Review on v0.12c
I was sort of unsure of whether to give this VN 3 or 4 stars but all in all, it just about teetered over the edge of 4 stars in the end for me.
Writing (3.5 stars)
The writing, setting and story are overall decent.
It's pretty exclusively slice of life as of yet and I fear that if that goes on much longer, if no actual plot or conflict is introduced besides the vague looming prospect of the parents of the MC, Rita, returning home, that it's going to become dull soon.
This is especially true because Rita is slowly opening up more and more to sexual experiences, so that story thread of her evolution is going to come to a stop sooner or later, depending on how kinky the dev is going to let her become.
The characters are overall pretty interesting although I feel like some of them, like Haruka, or the cafe owner and the photographer whose names I now can't even remember (Luca? One of them? Maybe?), are a bit underdeveloped. But I like Violet, Luna and Rita, they all have their own characterizations and are pretty well developed.
The dialogue is generally okay throughout though it does get fairly clunky and unnatural during the sex scenes.
Gameplay (4 stars)
Not too much to say here, this is a pretty straightforward VN. The choices mostly have to do with which characters you want to choose to have sexual experiences with, often being about whether you want the straight or the lesbian choice.
You play mostly from Rita's POV but some Violet POV scenes are sprinkled in throughout which was a good decision by the dev, in my opinion. Violet is already in a committed relationship but she and her boyfriend are on the lookout for spicier sex with other people.
This lets the dev have the what I would call "normal" route of these VNs with Rita where you play a sexually inexperienced character slowly becoming more sexually open and confident (although it's not treated as "corruption" in this instance which I'm pretty grateful for, I'm not a fan of the fetishization of the perceived immorality of women having sexual experiences) but also have kinkier scenes earlier on through Violet; in that way you don't have to wait until Update 26 or something until you get something a bit more juicy with the MC.
Technical aspects (4 stars)
The renders are overall pretty good. I'm personally not a huge fan of this particular art style but it's a nice change of pace from the typical DAZ3D stuff you see in most of these Ren'Py games—which kind of all looks the same after a while if you play a lot of these games to the point that I'm conflating characters from different games in my head—so it at least achieves sort of its own visual language.
I also like the music choices throughout; even though it's nothing really extraordinary, I always appreciate when a dev pays at least some attention to this aspect because it really does elevate the tension and the storytelling.
Otherwise, I didn't encounter any bugs or other technical problems during my playthrough, so the coding seems solid all in all.
Sexual content (3 stars)
Caveat: I only played on lesbian mode so I can't really comment a lot on sex scenes with men except for a few instances where I chose to watch the straight scene before going back and marking the lesbian choice as my canon.
Starting around chapter 7 or 8, sex scenes start to become a bit more frequent and, at least in Violet's case, a bit more interesting.
Rita is finally at a point where she becomes more open to sex but it's all really vanilla. There is sort of a weird incongruity where Rita starts having sex with a lot of random people, straight-up strangers in some instances and recent acquaintances in others, but doesn't really seem to care about having sexual encounters with other main characters.
This makes the point that Rita is opening up to her exhibitionist side and is, I guess, a mark of her becoming more sexually open, but sex scenes with characters the player barely knows or cares about don't generally make for the most compelling thematic material and therefore carry less weight than if Rita was having sex with one of the other main characters.
As to Violet, I generally like the pace of her story, how we get these scenes every now and then and she really does start to do some kinkier stuff, it's great.
Generally though, I feel like most of the sex scenes are always a bit of a letdown because they're always pretty short, with just a few renders of the action before coming to a quick conclusion.
And the lesbian scenes in specific have stayed very underwhelming because they all seem the same, they basically all boil down to cunnilingus, in 69 position if they're feeling adventurous, one after the other if they're not, and that's it. That's obviously fine sometimes but at some point, we really need to get some more exciting lesbian stuff, start introducing toys and stuff, or even just a bit more fingering, but at least something.
Conclusion
Mostly, this VN succeeds in its execution.
The premise—besides the introduction of the MC as a half-asian, half-white Canadian woman, an interesting choice which I applaud for its uniqueness—is not too exciting or something we havn't seen in similar fashion before. The same goes for most of the other characters.
But most of what Casual Desires does, it does well. The writing is pretty good, the renders are good, the dialogue seems generally natural, and the sex scenes are at least frequent enough to keep you hooked.
So while I wasn't blown away by this game at any point, it did keep my interest and I'm keen to see where the story and its characters are headed next.
The story in general is a fun time with a lot of "fun" and then some interesting mini stories here and there that although simple already caught my interest xd, anyway, best of luck.
