Review of version [v0.17d]
Cabin by the lake puts a simple but captivating premise, a family reunion of big breasted ladies in a time loop.
Straightforward right?
Well the game is a far cry from that, it’s a tangled maze of choices and tiring repetitive gameplay that underuses the elements of creativity in a sandbox with a time loop, which forces you to dislike what good is left in the game.
But let’s start with the beginning: You start as a random dude going with your family to a reunion of all your other relatives in a wooden cabin near a lake (hence the title).
After the game has welcomed you, in the introduction with all the characters such as: the angry sister, the promiscuous aunt, the tomboy cousin… and presented you the “events” (which will keep looping during the entirety of the playtime), the real game finally begins.
At the end of the vacation, You are thrown into the cabin again (and you’ll be thrown in again, every ending) with free roam and with some hints on how to proceed but with one single clear objective: try to corrupt everyone and get laid.
Gameplay wise, it is a sandbox with a set of choices per loop, therefore is not grindy or aimless at all, since you can spend actions only where the events or characters are, and the map will show them for you.
Moreover everything seems not contorted at first, the game expects you to experiment, talk to this girl and receive X answer, what happens if I meet my aunt and talk about my sister?
What happens if I spend the entirety of the vacation with my cousins?
Et cetera.
Seems pretty straightforward right?
Well no, the game gives you the impression of doing whatever you want to progress forward, but no.
In reality you will blindly brute force every option, every choice that seems inclined to bring you closer to sex while pressing the CTRL button non stop to skip the lines you may already have read 5 times.
So it’s a game about trial and error, which is totally fine, but even in hard roguelikes I am expecting some kind of rewards or upgrades, here you may get a corruption world point and an indication that you are going on the right direction… Till you get thrown back again searching for a new solution.
To be honest there are some gameplay upgrades that change personalities, past actions, events or implementations and things like these are truly accepted, although they aren’t much and don’t galvanize the gameplay loop enough to be truly welcomed; when I obtained them I don’t smile or cheer up, I just sigh, sigh that I can finally progress somewhat through the CTRL adventure.
Setting aside one moment the gameplay, let's talk about the writing and the story. The story could be defined as simple or bland, nothing happens, you go to a cabin with your relatives, you spend the days there and then you go away, the end. No real big event that you have to stop through repeating the same loop nor incidents nor enemies, you get the point. It's eventless, almost boring but it is meant to be this way, to catch you off guard with some particularly good moments, (or some disturbing ones that just makes turn off the game, if you have played it, you know which one I am referring to!), it half nails this concept albeit, because on one hand you'll be welcomely surprised for the turn of events but on the other you'll still button smash every line waiting for these climaxes to happen and not every twist is as the same quality of others.
The first half of the game slouches a bit, the second part when most progress is done, feels almost like a different game.
And this brings me to the characters, they all have a personality and some quirk that either gets twisted or put at the extreme, characters like Sami even if kinda tropey (Aaah a sister that hates you) ends up being wholesome, others like Lin completely miss the mark feeling weak. They all range from interesting, to kinda boring and completely skippable, but this doesn't matter you have to do them all to feel and gain some kind of progress!
And here I arrive at the biggest let down after the gameplay: the presentation, the models, sprites, the images overall. Throughout the main game you'll meet all the characters in a vn sprite, And almost all will have the same expression and pose during the course of the loop, and sure a few of of them actually have expressions and are actually lively, (Like Alex who has the most poses) or when you do their path they start to wake up from their marble sleep (Like Sami), but most of them will feel and remain still, like statues, that change expressions or show boobs once in a while. And so are the events around these characters, motionless. MC will touch a boob you'll get the description, MC puts his head into the melons of a girl, a black screen and a description, most scenes appear through text and the ones that are actually rendered will be very very static.
The renders and lighting in general is kinda decent, sometimes average but rarely downright ugly.
The few best scenes will just be conversations or unpredictable events but on the rest of the dialogues and descriptions, it falls short.
In addition the writing, is smooth, no errors or hiccups, although not exceptional to justify the many text based scenes, I have no complains.
Other curious additions that I will give credit, is the progress tab a the end of each loop.
It will show you the achievements, the unlocked elements and even emails that you obtained after doing X thing.
(Also it’s not a critique, but I don’t know where to put this, but the intro screen with all the love interests behind a light blue background looks terribly similar to the Weezer album, was it put on purpose? Who knows but now I can’t unsee it.)
To conclude Cabin by the lake is a vn with some actual interesting and cool moments held back by his slouching gameplay and presentation that although lackluster gets costantly updated, in fact some of these flaws could or will be smoothed and fixed, making the game more enjoyable even to the eye, and this review will probably change, but as for now the game is in a poor state, which even if it encourages me to continue playing more, it also makes me wish it was a better experience.
