Edit: It seems like my entire original review was just from the tutorial/prologue...? I used an autoclicker to skip past all the bullshit story (oh my GOD is the main story horrendously cringe) and it seems like the "real" game started so I guess you just need to spend a few hours to get to the real game. I'm hoping it's worth it... I also timed it, and it's seven whole seconds of forced waiting between time changes.... Why can't time just instantly progress? It's just needlessly padding the play time and wasting players' time.
I don't have too much to say at this point but hope to update this review later to a more positive one...
The writing in this is just... rough. Really hard to read and quite cringe at times. I like the designs of the characters enough, but the MC is just infuriating. He'll randomly do things for the sake of the plot but then often NOT do things for the sake of the plot. For example, at one point you're LITERALLY alone in your own apartment with a person and when she leaves the MC is like, "Man I need to find a way to meet up with her one on one so we're alone and nobody can interrupt!" Like what the fuck, man? She LITERALLY was just there ALONE with you and you couldn't do it then because... The dogshit plot called for it. I'm not even that far into the game and there have been many such cases.
The game seems to give you the illusion of choice by offering many "Leads" to things that you can "investigate" to progress different plotlines, but unless I'm just missing something it seems like a majority of them die out almost instantly because you haven't progressed the "main plot" far enough to unlock areas or do things. This wouldn't be too bad if it weren't for the fact that a lot of things are time gated while there's literally nothing else to do so your only options are to repeatedly skip time (which takes a few seconds every time instead of being instant which is really annoying as there's no way to skip the time progression and it happens EVERY time the time progresses) or work (which is the same but you get money for it).
This is made more frustrating by the fact that there's a "Help" feature where you talk to Pixie and she just says, "I dunno, go around and talk to everyone and if that fails then talk to me after a few days!" The problem with this is that sometimes the event you get by waiting a few days baits you into thinking there's something you can do when there isn't, and thus you waste even more time trying to figure out what it unlocked.
This game is dressed as a game with a lot of freedom to explore things as you want to and not be railroaded, but it seems like a total facade so far as it's just... tedious grinding through things even due to the forced time progression mechanic (which would be significantly less frustrating if time progressed instantly instead of showing the bar crawl slowly to the next time which means it's slow even if you want to skip past annoying stuff).
It's also quite frustrating that there are quite a few times where they decide to have text for a sex scene or something but opt to fade to black instead of showing anything that happens except for maybe the aftermath. Usually in an NSFW VN they'll at the very least have a few renders of each scene, but that's sadly not the case here. The models are nice though, so it's a shame.
I don't have too much to say at this point but hope to update this review later to a more positive one...
The writing in this is just... rough. Really hard to read and quite cringe at times. I like the designs of the characters enough, but the MC is just infuriating. He'll randomly do things for the sake of the plot but then often NOT do things for the sake of the plot. For example, at one point you're LITERALLY alone in your own apartment with a person and when she leaves the MC is like, "Man I need to find a way to meet up with her one on one so we're alone and nobody can interrupt!" Like what the fuck, man? She LITERALLY was just there ALONE with you and you couldn't do it then because... The dogshit plot called for it. I'm not even that far into the game and there have been many such cases.
The game seems to give you the illusion of choice by offering many "Leads" to things that you can "investigate" to progress different plotlines, but unless I'm just missing something it seems like a majority of them die out almost instantly because you haven't progressed the "main plot" far enough to unlock areas or do things. This wouldn't be too bad if it weren't for the fact that a lot of things are time gated while there's literally nothing else to do so your only options are to repeatedly skip time (which takes a few seconds every time instead of being instant which is really annoying as there's no way to skip the time progression and it happens EVERY time the time progresses) or work (which is the same but you get money for it).
This is made more frustrating by the fact that there's a "Help" feature where you talk to Pixie and she just says, "I dunno, go around and talk to everyone and if that fails then talk to me after a few days!" The problem with this is that sometimes the event you get by waiting a few days baits you into thinking there's something you can do when there isn't, and thus you waste even more time trying to figure out what it unlocked.
This game is dressed as a game with a lot of freedom to explore things as you want to and not be railroaded, but it seems like a total facade so far as it's just... tedious grinding through things even due to the forced time progression mechanic (which would be significantly less frustrating if time progressed instantly instead of showing the bar crawl slowly to the next time which means it's slow even if you want to skip past annoying stuff).
It's also quite frustrating that there are quite a few times where they decide to have text for a sex scene or something but opt to fade to black instead of showing anything that happens except for maybe the aftermath. Usually in an NSFW VN they'll at the very least have a few renders of each scene, but that's sadly not the case here. The models are nice though, so it's a shame.
