HTML - Crucial Investigation [v1.91n] [root]

After putting up a rather harsh review of this game, I've edited it to focus on a handful of concrete issues.
This game is overly grindy, with vague parameters for progress, and no way of actually tracing your steps, or even knowing if you're in the right direction. This results in repeating the same scenes over and over again, until the game decides (on its own) that you can move ahead.
To make matters worse, there's no way to skip any of the grind, and instead you're forced to go over a boring cycle of waking up, showering, putting on makeup, going to school, and earning invisible corruption points that seem to lead nowhere - until other paths suddenly open up.
While it is normal for HTML games to have a certain level of grind, the main issue is that the game is badly designed in its UI and button placements, which leads to endless clicking and constantly having to move the cursor around (which, in turn, leads to carpal tunnel syndrome).
If the developer had included an option to "automate" a whole week, and only focus on raising the corruption points at school, or at the nightclub, this wouldn't be such an issue. Or if the game actually showed you a visual bar with how many points you need to advance the story.
If you compare this to Family Ties - another HTML game on this site, the differences are night and day. That game was clearly developed with a vision and a keen eye for graphic design, which makes this one feel amateurish, rushed, and needlessly convoluted and bloated.
Yes, the game does have a lot of content, and a lot of scenes. However, the game does not have any tonal consistency or world logic. So all the events that take place feel like filler - an overuse of porn as a distraction, instead of feeling like a slow descent into corruption.
This brings me to the real issue: the writing. The concept is interesting enough, with lots of potential, but the way the female protagonist is written and depicted, simply leaves a lot to be desired. Whatever sense of agency was promised at the start of the game, it's soon discarded.
Instead, the protagonist becomes a mindless, cock-hungry slut, willing to fuck everyone she encounters as soon as she takes a hit of the "magical drug". There's no resistance, no shame, no guilt, no attempt to regain self-control. She simply becomes a toy for everyone to use.
This is a problem because it's initially set up to be a corruption game, but it shifts gears to mind control. The protagonist's fall happens too fast, it's too excessive, and it's too random without any care for character development or continuity. It's just an excuse to show porn.
It's also strange that this game includes Daz3d renders with real porn, but not in a way that complements the other. The 3D renders feel out of place, especially when surrounded by all the stolen porn assets (not to mention some events that are locked behind a paywall).
It would be great if the developer went back to the drawing board, and started removing storylines and branches that go nowhere, in order to focus on the "A story" - the actual police investigation. However, this might be impossible, due to how many variables there are.
If you decide to play the game, be mindful that you'll spend hours needlessly clicking without any tangible sense of progress, and that there are much better HTML games out there - even in the corruption / mind control genre. A game like this is the dictionary definition of bloat.

This "game" is terrible. There is no story. It's super repetitive. If you don't choose the "sex path" choice on your first choice, you get a bad end at the end of the first day, regardless of the other choices you make.

I dont feel to reward this author with a positive review.
His/her/(or whatever self-identifies) works are a grindfest with repetitive and monotonous content. 4 years minimum without any real improvement.

The game is nothing but grind. Developer is lazy bastard who does not want to add automatic routines for shower and makeup. There is no skip button. Progress is slow as dead turtle, and god damn it the the flying F... Why there is old safe you can't access. Patreon content Patreons must be either verry rich or verry stupid to pay money for this garbadge. Just for pure curiosity how long it will take to reach end I played for 6 hours of repeatedly same pictures and text. Basicaly game is taking about 50 minutes and after that is non stop same thing. Tottlay not worth time and money game

TLDR: The two side stories are ok, but the main one ... Take a low quality linear visual novel with inconsistent story, add ton of farm and bugs, lock the content behind random gameovers (with no sex, it's just a text telling you to restart) and you have crucial investigation.

Now a bit longer, I won't talk about the two side stories that are pure visual novels and look nice with much more efforts put in, but are not really my cup of tea and not the reason I played ... Damn it ...

Now for the main story, it should be a visual novel too, but is in fact a lot worst. A visual novel let's you enjoy a story seamlessly with only your choice mattering on what would happen, here forget about that. First the story is hell of shitty, nothing makes sense at all, sometime your character obeys orders that weren't given to her, sometime she answers when nobody was speaking to her it feels like part of the script was cut down without any care, but well, you have a video to fap on, you won't read the text right?

Now let's talk about choices and mechanics, simply you would have none the game would be better. Let's talk about the start of the game, you are a cop sent undercover to investigate in a university with your boss planning to turn you into a whore (but you don't know yet). Ok sounds fun. Yet when you start the game you are in your boss office and are asked two choice, one is labelled "sex path" and the second nothing. If you choose sexpath your heroine will make a little tease ... Ok ... and earn 1 slut point. If you chose the other she behaves like a cop is supposed and you go on your day.

Now this looks almost natural in a porn game, the issue is, at this point you are already gameover if you chose not the sex patch, because at the end of the day you will have a check on your slut points and if you don't have 3, it's game over. The text is some random bullshit about telling you that you aren't efficient enough and voila. And that's the issue, you can do anything you want, you have to follow EXACTLY the path decided or you will have at best a gameover, at worst won't see any content and be locked in the same stupid loop forever with no content added.
In many games I enjoy game overs, I even collect them, but here there is absolutely no point, they are just punishing you for not following the linear walkthrough exactly. What's the point?
And the gameover mentioned above tells you, you did not made any progress in your investigation, in one day LOL. Really efficient police in the US. But don't worry, if you teased the first day and start to fuck anybody in school past day 3 you can stay there forever, no need to make progress anymore, no so efficient finally.

Now about the content, I read there is a lot of content (if you can access it) and that's true, the issue is it's quality. I'm pretty sure how the author add more content is simply browsing youporn he sees a video he fapped on, download it and stuff it inside with no care. Your character is blond with long hairs, don't worry she will swap to brunette half of the time, hairs going short to long, coupled with the bad writing and story that makes no sense, most of the time I'm wondering who is supposed to be the girl on the video that is displayed ...

No just no ... It's nice to make a game for free, but here I feel insulted. The only two nice things about this game is how some pics shifts when your stats rise and you become corrupted and the fact you can throw the game and keep the pics and vids for local fapping if you wish. All the rest is for trash.

That's too bad cause I remember playing it a long time ago, when it wasn't yet version 1.xx and it was pretty promising and it looked like choice had more consequences back then. Might be my memories not being accurate or i was more forgiving cause in development, but it really feels like one fo those games getting worst with each update.

The painfully linear style of this game is too much to bear. This game needs to either have fast forwarding/skipping options that can make an average person want to play it. As nice as the gifs and clips are that are used in the game, they don't make up for the lack of an objectives menu (the walkthrough is sub par) and the intermittent progress in a quest by only have for example 2 out of 7 days be available to process the quest with the additional necessity to take at least 5 weeks to make substantial progress is mindbogglingly boring and frustrating. I highly discourage people from playing this game.

I would likely rate this game higher if it were playable. As is, you either pick all of the lewdest choices immediately, or you get game over. Illusion of choice is worse than no choice. That said, I give this game 2 stars for not wasting my time. The dev quickly lets you know it wasn't designed for players who prefer corrupting someone fairly pure.

So, this is a storied dev, and a long-term project, and some people clearly enjoy it.

What I kinda dislike about it is how it obfuscates being entirely a linear experience with the presentation and "stats" that imply some kind of modularity, or sandboxyness.
Instead this is a linear VN with poor character-writing, with some weak life-sim trappings to simulate a self-insert angle to it. This sums up to making the game very easy to dismiss, which just sucks all around for everyone involved.
However, there is a clear theme and a story, simple and restrictive as it may be, and that will probably still appeal to some. There's nothing inherently bad here.

The worst grind possible, because of how progression works you can't even skip days or cheat to somewhat fix that.

Let me give you an example:
At one point you need one guy trust, you can get a single point per day on weekends, so 3 points per week.
You need 24 points, it's segmented into stages so you can't just set it to 24 without possibly breaking something. 8 weeks of grinding and there is nothing else to do in the game at this time: only one similarly structured event chain at school during the week.
Every single day require you to shower, make up, click through a few small random events that you have already seen 50-100 times at this point, go to school, class, deal with repeated scenes again, go back, shower again and finally sleep. on weekends replace school with a meeting.

Every event in this 24 events chain that takes 30-60 minutes to complete adds a single sentence to the base event or a short gif, in practice you get a single event in 24 parts.

After that You unlock tthe apartament of that dude and go through another event, this time split in 23 parts, after that you unlock a gym with another "repeat 20-30 times that event with an hour of chores in between".

^these numbers are taken from the game code when at this stage I gave up on this garbage and checked how could I make this shit playable

The end result:
talk scene x2>talk scene + teasing x3> talk scene, teasing, touching x2> talk scene+ teasing + touching + bjx3 etc. for 30-60 minutes

Probably worst grind in a porn game . mc gets randomly fucked without any context. No skip button? Seriously? The game is like 1st go tease a guy--> after 1 week of everyday -hectic same school bs grind if u did complete prerequisite u get to oral sex--> another 1 week fucking--> after another week sex. If u have patience to play this mindbogglingly grind set u get to anal / other stuffs. I got my finger become cplete numb after continuous clicking through before even serving me own jam. Deleted after blueballed ,downloaded again gave it a second chance-- deleted again.

for v1.35n

yep this is a porn game and i love it. updates are regular and incremental, choices are clearly laid out. The 3D graphics are good too. Storyline is enjoyable and I love it. Although I would love to see more visuals or even a choice in the outfits the MC can pick. I mean, the club outfit, would love to see that be the basic option over the school uniform.

anyways, the downside is the grindy nature of the game. I think the game is supposed to be a slow to medium path to corruption but the daily tasks can get tedious.

as for this version, there is plenty to do yet also not enough to do once you start seeing repeats.

real picture based game and nice story.
pros:
1.developer is active both ways in development and on forum
2. nice story. worth playing
3 . THREE differnt games in same game with different style
cons
1. story is slow burn means developer is actively building but there is 3 different stories so you wont see any difference much change or story progress

FIrst game of this "type". I have nothing against the type, but why are those images not connected? it's like someone draw a comic book by taking pictures from all existing volumes... it has no identity, nothing. The story is unexisting at best.

You press button to upgrade some stats... why? I don't get it at all. If the text was good, it could have only text like some games have, and those can be good. But here, the unappealing images (they are not bad : it's real porn extracts) unrelated to the characters and all destroy the interest.

this game is good for the first 30-60 mins, then the infinite grind sets in and it just becomes a chore beyond belief. the premise is excellent, but the execution is dogshit. the dev has clearly never played their own game.

Extremely repetitive,hardly any dialogue or story. Storyline lacks any imagination and creativity. The grinding is way too much as well. Overall - very very poor. Not sure why the dev is even trying to be quite frank. I would not recommend to waste your time or support this so called game.

A whole lot of grind with not a whole lot of content.

The entire plot is a bad parody of porn logic taken to 11. Your character just randomly decides to get fucked, then nothing comes of it afterwards.

There's no indication of what you do mattering until suddenly it does. Most options do nothing, and you have to repeatedly try each of the same options out each day and pray you meet the requirement for some new event.

The vids used feature different girls. Not sure how that would ever be mistaken as your character, but at least the video themselves, if taken separately is decent. And since it takes forever to grind out a new scene, by the time it came up you'll forget what your girl would look like so it doesn't matter.

v1.08n

This game is a mess... An absolute mess. Which really sucked because I was excited for the 21 Jump Street premise.

If you "choose" to not sleep with your boss and the principal, it is game over. The game gives no hint of this whatsoever. So why even bother offering the choice, if we're just going to be railroaded anyway? Most of the other choices seem to be broken.

I go to the Beach. None of the options do anything.
I go to the Park. None of the options do anything.
I go to the Mall. Guess what? Again, none of the options actually do anything. Clicking on the buttons is completely unresponsive.

As far as graphics: I don't mind pure text. I enjoy artwork. I don't care for real porn images, but I won't rate a game down for it. This game chose to go for a weird mixture of animation, still images, and real porn gifs. However, they couldn't even be consistent between images. Usually the MC is a blonde porn actress. Sometimes she's randomly a brunette. Clearly not the same woman. If you're going to violate copyright of real porn, at least put a little effort in to make it match between images.

On the positive side... A web version was available, so I didn't have to waste time and bandwidth downloading this schlock. Yay?

love the game . lots of gifs and vids( which i love ), good plot easy to follow .
no unnecessary writing . not a lot of literature ( which i also like ) u can understand whats happening just by the visuals . some activities have a long period like the weekly events of if there is option to skip days or add an automated makeup n shower system it will be faster and will not disconnect the player . overall i like it i would give a four star but m giving five for encouragement to the developer. hope u keep the consistent updates coming i wish u the best of luck .

The game is fairly straightforward and has a decent walkthrough. There are plenty of good scenes and a good variety with a nice storyline.
The only problems may be that theres no sound, the game is a bit too grindy in terms of money especially with a recurring scene where you lose almost all of it, and lastly it is not clear when we have exhausted all the current content for most cases. Definitely worth playing.
It is also worth mentioning I am yet to encounter any bugs which is really good

The game has a poor UI, has been riddled with typos for a very long time, and plays more like scrolling through a subreddit full of loosely similar gifs with poor titles. Choice is next to non-existent and the requirements to unlock certain scenes are so hidden that it's impossible to figure out without hints. The story has a decent base, but hasn't really gone anywhere nor is it paced out like some of the better games on this site. My recommendation to the creator would be to focus on refining the earlier elements before adding even more content to the mess. Too many creators have their game fail from adding content forever without ever refining any of it.