mile and made it possible for you to pimp your buddy for benefits from other inmates.
It's a welcomed change in a genre that is dominated by exclusive relationships, with (thankfully) only some harems. Not only you watch or participate but to prostitute your sweetheart to several johns.
In spite of what I have just stated, the novelty factor wears off very easily. By the second route, you know that for every favor or question solved you will have to put your or your lover's butt in the line, and it becomes annoying.
Just like that awfully repetitive shower minigame.
About the art... I spoke about BGs before, but the other thing nobody has made a great effort in is the new character sprites. Those secondaries have literally two facial expressions and the quality of the drawing is noticeably inferior.
There are a lot of sexual scenes, that's true, but the animation is very, very basic with a couple of variations.
I still consider it a good, if very light, game. But that may be because of my cute, puny Goth boyfriend meme fetish
