Two months of lurking with nothing new to add, and finally it's here and I have things to say again.
Episode 6 is... fine, I guess. I played twice, and I enjoyed it, though less the second time. I just don't think it really delivered any of the things I actually wanted.
I remember some time back somebody tried to make a list of all the unanswered questions left dangling up through the end of Ep. 5, and it was about twenty items long. I think this episode addressed one (the letter pertaining to MC's mom). In and of itself that's not a problem, except that we didn't develop any of the relationships either. We made one tiny inch of emotional progress with Bella, and that's it. None of the other LI's like us any more or less than they did before, regardless of our choices. However they felt about us at the start of Ep. 6 is the same at the end. We added a few more dangling, "to be continued" type stuff, mostly at the very end, and for the first time it felt really forced. Previous cliffhangers properly whetted our appetites for answers, but this just felt like "stay tuned for more" teaser bait.
As for the gameplay itself, first off, I disable minigames. I see a lot of complaints about them in this episode, but I've always found them annoying so I turn them off by default. I get the feeling others may join me in this going forward.
Second, the free roam sections... it's too much. It's like so many games that are "open world" only the more you explore the more you realize it's just empty space. The interactivity is a bunch of mostly filler conversations and then scavenger hunting for renders, which I never minded doing in prior episodes because free roam areas didn't have 50 separate screens to stare at. I'm missing some renders and will probably just wait for someone to post a location list instead of hunting them down myself, because it's too big a haystack for me to go looking for a needle in.
I liked the D&G game, but I agree it is clearly where DPC spent all the time this episode. There's a lot of alternate routes in there without making any single run through feel too long, which is good and adds to replayability, but the time devoted to developing it could have gone into giving us more meat on the actual story instead.
I was wondering if I was going to need spoiler tags on any of this, but I'm realizing there's barely anything to spoil. Even if I gave a play-by-play of the episode (I won't), not enough of substance happens to really be considered a proper spoiler. There's nothing that, if I blurted it out, would ruin the episode for you or spoil some huge reveal. That's disappointing to me, that in the entire episode nothing really felt like it carried any weight.
So... yeah. The episode is nice to look at, but once you've unlocked the naughty bits and the joy of a new chapter fades it feels pretty empty of actual, meaningful content. I'll run through it again to do a deeper dive, look for some details that might have meaning behind them worth considering, but all-in-all this felt pretty disappointing to me.
