Reviewing v0.4.2, no spoilers.
So my rating for this is 4 stars which is about as low as I can go without feeling guilty about it. But the fact of the matter is, I didn't really enjoy playing this game.
The graphics are truly top-notch, all of the renders and the animated scenes are pretty much flawless, really top-tier stuff and there's also just so much content with so many extremely hot girls, so I can't really say anything negative about it.
I kinda also like the structure with the alternating VN-style and the more sandbox-style free roams in between. It does away with the sort of grinding often associated with sandbox games while also feeling more interactive than pure visual novels.
I also really like the characters and the relationships between them, they are really complex, really human and believable, and you really get the feeling that these characters have complicated backgrounds that shaped their personalities.
The story is very engaging and interesting and gets a lot of foreshadowing in from the beginning, the plot is clearly thought out from the beginning not just made up as you go along.
So why don't I enjoy playing it? Well the reason lies with the branching structure of the game where choices really have a big influence on the course of the story. In general, I sort of enjoy that structure; I'm not opposed to a straight-up streamlined VN that's more like reading a book than really interacting with it, but it can be nice to have your choices matter.
In this case though... the complexity of the branching is insane in this game. You kinda have to give the dev credit for it because it can't be easy to write a general trajectory of a game while also having your choices hugely influence it. But it's just simply too hard to predict anything here, one simple dialogue choice (of which there are myriads) might fail to tip the relationship just over the point where you might have some scene with them later. And you probably won't know the effect until like 2 episodes later or even not at all, you're mostly not made aware of the consequences your choices had, not even in retrospect.
So I played this game at first "only" with the walkthrough mod, which tells you just generally in which sort of direction any dialogue option will take you, but not really to which big differences it might lead in the future. Then beginning somewhere in episode 2 I started noticing I was missing scenes, so I started playing it with the proper walkthrough; even then, I started missing a few scenes in episode 3 (and yes, even with multiple shots at different routes) probably because I missed something in episode 1 and didn't want to play the whole game again just to possibly still miss the scene because no one knows exactly how to get there; I mean, you don't even know what scene you're missing, with which character, there's just a blank space in the scene gallery, so I don't even know which character I'm supposed to be doing something different with.
It just gets very exhausting after a while, and, IMO, really impossible to unlock all the scenes if you don't have the walkthrough which I really don't think should be necessary to take you through the whole game, that just takes the fun out of it, I really generally just want to use walkthroughs if I'm stuck somewhere specific. And even so, going through episode 3 literally scene by scene and dialogue option by dialogue option with the walkthrough, I ended up not being able to unlock everything.
A major part of this is also because there's no rollbacks in this game and you can't replay from specific points if you didn't save there or try certain scenes again. So you're probably stuck replaying the entire thing again if you got one or two minor things wrong early on. But, you know, you might not need to do that, maybe it was something recent you did wrong, but again, you have no way of knowing at what point you went wrong or even with which character you went wrong.
I also think that to find the special renders during the free roams may be a bit too hard, which again wouldn't be a big deal if you could just replay them afterward or even had a proper indication shortly afterwards that you missed some, but you're mostly stuck playing until at least the end of the episode to really understand where you might have missed some things.
So you can look at all this criticism and think I'm just a whiny bitch complaining about the game being too hard, and hey, if that's the case, fine. It's still true that because of that, I can't really enjoy playing it normally and I imagine that's also the case for other people. If you don't mind all of this work to try and get to the few scenes you're missing, then by all means. But honestly, at his point, it almost feels like grinding which is kind of weird because I think the dev specifically tried not to have any of that in here.
But I still want to somehow play the game all the way through because of everything else, the great renders, great animation, great story, great characters... but I just can't, it's just too frustrating and exhausting.
I don't think I'll end up playing future updates, depends on how much time I've got on my hands, but it really seems like the game just gets more convoluted with every update, every episode to the point where it's just becoming ridiculous. Maybe if someday the whole thing is finished and there is a clear and obvious walkthrough available, I'll go through it again (even two or three times if I have to, to get everything, as long as I'm absolutely certain, that I actually will get everything) but at this point, I just can't.
Oh and n.b., I realize that you can unlock every scene and render with a cheat mod but that's not really a solution to the problem, is it? If I just wanted to watch the scenes, I wouldn't play erotic games and VNs, I'd just watch porn. I want to be able to get to that point myself, to figure it out. But like I said, just seems too impossible to me, especially if you have no help whatsoever from walkthrough mods or classical walkthroughs.
So take this review how it's meant, I still think the dev has demonstrated true skill here, this could very well be a top-tier game and it might be for some people who are not as annoyed by the points I mentioned as I are but if you haven't played it yet, know what you're getting into.
