How Long To Beat: 15+ Hours
The game has been Abandoned at update v99e because of the creators personal lives, meaning the overall plot and every character arc is unfinished and incomplete.
The character art is good, the quests are decent, but ultimately this isn't worth the time investment.
This is an RPGM game without combat. You will receive a quest from a character, which is assigned to a specific time (the game has a 4 part day cycle). Once you start a quest you're locked in until you complete it, giving you a reward. The game has stats and the stats rarely matter beyond certain opening questlines.
The quest designs are okay. Some are story-driven and lean more towards cinematic, linear progression; some are fetch-quests; some are puzzle-focused; some are challenge or mini-game focused. Puzzles usually involve moving boxes or boulders to specific spots. Challenges and mini-games usually involve timing or rhythm. I will give the game credit: it tries to make each quest varied and unique, outside of the rote fetch-quests.
The open-world map is crowded, incohesive, and too large. There is the main square of the town, there is the Witch's swamp, there is a train station with a forest, and then there are several portals to transport you to other terrains, like a snow land. The actual maps are just too big for what's needed. Part of this is the art direction for the maps feels crowded and garish. Part of it is a lack of unity in design, like how every tree is a different design and takes up a set amount of tiles, so they don't really make a forest aesthetic; part of it is an issue with the map layouts. Traversing across several maps gets old very quickly. It's easy to get lost when you're pixel hunting for a quest that says "break 7 sets of sticks!" in a huge map. Every fetch quest takes too long. There's not a good way to layer up quests, so once you've begun a fetch quest, it's best to just go and do it.
The economy for in-game currency is stifling. There are only two main ways to earn money for quests: doing a gardening mini-game or working at a bar for one or two parts of the day cycle. This means, without cheating, I had to start a new day, run to a bench in the town square to shift from Morning to Noon. I could then choose to go to do the gardening mini-game, which takes several minutes but only costs one part of a day cycle, or I could work at the tavern for 2 parts of a day cycle. Once that was completed, I would go back to the bed and start a new day cycle. The quest item requires $100, so I may have to do this back-and-forth possibly 4 times.
As you can tell, the four part day cycle makes the game a grind.
The art design for the character models is good, but the lewd scenes are tame. There are six main love interests in the game, which you can see in the main page banner: a mother/maid character, a dark elf mayor, an aunt/maid's best friend, a tsundere witch, a buxom blue-haired guardian, and a green-haired dwarf/gnome/halfling tavern-owner. Of the designs, I liked four out of six, and the storylines are similar. I did not care for the Dark Elf plot or the dwarf Tavern owner plot. The witch and the guardian have very long quest sections, which felt bloated. The lewd scenes are animated, but they are very static in movement. There is sound design, but it tends to call attention to what you don't hear rather than what you do hear. For example, you may have a lewd scene where there's squishy noises for penetration, but there's no other human sound, like moaning or movement, so it just sounds like someone is stirring a spoon in a jar of mayonaisse into a microphone.
None of the character arcs are finished beyond actually having sex with the characters. So ludonarratively, the main character, while spouting love and fidelity to each of the girls, is a hit-it-and-quit-it kinda guy. Because the lewd scenes aren't exactly exciting, finishing a character's storyline feels like a hollow accomplishment.
I Don't Recommend The Game. I give it an overall passing score for the character design and the variety in quest designs and mini-games. The lewd scenes are underwhelming for the time commitment. The writing doesn't give it any favors. But if you love RPGM projects like Town of Passion, this one is similar.
Similar Games: Town of Passion