HTML - Blue Swallow [v0.7.3,1] [Blue Swallow]

I like the game which is well constructed and written and really like that some of the consequences of choices are not immediately obvious as in real life you make choices and sometimes the result isn't what you expected. However, for me there are some issues...
Pros:
Well written.
Great replay-ability with different characteristics.
Nice art, which is likely to improve over time.
Cons:
The text can be very long (sort of wall of text).
The game is written for an American audience so if, like me, you are not au fait with the US and didn't go to college or a university some of it is difficult to follow which leads to not fully understanding the story and therefore making decisions 'blind'.
Suggestion:
To reduce the amount of text by either breaking it down to smaller chunks or adding more artwork.
To provide hints for non-American players for some of the story choices.

I'd like to give it 4 stars as it's an above average game but given the 'wall of text' and understanding issues it's a 3; for now anyway... Good luck with your project.

A very good game already with a lot of potential for the future.

Pros:

- Well written (which is a must for this sort of game) with solid pacing which does not waste too much time on the mundane and offers erotic content at frequent intervals.

- Nice supporting art, the HD art is in its infancy but is also looking good.

- A lot of content already, considering the age of the project, and a steady release rhythm


Cons:

- Can be a bit opaque as to which choices impact which outcomes or how to access certain routes

- While that's good for replayability, the content (early on especially) is a bit scattered across lots of routes

- Needs a lot more save slots

Love the Game. Great and unique presentation, the UI works well, there is a lot of variety to fill every niche and it is quite addictive. I have found myself playing it again and again to see what I might have missed. Can't wait to see where this one goes.

Alright, I've played Blue Swallow [v0.7.3,1] by the developer with the same name; Blue Swallow.

I have some criticism to share about this game. This review will primarily revolve around things like pacing, story, writing and decisions. All in all I went with 2 stars as the game currently do not actually provide the spy story that I expected it to.

Pacing:
Pacing is very important in all stories, but especially so in text based games as you don't have spicy visuals to back you up.

Now, imagine settling down, you've decided to watch a James Bond movie. Then the first scene is James Bond getting born. He proceeds to go to school, high-school and college. You might think that all of this is unnecessary, but in the case of Blue Swallow, the dev wants to show you how the protagonist got to be spy and how her personality is. To continue the example, we indulge it a bit to see how James Bond was formed into the formidable agent he becomes, though its not really interesting at all. It's actually fairly mundane.

For a spy game or a James Bond move this would be done in a few cut-scenes, or in the case of a text based game by being provided a few options like "I was book oriented/athletic/whatever in high-school". "My family loved/hated/ignored me" etc. But no. This game takes you through the long winding path towards the protagonist becoming an agent. All of which has nothing to do with the protagonist being an agent.

It feels like the dev wanted to make a story about a young woman going through puberty and early adulthood in a slice of life fashion. Then at some point the dev wanted to make a spy game. Instead of making two separate games they decided to strap on a spy story to the college story. The result is weird with a strange focus and very slow pacing. There's really no point in it.

Choices
The game has choices, which is nice. I don't really mind that I can't see the stats. This is game about character and decisions and not about stats, even if they mechanically must inform what happens.

That said, the tons of text is a bit much to read through without meaningful interaction in-between. Remember those old books where you'd make a decision and it'd say "go to page 257" and you'd do that and so on. Well, in those books the text was about 1 paragraph and 5-7 lines worth of text before the next decision. That should be rule of thumb for Blue Swallow as well.

To end this, all of it really would've made a lot more sense, if the story simply started with the protagonist being chosen as an agent because the agency saw potential in her. You could easily add choices like how the protagonist was raised, academic/school credentials, her romantic experiences, spare time jobs and so on and then just tag on a small explanation of why she was chosen over other prospecting agents.

That was a bunch of text on its own, and I didn't even add any decisions. So, you can just skip it and read the short version here, if you want:

The Good

• Well written with few or no spelling errors
• Decently vivid, enough to at times get a good idea of visuals and characters

The In-between

• Sometimes its a bit hard to follow the time-line. It might be down to me expecting a spy-story and not getting it.
• The prologue would be alright if it wasn't the prologue to spy story. I'd expect the prologue to a spy story being about completing some assignments to be chosen as an agent. I don't expect the whole child-hood story.

The Bad

• Weird pacing
• If feels like the dev wanted to make slice-of-life college story then changed their mind and strapped on the spy part
• The entire part with schools, college and all is not meaningful to a spy story. I understand wanting to show what shaped the character, but this takes way too much focus from the spy part.

Spy stories are kind of boring in and of themselves. I'm sorry, but it's true. What this game does right, and what makes it compelling, is giving you a robust lifepath to define your special agent. Who she is is as important as what she does, and this game and its main character is far more engaging and interesting than a quick sexpionage romp might be expected to be. If you actually want to read and engage with the material of the world presented here, this is a great game that does more right than most of its more straightforward contemporaries.

So give them a chance and let them cook, because the "main game" - which I feel is disingenuous because the whole thing is the main content, but whatever - is shaping up well too. Having played the latest release, the spy content has been worth the wait. It is both sexy and fun, and has felt acceptably dynamic for my different Spies on different lifepaths.

In short, it's a really good spy-themed life sim with a very customizable and well defined main character.

One of my favorite games I have played on this website. The amount of options and paths make it one of the best games in my mind. The options allow you to shape your FMC in the way you want to create her. I've replayed this game a bunch of times choosing different options.

Currently, you can play the game up until you start your spy arc, allowing you to play through the FMC's high school arc, and can play through a gap year, college, or go straight into the spy portion of the game. I'm very much looking forward to seeing future updates of this game.

One of the most bs cc systems ive ever dealt with. Tries to innovate by making your choices shape your character naturaly but instead it removes all control and intentionality. There's good reason why every game ever lets the player see the char stats you know. You have no idea what your choices actually do stats are hidden and you're left guessing. its giving you options but you’re just along for a blind ride. the writing is decent but the lack of transparency in how choices affect anything makes it a confusing mess.

That was perhaps the most frustrating character creations I ever had the displeasure to experience. This is terrible game design. I understand the idea behind it, but there's absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel.

Give me an option to be able to see what I'm changing, how it's affecting the character I'm creating, etc. It's infuriating to go back and forth or outright wipe progress with a restart because the character turned out way off track to what I had intended.

A few options/locked options also are entirely nonsensical to me. My character's only able to "hit the club scene" if she grew up in New York? Why? Are there no clubs in California?

Like, sweet Christ on toast. I don't think I ever got actually mad creating a character before.

Light on visuals but makes up for it with immersive writing and a real sense of choice and getting to define your journey. If the eventual story is as rich as the prologue/character creation process this will be a gem of interactive erotic fiction.

Blue Swallow is a text-based game that makes all the choices for you.

"But," you might protest, "look at all those choices the game offers you! Ten dropdowns per passage! How can you say it makes ALL the choices for you?!"

And that question can be answered in one word -- "intentionality".

Most of the best character customization in games stems from intentionality. In other words, you have an idea in your mind, and using the tools provided by the game, you shape the desired character out of it. It's how character creation works in pretty much every game.

Blue Swallow tries to innovate on the idea of character creation by taking your "idea" and allowing you to roleplay as that in character creation, shaping your character naturally through the events of the game. It's a neat idea, don't get me wrong, but it completely removes player intentionality and control from the experience. This results in a frustrating experience where you want your character to do something or go in a specific direction and the game just tells you "no".

This wouldn't be so bad if the game was a little more transparent about what your choices actually mean. All of your characters' stats are kept completely hidden from you, including which choices raise and lower what. It turns the intended experience of getting immersed in your character's story to me scrolling directly to the dropdown and trying to mind-read the author to make my desired character.

In conclusion, Blue Swallow is not really a "game". You can "make choices", but at the end of the day, you don't even know what choice you're making, and the whole thing just feels like a crapshoot as the author leads you down what feels like a random path. I think the production value is why this game is rated so highly (4 stars as of writing this), as the game looks very polished and has decent quality writing.

However, I'm giving it one star. Being pleasant to look at isn't enough to save a game that feels like it's lying to you about what it is -- even being interactive. Save yourself some effort and buy a book instead of trying to play this not-so-visual novel.

EDIT (9/29/2024): I've bumped my review up to two stars. One star is a very strong rating, and although I still don't recommend the game just yet in its development, it absolutely does not deserve the same rating as much of the other slop featured on this site.

It’s a common sentiment in this industry, to be fed up with how many of the aspiring projects falter and stumble over the same issues that their forefathers ran into. Surely someone can learn from these mistakes. You can make your own game, with blackjack and hookers. With so many mistakes witnessed and documented over the years, it can’t be that hard to do it correctly now, right?

Right?

Female Agent has rubbed a great deal of people the wrong way. What was once an ambitious attempt to give players a vast amount of customization and freedom in the way that they can tackle the main plot has now been reduced to what is little more than a linear kinetic novel. Blue Swallow aims to rekindle that original vision of FA almost beat for beat. You start off as a child and slowly build your character as you guide her through school and (potentially) college. The oddity here, however, is the dev’s staunch decision to make your stats hidden. While you are told what attributes increase and decrease with every choice that you make, unless you’re keeping track of all of this on paper, it’s rather annoying to gauge what your current build is. Imagine playing Disco Elysium, but you can never access your skills page. It’s THAT baffling.

Another strange design detail is the sex traits that can be chosen twice throughout the current game. It is unknown if these even do anything (outside of exhibitionism), and some of them seem to be entirely moot. You can spec into anal, but the dev himself has stated that there’s no focus on that content as it’s not his kink. If that’s the case, then why is the trait even there in the first place? Even if you don’t want to write about anal, you could perhaps pitch it as a way to reduce the chance of the protagonist getting pregnant by just being a buttslut all the time.

Another fallacy that both games commit is too much of a focus on school life. A big joke about FA in the early days was that it was hyping up this grand spy mission that you were going to attend in Bangkok, and after years of buildup, the rework ripped out everything except the Bangkok mission (thus leading to its current issue with linearity). BS also ends near the outskirts of its main spy plot, and god knows if the same mistakes will occur here.

The only positive I’ll say is that the paperdoll for the protagonist is well done, and the few animations that are currently present are passable. All of the other graphical assets appear to be either heavily filtered stock photos or ai slop. I’d give it another year or two to bake to see if it deflates like Female Agent again or not.

I love text based games and I love female protag games but I can't give this more than 3 stars.

There are some great ideas here and the execution in a lot of ways is impressive.

The main issue is, I was reading through this game for around an hour and, because of the way the game set up, basically none of the characters you interact with are developed.

Because it simulates growing up in so much detail, you get introduced to characters and situations that are interesting and then it just flashes forwards several years to something new until you get to college.

It just kind of feels like your reading the diary of a teenage girl for a lot of it and there is little character development outside of yourself.

The writer of this game is talanted, but in my opinion the beginning should be almost completely scrapped and just jump straight into college after you create your character.

Then it should focus on developing your relationships with other characters and telling an interesting story with changes based on your choices in the character creator.

As, in writing, there are no stakes to stories where a random girl named jessica did x thing. Whereas, if Jessica formed a relationshp with the MC and we got to know her and we got to know the person she was doing x thing with and some of their friends, then x thing becomes an interesting thing to the reader.

Most of this game feels like reading about characters you know almost nothing about. This game really needs some character development.

The title of this games says: "American Spy Thriller", from what I played, there was no spying, or working for a spy agency at all. Maybe that happens later but by the time I got there I was too bored I had to stop playing.

This may come across a bit harsh, as the game is really good in some ways, it's just my opinion.

And, I also think not showing why your character is reacting in some ways is a bit of a mistake. If I knew that a choice I made earlier in the game was affecting the MC, at least I could get a sense of the MC's character development based on my choices.

Also, creating a game this ambitious seems like a nightmare amount of work. The branching paths and dialogue almost have to be puddle deep in order to allow for the developer to have time to complete it.

TL;DR:

Pros:

- This game has some really ambitious and interesting ideas
- The writing of the game is in some ways quite good
- The character creator and "paperdoll" or whatever system looks really nice

Cons:

- Game kinda feels like your reading a teenage girls life story in her diary
- Game doesn't allow you to see how your choices in the character creator affect the MC (other than multiple playthroughs)
- Because of the way the story tries to tell a complicated origin story of the MC, you never develop any relationships with other characters (maybe you do later, but I played an hour)
- Because of the lack of character development, you might read "omg did you hear that Jessica was backstabbing Sarah?" and you either don't know who they are at all or have a very faint idea of them so you just don't care about what's happening.

Really fun concept. The gameplay makes the story feel more consequential, a quality which most nsfw games lack. Beautiful art style as well. Definetly keep this on your radar, that's what I plan on at least.

Well, this feels kind of like a Deja-Vu, but here goes.

The game has TONS of potential. The writing is solid, the developers seem to be very dedicated, and the premise of the game is still as fascinating as it was when "the game that shall not be named" was released 5/6/7? years ago.

Unfortunately playing the game has been mostly a frustrating experience for me. Apparently it is intentional that you play "blind", meaning stats are hidden and you just have to follow your gut. While I absolutely understand the intention and appeal behind this idea, the execution imo is really flawed.
I was utterly lost. I had absolutely no idea what kind of MC I was playing. You can try to play a certain type of character, but chances are you are going down a completely different path without even knowing. On top of that, many paths have VERY strict conditions that make it nearly impossible to find them without looking at the code (which should definitely not be something required of the player).
Combined with the plethora of choices, playing this game can turn into an absolute nightmare.
Also, there appear to be many bugs or the amount of choices is simply so overwhelming that it's impossible to represent them accordingly, but I had several immersion-breaking situations where I thought: "This can't be right."
I feel like "less is more" would do the game a lot of good. Why give the player the option to have an affair with the dad/step dad when you can't deliver and he treats you exactly the same.
Last but not least: We are still in the prologue part, how the actual game will play is still a mystery.

This game is basically basically a what if scenario where a project possesses all the great qualities that one looks for in a NSFW text based game. The writing quality is terrific, with the UI alone being a great indicator for the passion and effort put into this project.

Unlike other projects where the how well you progress in a story is mostly an illusion draped into the flavor text alone, in Blue Swallow your choices and actions truly bring fast and tangible results that reinforces your player agency.

The above mentioned factor greatly reduces the friction in creating a new character or starting a new play through as each runs feel fresh and unique, unlike the repetition and railroaded starts prone to this genre of games.

Seeing the Dev's posts gives me hope that they are grounded in the same reality of us players. They sharing the same frustrations and criticisms we all have experienced with other projects who guzzle funding with little nothing to show for it.

Interesting start. I wish there would be more games like this.. and if there are I have totally missed them... I personally would have wanted more "choices to advance moments" but this was really entertaining and enjoyable.

Game version reviewed: 0.4P Public

I like this game. The writing is believable and good, and the transition within and between scenes are fluid. Overall, the narrative could do more with developing side characters or at least introducing them with a bit more substance. It occasionally feels segmented.

This is the game that female agent once promised to be but has completely deviated from.

8/10 Writing, with solid update schedule and good content makes it a 10/10.

Can easily become a top 10 fav.

Choices seem to have actual different paths which is great, and developer is pretty on top of handling updates and bugs.

Much better than a certain other game that reset it self every 3 months, and only adds 10k words in a update, when a bloody webnovel will update 1-2k words a day straight for 3-4 years. SMH

Almost 6 months since posting and still no sign of the spy component of this story. This is already appearing to be one of those overly-bloated games which is going to take forever to reach any significant level of progress. There's also the plethora of choices given to the player which do seem to have impact (so far) which will likely slow the development down even further than it already is due to having to account for so many variables. On a less objective note, I don't understand and dislike the character development system. I made every choice to shape this character into a totally horny slut, yet she still refused some sex scenes in Africa, despite the implication that it's possible. It doesn't make sense to me at all, and just frustrating given how many choices I have to keep tweeking to try and get my desired result. Ultimate conclusion, game has too much going on and too little control. Based on the description and comments in the thread from the developer this might be what they're trying to convey with their game, but I don't see it having much appeal beyond a niche audience.

Nice game.The various possible routes and influences on the protagonist's personality make the game very interesting. I hope that soon it will be possible to use the skills acquired during the game and that more images will also be added.