As someone who is looking into creating a h-game myself, I think a big part of the appeal is the simplicity for the dev. Most 2d sidescrollers pick between either being fully pixelart sprites - that is, the creator has to manually create each frame of every animation (think kurovadis). Or they go the spine/bone animation route with higher definition art- think Mission Mermaiden or Hachina.
Problem is, both of those require a good bit of artistic talent that I, and quite possibly a good few other prospective devs, simply don't have, and both routes also have large timesinks associated with them (manually creating sprite art for each frame of animation, creating detailed sprites to animate with bone animation).
The Captivity artstyle however, is simplistic enough that putting entities together is far faster and easier than the alternatives. You're using bone animation, so you don't have to manually make each frame of the animation, and the detail is low enough that creating the art to animate is relatively fast too. Especially if you're reusing body types - making a lot of humanoids, or canids, or whatever - at that point you're basically just reskinning old assets to get a new base model to animate, and can potentially reuse basic animations like walking too.
So the style is simple to learn, and fast to create assets with, which makes it great for 1man bands or small teams, because you can churn out a fair bit of work in a small number of hours. The quality is pretty good too - one issue I have with smaller sprite-d games like Kurovadis is that the detail of the animations is often a little lacking due to the limitations of the low pixel count, but with the captivity style you've got a fair bit of detail to work with, and going by the popularity of the original people definitely like it.
So yeah, TLDR is that the Captivity style is decent looking yet very simple/fast to work with relative to alternatives, which works great for scaling up to larger rosters of enemies or multiple animations. Makes h-game development easier for amateurs like me who CBA to learn how to actually make art.
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