To start this is well worth the play and well worth tracking. The games art, animation, motion comic elements, and general production values are excellent and really set a new standard for Visual Novel games.
Dialogue and world building is also very good. The girls are well characterized with consistent, interesting personalities that come out through their diction. The framing and establishment of the game world is a smidge expositional, but excusable as the player character requires it in narrative and it’s facilitated/built on by optional conversations in the game.
>But game construction has dangerous red flags
Currently the game is a Visual Novel with menu based interaction in hubs between sequences of time forwarding narrative. This is mated with choice decisions that change the game’s timeline.
This is an incredibly risky design. It’s problems are showing only one material choice decision into the game.
The two sex scenes currently in-game exist on separate branches. Moving forward, the game and all the girls already have to be written twice to accommodate this choice decision. There are 6 girls, and if each game choice is structured in a similar “either or” manner the game is already hamstrung. Each “to be continued” is a whole other set of writing and events. The current writing and scene construction is highly situational. The Scenes could be reframed at different places, but already Sui and Neu require 100% unique paths for their opposite branches to begin the physical relationships. Additionally, if/as timelines converge, key events will have to be written either so generalist your choices don’t play a role or require alt dialogue and references for every combination.
It will rapidly get out of hand, and really the existence of binary choice at all (and this early) means it already has.
Each time Kamuo moves the game forward it will require more writing and be harder to keep track of. Many cases of games making the same design pitfall collapsing under the weight of the complexity of seemingly simple (but compounding) in game player choices. Regardless, even if Kamuo has 100% mapped out the web of choice decisions, it is still the absolute hardest/time intensive way to make a game. It’s going to be slow and forward progression will be increasingly minor due to each step forward requiring monumentally more parallel writing as the game advances.
The simple way to remedy this, make it a single timeline of events. Everything happens sequentially instead of parallel, your dialogue choices only produce variants of scenes or prevent scenes from triggering. This is not the most groundbreaking of narrative structure, but requires no additional mechanics than what is already here.
Or (which could be planned) each girl has a hidden early game YES/NO choice (Nue, then Sui, then Deca, then...) for if you are going to play that girl for the rest of the game. Reducing things to solely a kinetic novel beyond this masked "choose 1 girl to sleep with" decision. Not really an engaging replay element. Would kill the current game feel built by all the girls flirting. Definitely not my vote, but something that would be a continuation of the current structure. Distant power gapped 3rd on functional game construction.
The more in depth way to remedy this
The current game before the Nue-Sui choice(removed/recut) is the “intro” and the game beyond it becomes mechanics based, not narrative based, as a VN relationsim operating off of a Sandbox world map system.
The building blocks are all here. The walk transitions, the girls as animated interactives in world locations, the establishment of game locations via the intro. A relationsim system would compartmentalize the arcs for each Reaper into their own little boxes that can cross over narratively via variable based game conditions. Forward progression of time/narrative freezes and in these plateaus between fixed narrative events you develop the relationships with each reaper. This would let Kamuo focus on his 6 established reapers as their own arcs without having to tether them to ongoing narrative events or deal with the massive spider web of parallel writing.
These girls also deserve the depth and character development possible through a full relationsim over the course of ingame weeks versus only being viewed through narrative forwarding writing. The chefs kiss to make each sex scene have weight behind it.
The former is as simple as replacing the “to be continued” pane for Neu’s branch with a line of dialogue in the Sui branch saying something along the lines of “[playername] how lewd, is one of us not enough for you? uwu”
The latter is far more adventurous and a game worthy of the effort being put into this animation, GUI, and motioncomic presentation. Would be the instant gold standard for western(?) English language Erotic Games.
I hope things take one of these two directions before future updates lock Kamuo into the "narrative progression" game design and I’ll be able to amend my review when game/writing design is on par with art design, presentation, and dialogue. But If the future builds just toss Deca/nextgirl onto what's structurally here currently, it’ll sadly be a game built on sand. Not unfinishable, but far more work for far less additional playtime per update and only get worse the more branches are added to existing branches.
I really like your artwork.
