This review is a bit of a long one. So I'll have a bullet point list of the pros at the top and a longer diatribe below describing the cons if you want to continue on.
Pros
- Graphics. Excellent artwork. Seriously good.
Okay. That's it. If you're still here and want to continue on you've been forewarned. Strap yourselves in because the rest of the review is a bit of a doozy.
Cons
- Gameplay. Calling what this game has implemented a gameplay loop is like dragging your dick across broken glass and calling it a form of masturbation.
I've been trying to put my finger on what it is about this game that makes it so unpleasant to play, and I think I've finally found the heart of it: the open world setting. I think the creators of cloud meadow saw how an open world setting is a hallmark of excellent, immersive, games and misunderstood the feature as some panacea for good gameplay. Without understanding that, as a gameplay feature, an open world setting is only enjoyable and compelling after a fuck ton of work has been put into it. This is true for games of enormous scope from TES, Fallout, and the Witcher 3, but it's also true of games on a much smaller scale like Stardew Valley. Because a poorly implemented open world setting will not only fail to immerse the player in the world, but will actively distract them from it.
This is because an open world setting in a fully visualized format requires the creators to spend undue time on making that world come to life. Where text or button interfaces allow the player to flesh out the minute details of the world with their imagination, here the creators need to show the environment living and breathing in this shared space with the player. Otherwise you get a travesty like Cloud Meadow.
The open world setting of this game feels like stepping through a shallowly painted set piece populated by mannequins, no matter how pretty or vivid those painted colors might be. I don't want to run through a lifeless town populated by static NPCs between several loading screens so I can dick off to another island devoid of animate life so I can get access to a barren dungeon.
It's not fun, and every step of the way makes me to stew on how dead the game's world is. Bluntly speaking, running through this game's open world setting feels like a colossal and aggressive waste of the player's time.
- Gameplay Part II: Dungeons. Wasting time going through a lifeless maze was pioneered by a Windows 95 screensaver, and should have stayed there.
Maybe this is a matter of reality not meeting expectations, but I feel this game's dungeon would be so much more enjoyable if it was in a format akin to Darkest Dungeon. There's absolutely no reason for me to have to hold down a button so my character runs across an empty expanse for several screens, only to have to backtrack when I hit a dead end. This isn't fun. It's boring and immersion breaking. All it makes me think about is the other, less convoluted, avenues I could be pursuing to choke the bishop, spank the monkey, strangle the snake. I don't want to be sitting there, dick in one hand, holding down a button with the other.
There's also some serious rebalancing that needs to be addressed for the combat, it seems a soulless fight of attrition and one that doesn't encourage the player to waste time leveling up so it becomes more manageable. I'm not going to go into depth on how unpleasant the combat gameplay is, because I don't fully understand what makes the experience so grating, whether it's just time lag with the animations or whatever. But it's literally more enjoyable for me to avoid the combat altogether and hope I have enough life to survive the boss. Like I don't know how it was fucked up considering it's in such a classic RPG format, but it's there and it would be worthwhile for the creators to figure out what needs to be fixed.
- Gameplay Part III: Farming. Because what's a porn game without farming?
Like I don't know if the devs wanted to create "Stardew Valley: Unrated and Uncut" or whatever, but this part of the game just sucks. Even the actual farming in Stardew Valley was a chore to get out of the way in the morning, aided only by the customizability of your plot of land. Fields could be turned into decorational devices, and the effort of customizing and maximizing your field layouts made the otherwise mindless effort of actual tilling and watering rewarding.
What Cloud Meadow implements for farming is something that has all the tedium of farming without any of the feeling of reward that Stardew Valley gave you. While the isometric format of the game certainly doesn't help when aiming your tools, having to till, weed, water, and plant in preallocated spots feels like a tacked on and useless part of the gameplay. Something there that only exists as a shunt to move you on to what everyone is playing the game for: breeding.
- Gameplay Part IV: Breeding. What we all played the game for, and what is so badly undelivered.
I don't really want to go there, but the fact of the matter is Breeding Season looms large in the background of this game. I don't care or want to know the full story of what happened that brought that game to demise, but Breeding Season exists as a kind of precursor inspiration to Cloud Meadow and so comparisons between the two are somewhat inevitable.
Part of what made the breeding loop of Breeding Season enjoyable were traits your monsters carried. It's a bit of a Skinner box, but pulling the lever and seeing the traits or mutations the resultant offspring might have was fun. Seeing those traits you curated continue to improve and what their combinations might result in gave the player the same sense of reward one might achieve from finely pruning a bonzai tree. The UI was tailored to this aspect of the gameplay, it let you easily determine the traits of your breeding stock and go about determining your breeding pairs.
Additionally, the variety of these traits, and the visible impact some of these traits had (whether it made your monsters more bestial, or appear younger) gave the player many permutations of their breeding stock both to explore and fap to animation wise. While this would have been a likely obscene number of animations to make, it also focuses on the core aspect of the game: sexy animations for the player to get off to. This is the gameplay that would keep the player coming back for more.
The breeding in Cloud Meadow is only redeemed by its animation. First off: I don't know what genius thought it was a good idea to bury traits in some submenu you get when directly interacting with a single monster, but it's bad and they should feel bad. It impedes the breeding loop that should be driving a player to get more monsters. Secondly: the number of animations is just disappointing, I know the number is much more manageable compared to breeding season but this is solely what players come to see. As it is now, Cloud Meadow is feature complete for 'HD' breeding animations, and, sad though it is, I'm almost positive Breeding Season has more animations. This might be a bit of an unfair comparison though, as Breeding Season had about 4 sex animations for every possible breeding pair and trait permutations of the breeding pair, while Cloud Meadow has only 2 sex animations and it's only for breeding pairs including the player's character.
Let me reiterate this though: Cloud Meadow's breeding animations are basically finished. This is all the fappable content the player is likely to see, and given the audience of this game it's also the only thing players would be interested in.
The rest of the game might as well be so much window dressing.
Well, that's it for the review. I should probably write something about the story, but I was skipping through it so fast trying to get to the breeding section of the game that the only impression it managed to impart on me was that it follows the generic 'stranger in a new land' introduction. Trite, boring, nothing to write home about. The most positive thing I could say is that it's a comfortable trope, something you can relax into without thinking about it deeply. In broad strokes the setting is novel but I don't think it's enough to keep you there.
Honestly speaking, if I could make only one suggestion to the devs for delivering an enjoyable playing experience, I'd tell them to at least work on stripping out the pointless fucking open world environment. Like, yeah, I can see you invested a lot of time into it and it looks very nice and pretty. But it's such an awful vehicle for delivering your gameplay experience that it coats everything you have in a fine layer of shit.
