I don't want to treat DPC as a one trick pony. Nonetheless when he's only made 1 complete game, that's all I can fairly judge him on.
It's not just the obvious twists in AL, it's DPC's overall philosophy that the way to make us feel for the characters is to put them through hell. You can see that even in BaDIK: Maya's father; Bella's husband; Josy's loneliness; the MC in Episode 4 (though that one partially missed the mark).
It's not that the technique is invalid, because it can definitely work: Josy's monologue in her second date, for example, really did make me care about her, and that's been a vital part of holding the M&J path together so far. But there is a limit to how far you can push that technique before the audience is overwhelmed and just tunes the whole thing out. What AL demonstrated is that DPC completely misjudged that line in his first work (IMHO, of course).
BaDIK is still in the first half of the story from everything we know, so it's too early to know how far it will try to push things. I agree that the raunchy college comedy setting means DPC doesn't intend to push things as far as he did in AL. But by the same token, I think the setting also means audience's personal limits are also going to be lower than they were in AL. That means that even if DPC intentionally dials down the drama, he could still overdo things even worse than before.
What I've seen so far makes me nervous. The M&J crisis was addressed, but nearly all of us agree the resolution was rushed and incomplete, and it's clear there will be more drama with them in the future. Sage is, to all appearances, unable to let go of a loveless relationship, and now she's being undermined by her HOT sisters. Bella's secret has had so much dark foreshadowing our only real hope is that DPC is going for a comedic anticlimax.
And maybe he will! I'm certainly hoping for it. But until something like that actually happens - a dramatic confrontation we dreaded is diffused (not merely postponed) in a lighthearted manner - I'm skeptical the college setting is proof against angst overload. I'm a big fan of the game, but I can't trust it yet.
To paraphrase City of Broken Dreamers, DPC can act as though he's not going to set us up all he wants; the problem is that is also exactly how he would act if he were setting us up.
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