[ Review for version 0.300c ]
TL;DR: What a wild ride! College Daze has so much content that I do not know if I can fairly review it because there is so many fucking options on what you are able to do. Play it without mods on your first round and play until the end of day 16. There are so many small choices that have larger impacts down the line that it would be quite the challenge to get the same ending twice, even if you tried. It’s so good!
The Good: The game caters to many niches, and if you feel like you don’t like what the game is offering you are almost always clearly telegraphed when to select another option. The incest is a huge plus! You decide yourself how good or bad of a person you are going to be.
The Average: It’s a text game with pornographic pictures and videos to clue you in of who you are talking to or what the sex scenes looks like. This is great for the most part, but sometimes you read one description, but the video or pictures do not agree with it.
The Bad: The game is not very clear with when stat requirements would matter until the last third of the current game, when I suppose the dev figured out how to add it in. If you are careless you can run into the midpoint and have a fair few undesirable outcomes because you were a couple of EXP away for the right willpower or intelligence stat.
Thorough Review:
Story: Great!
College Daze is the story of a college freshman who, upon arrival at college with his mother(’s friend without cheat code) and co., discovers that there are shining lights floating around the campus that he can, somehow, draw into himself on onto others to create magical effects. Most of the time the effects are sexual but can also suddenly be fatal if you don’t read the description. The MC discovers that he has been gifted these powers by a Succubus locked away in a shadowed dimension seeking freedom. What the MC does with these new powers is completely up to him.
Characters: Great!
There are so many characters! In a single play through you must select away so many people because there is no way to do a min-max or optimised play through. All characters are nicely fleshed out so that you feel like there is a point in exploring them. There are MILFs among the school faculty, babes all around and your classmates are a bunch of bros (and hoes). There is no way for me to describe each one of them, because the characters you will interact with in your playthrough will very likely not be the same ones I interacted with.
Gameplay: Competent.
It’s a text-based game with multiple choice for important decisions. The game branches out in many ways depending on what order you play it in, and you may find that you run out of time for certain things, since time will almost always progress to the next timeslot when you decide. There are rare exceptions where you can get many things done in the same timeslot, but without you will rarely be told what moves time forward and what doesn’t. Even with mods this is not clearly communicated since time ticks forward a few “continue” clicks in.
Visuals: Amazing!*
*The pictures and vids that have been put into this game are really good! Otherwise, College Daze has a boring UI with standard text. It is easily read, however. Normally I don’t like real-porn games because I find them lazy and a bit exploitative.
Summary: Great!
College Daze is a banger game. I’ve played it several times during development but this time I decided to do a cheat-free playthrough using what knowledge I remembered and liberally used feature of stepping backwards to undo bad outcomes. In my last playthrough I toggled incest mode with no other cheats and made it my goal to romance and impregnate all my immediate family: mom, sister, aunt, and first cousin. Even when I tried to limit myself to these four, I still ended up with the additional: roommates’ mother, childhood friend, childhood friend’s mother, English teacher, sister’s roommate, cousin’s roommate, the mother of a nunnery, and the most recent conquest: the daughter of my mother’s friend during the daughter’s wedding. Finally, and not least: a succubus queen and her servant that she gave to me.
And that was me trying to restrain myself! 10/10, but also terrible. This took hours of reloading previous saves to figure out what I had to do, when and where to achieve my goals.
Wishlist:
> I wish the incest dialogue was a little more consequential. At most it is “oh, but we’re related… oh, well”. Once you’ve used some pink lights on a relative their resistance almost completely dissolved. The only hard counters are the stat requirements for making them your lovers and convincing them to have a child with you, but actually having sex with them is just about finding a pink, purple or brown light.
> I would like more pillowtalk in the game. Sex scenes usually end and then you skip forward in time to when everyone is dressed and moving on. The game specifies that characters under the influence of lights (unless purple or brown is used) will remember what they did whilst under the effect, but since you leave before it has a chance to wear off properly it leaves a gap in narrative of how characters rationalise what they did after the fact. You can have sex with your mother as early as day 1 (non-penetrative) using pink lights, but she doesn’t ever bring it up even though this would have been a massive taboo breach that she was aware happened.
> More femdom. There is a heavy focus on male lead or male domination. I want the women to take charge more. Some of them are better for this, but most don’t have anything resembling agency but instead let the sex happen to them.
