After playing through it multiple times I gotta say the Others path is the only one that really feels like old style free-roams where they were multiple chances to get your dick wet. Kinda blows the rest out of the water.
I knew once I finished episode 8 that Others was gonna be my first playthrough. Josy is my favorite girl by a fair margin, but Others has like 60% of the content.
But I believe what really holds it back is the lack of any post-party content. Like I'm not expecting a full day's worth of recovery/cleanup but we can access the cellphone outside of free roam now so having it load a bunch of new clucks on Rooster about stuff that went down at the party once the new 'day' hits would go well to giving people a sense of completion instead of just some random stat screens for a minigame. Maybe a dynamic one from most of the guests that has them expressing their approval the higher your score was on the minigame? An update on what the preps did if you did let them in? Literally fucking anything from Nick? People asking why Santa hates you? Hell maybe a text or two from someone like Sally telling you to get your clothes back.
Nail on the head. Phone content was lacking a ton in this episode too; which I know isn't the most important thing in the game, but I like phone content. There were 6 possible text convos at the beginning, 3 of which were locked to a path, and a few Rooster clucks most of which you couldn't reply to, and the few you could reply to weren't anything funny or interesting (excluding the Jamie one if you make fun of the feminists). I really can't reply to Josy or Maya's clucks that they made because of the MC after the dare game and reference the MC in the replies? It's kind of ironic that this episode that lacks so much phone content also is made up of mostly free roam content, which is historically where phone content resides. What happened to the days when you would start a free roam and immediately be confronted with 7 different texts, half of them with long reply chains, and 3 clucks that you could reply to with funny, witty lines?
If it this was a content packed episode with a relatively short development time I'd give it a pass, but this was the longest development time yet and didn't feel all that much more content filled to me.