I'm not going to touch the drama associated with this game with a 10-foot pole. That element has been rehashed so often in the comments and reviews that all of you get the gist at this point. As a game itself, it's actually decent, at least when it comes to some of the other games I've played and reviewed on here. Again, I’m not here to review drama, but the game itself, and offer criticism on ways in which the game can be improved.
Not Enough Focus on Your Monsters and Farm:
Now, Cloud Meadow was designed to be a successor of sorts to Breeding Season. Anybody who knows the history of this project knows this. However, unlike Breeding Season, the monsters in this game seem to take a massive backseat. The dungeon crawler quests seem to take the most precedent. If you don't really want to go through the dungeon crawler quests, you're shit out of luck as you need to do the quests to get upgrade shards to upgrade your farm. It feels like a weird balance, since the breeding aspect is what the game primarily advertised itself toward, and while you can do that in the game, there's a ton of other elements that get in the way. Chief among them though, being the dungeon crawler quests.
The dungeon crawler part of the game would be a lot better if it wasn't pushed so much. The dungeon crawler portion is pretty much mandatory if you want to upgrade your farm and streamline it to your liking. And because you're pretty much forced to go through the dungeon crawler portion, it's just a painstaking ordeal that I and many other players here would love to avoid. Now, there are probably some people who enjoy the dungeon crawler and find it enjoyable and engaging. If that's the case, then by all means, have fun! But for those who aren't interested, or simply prefer to focus more on monster breeding and their farm, the dungeon crawler quests shouldn't be all but mandatory to do. When it comes to farm upgrades, I should just be able upgrade it by getting money by selling crops and other such things. Also make the dungeons more worthwhile; you should be able to capture monsters that you beat in the dungeon if you so please, and the different monster color palettes shouldn't only be acquired by breeding two different monster species, you should be able to catch them in the wild too as a kind of rare occurrence.
The Monsters Aren't That Engaging:
With other characters in the game, you can romance them and have a more meaningful connection with them. The monsters that you have on the farm are sentient, they can talk to you, you can add them to your party to help you with quests, have them work around on your farm, and you can max out their loyalty so when they graduate, they choose to stay with you. The only downside is, outside of that basic stuff, there's no real connection or depth to your relationships with your monsters. Sure, you can have them breed with you to your heart's content, yet for some reason, you can't romance them. On the game's roadmap, it says that there's going to be more in-depth romance for the companions, but nothing for your monsters is mentioned. Let's say that you wanted to romance the Centaur in your barn; you like him or her and want more than just mindless fucking. Well guess what? Fuck you.
It doesn't even have to be the most in-depth dating sim about it either, just give me a better reason as to why I should want to keep them around besides them being in my party for the dungeon crawler and helping on the farm. Give me a better reason to have them in the first place instead of them just being glorified sex and menial slaves. I want to have more of a connection with them, I want the game to make it feel that keeping them is a good thing besides that it would just be an inconvenience to have to get a new monster and level them up again. Make it so that if they leave, I feel bad, I miss them and want them back. Not me being like "well, I can just get another one, no harm done. Sucks that I have to level them up again though."
Make More Unique Scenes:
Now when it comes to pairing your character with certain characters, companions or even your monsters, it plays a well animated sex scene which is honestly incredible content. With other characters, it's just 16-bit pixel art sex scenes which are incredibly underwhelming. Look, pixel art sex scenes can be done right, just look at Degrees of Lewdity. In Cloud Meadow though, I would be fine with them if they were placeholders for future animations or something, but they aren't. Look, when the well animated 2D animations are in the game, why would I want the pixel art scenes? Why not phase them out and replace them with well-drawn and animated 2D scenes like the other ones? Give me and other players a reason for wanting to pair up with these characters instead of the ones that have the regular scenes.
Considering the massive amount of time between updates, the developer and artists have more than enough time to draw and animate these new scenes and push that out as an update. People wouldn't be mad at the prospect of more well animated scenes. Hell, most would be thrilled at having them, and very few players would lose sleep if the pixel art scenes were slowly outmoded. The well animated scenes are part of the reason why I play this game in the first place, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Save File Formatting:
The game's save files are run through an in-game save converter where it formats everything into Base64. Now, if you have the right software, you can decode that long Base64 string into readable text that you'd think that you'd be able to edit, right? Wrong. Even if you convert whatever edits that you have made back into Base64, and try to load it into the game, it will tell you that the save is corrupted. The game has an in-game cheat menu where you can give yourself more money, change the day, weather, and things of the sort, but if you dare to edit your saves, it's verboten.
This isn't some major game where it needs borderline encrypted saves like a AAA game; this is an indie porn game for fuck's sake. So, why pretty much encrypt the saves? It's unnecessary. If people want to cheat in a porn game, honestly, who fucking cares? If this feature was removed, honestly, the developers shouldn't be losing sleep over it. They aren't going to lose Patreon supporters if they remove this one element, but I guarantee that the developers view this encryption as necessary because if someone found out how to cheat in the game without pledging on Patreon to get the existing cheat code, they would be worried that somehow, they could lose money over this.
Conclusion:
Again, not even touching the associated drama, this game could be much better, but contrary to some of the reviews here, trust me, it could be a hell of a lot worse. It's a reasonably entertaining little game for what it is, and it's honestly better than several games that are on here. It's honestly nowhere near as bad as some of the games here where it can be summarized as generic 3D incest game which is undoubtedly a Patreon scam #562. I have my doubts that with S-Purple's slow updates to this game being outright malicious by scamming people. Rather, it just seems to me to just be a gigantic case of laziness.
I listed some very valid criticisms of the game itself, and there are many areas that leave much to be desired. I honest to God hope that Team Nimbus holds themselves to that 2025 deadline of releasing version 1.0. Until that time rolls around though, I am a tad bit skeptical. If by sometime in 2025 that release does come out, you can definitely color me impressed. As for now though, it is what it is. To use the line from HBO's Chernobyl miniseries, "not great, not terrible".