A solid 4.5 stars. Overall, I recommend playing it.
Still, the game has.. issues. Especially if you are looking for something similar to CoC. It improves upon CoC in various ways (sometimes by using elements from TiTs, sometimes new), but also does some aspects worse.
Pros:
- Interesting companions. Several of them have alternate behaviors based on actions, though they aren't too extreme. (It is more sub/dom, than CoC's pure/corrupted)
- Good writing.
- Good art. I like text based but I also like having art to guide thoughts about appearance.
- Not awful encounter rate.
- Interesting combat mechanics. I like the powers system, though it does have some balance issues.
Cons:
- Art. I like art in these games, but it can be at times notably inconsistent in style (such as those within the passage; but I think the most obvious is the title picture on this thread of Cait which has different proportions and 'feel' than in-game Cait pictures), and inconsistent in appearance (there is no pictures of the player, but for Cait there is a witch face picture but no body picture). This isn't major.
- Balance. The game can be weirdly balanced at times, though I'm unsure if this is due to planning on adding more content. You can reach a point where you're defeating all the enemies in the area trivially, but then you can't beat that story-character who is guarding the way. The amount of XP you get is odd, and so leveling up can take a while.
- Writing. Overall the writing is pretty good, but there some issues in noticeably different style.
- None of the companions really have romance. Mostly fuckbuddies, Cait is just the most on the nose about it. The most you'll really get is some tender moments and kissing, amazing.
- Some of the characters you find feel like they're missing something and are incomplete. I felt this most notably with the spider-woman from the right side of the town (then down), where she can give you a fortune and a little chat but not much else. She mentioned the spider-queen you see in the north, but nothing ever came of that.
- A lot of the talk content is of the style where you unlock the majority at once (or after one event) and go through them and they never change again. Some way to have 'you have already seen this' would be nice. This does make the companions feel somewhat empty whenever you're not doing their quests specifically.
Random Complaints/Comments:
- Silly Mode. Don't turn this on. It isn't Silly Mode (Wacky Wasteland or whatever) from Fallout games, where there's slight references in places and fourth-wall jokes. It is more referring to a character as your waifu or 'ELVES LOL', (Lusamine scene) at least that I noticed.
- Pregnancy content feels kinda meh compared to CoC, as in when the player gets pregnant. Though, there are more inbuilt story elements of it. I notice it a lot less. Another thing is that when you're pregnant it feels like 80% of the time it is eggs, since those are essentially surefire way to do it. I'd suggest making a chance that eggs from normal encounters have a chance of not staying, or something.
- Corruption is weird. You only get corruption from a few sources and it is usually huge jumps. Compared to CoC where it is a slow but persistent source that you may actually have to think about, this feels lacking.
- Transformations are large jumps compared to CoC. You eat a fox berry thrice and now you're a full fox-morph. This damages roleplaying the slow transformation, especially if you roleplay having to eat food.
- No 'need to eat' option. I liked this option in CoC since it meant I could start out as a pure hero that slowly gets transformed because they *have* to eat. Though, I do admit that in this scenario where you already have access to a normal town (compared to having to eventually find Tel'adre), noncorrupted food would be far less of a problem. Though easy explanations exist (ex: Kassyra messing with the player, but no one else).
- Kinu aging up is weird, and then getting immediately married was odd. I wasn't really against it, but it happening immediately from when you free her and her mother (skipping over name to avoid spoilers) just felt forced.
- There's a girl you find after the whole kingdom quest with Etheryn who is a dom much in the style of Evelyn (futa) if a bit rougher. I think the only real problem I have with her is the lack of content (I imagine it is put after that big quest because then you're jumping into the notably uncompleted content area?) but also that she could just be merged with Evelyn.
- I think the above does somewhat point out one problem. Some of the characters could just be merged with others to give them more characterization & content. I imagine this occurs in part due to different writers.
- The only femdom companion is Arona, who is more of the 'you are mine bitch' femdom than the Evelyn sort. Cait is switch, but is most often sub/equal. Etheryn is pure-sub.
- Far less forced or consensual transformation from other characters. Storywise, this makes sense in some areas since they aren't the same kind of crazy that original CoC had, but even from characters where it felt like it would make sense it wasn't coming.
There's certainly stuff I missed, but I think that encapsulates a lot of my opinion on the game. Certainly a great addition, but it does fail to capture certain elements of the gameplay that one comes to want from CoC/TiTs.