As of 0.1.0, there is not quite enough content for a fair evaluation, but given the unfair 1 star rating I felt that I had to rate this visual novel earlier than I would have done under normal circumstances.
Graphics
The game has Honey Select graphics which are really competently done, close to the best I have seen so far. (It would be even better if they didn't all look so melancholic.) So far there are three potential love interests, and they are all normal beautiful young women, not freaks with absurd proportions. Two of the female models remind me of models I have seen before, but they are not identical to them.
Story
Nicolas (default name of the MC) is a young guy who at some point moved away from the Japanese city where he grew up. The story opens with him on the train back to that city. He is going to study at the university there and live with his sister-like old friend Milene and her mother. It appears that Milene is now an idol. Apart from meeting two friends of Milene in the street, girls from Nicolas' new university, nothing much happens on the first day. Release 0.1.0 ends with Milene trying to wake up Nicolas the next morning while presenting him a sexy view that she can plausibly sell as just being in the process of dressing.
That's not a lot of content (and no explicit scenes so far), but it's just the right amount for a first release.
I found the story very well done so far in terms of plot and general mechanics. I am less enthusiastic about the dialog. There are more lines of thinking than are (or should be) necessary. And so far all characters speak as if delivering lines in a sitcom with a laugh track. It makes some sense for the characters we have encountered so far, but it still seems a little bit overdone. And sometimes the banter between the young people feels a bit forced or non-native.
Technical issues
- The quit/exit functionality does not seem to be implemented at all except for a standard magical key combination (on PCs: Alt-F4) that you may not be able to use if not playing on a computer. The functionality is not just missing from the in-game menu (a common Ren'Py problem), but also from the main menu. Before starting this version of the game on something other than a computer, make sure that you have a way of stopping it. For most people, in windowed mode there will be a standard operating system closing gadget. To reach windowed mode from fullscreen mode, you can just press F or use the Preferences/Settings menu and select the option "Ventana".
- From an artistic point of view, the menu is great, but you can see that the release was rushed. One submenu is called "Settings" in the main menu and "Preferences" in the in-game menu. Several of its options have Spanish names in what is otherwise an English-only game. Similarly, the word "click" is systematically misspelled "clic" in the main menu.
- The textbox is fully transparent by default, which works very well. If you use the slider in the Preferences/Settings to make it opaque, you can see that it is misplaced to a location higher than the text, in the middle of the screen. For now, the simple workaround is not to use this slider.
Conclusion
I am sure the technical issues will be solved in one of the next releases. None of them are insurmountable obstacles, so I have ignored them for my rating.
I am basing my rating primarily on how eager I am to read a continuation: very much! In fact, I am tempted to give it 5 stars to offset the 1 star rating, but it's objectively not worth 5 stars yet. If it continues the way I think it is intended, and if the developer keeps up the quality of the renders, this can change very soon. But for now it's basically just an extremely promising demo, so 4 stars.
Note on file size
Version 0.1 has an overall download size of over 900 MB, which is a lot for such a short release. I recommend downloading the compressed version instead. It has only a 7th of the original size.
Graphics
The game has Honey Select graphics which are really competently done, close to the best I have seen so far. (It would be even better if they didn't all look so melancholic.) So far there are three potential love interests, and they are all normal beautiful young women, not freaks with absurd proportions. Two of the female models remind me of models I have seen before, but they are not identical to them.
Story
Nicolas (default name of the MC) is a young guy who at some point moved away from the Japanese city where he grew up. The story opens with him on the train back to that city. He is going to study at the university there and live with his sister-like old friend Milene and her mother. It appears that Milene is now an idol. Apart from meeting two friends of Milene in the street, girls from Nicolas' new university, nothing much happens on the first day. Release 0.1.0 ends with Milene trying to wake up Nicolas the next morning while presenting him a sexy view that she can plausibly sell as just being in the process of dressing.
That's not a lot of content (and no explicit scenes so far), but it's just the right amount for a first release.
I found the story very well done so far in terms of plot and general mechanics. I am less enthusiastic about the dialog. There are more lines of thinking than are (or should be) necessary. And so far all characters speak as if delivering lines in a sitcom with a laugh track. It makes some sense for the characters we have encountered so far, but it still seems a little bit overdone. And sometimes the banter between the young people feels a bit forced or non-native.
Technical issues
- The quit/exit functionality does not seem to be implemented at all except for a standard magical key combination (on PCs: Alt-F4) that you may not be able to use if not playing on a computer. The functionality is not just missing from the in-game menu (a common Ren'Py problem), but also from the main menu. Before starting this version of the game on something other than a computer, make sure that you have a way of stopping it. For most people, in windowed mode there will be a standard operating system closing gadget. To reach windowed mode from fullscreen mode, you can just press F or use the Preferences/Settings menu and select the option "Ventana".
- From an artistic point of view, the menu is great, but you can see that the release was rushed. One submenu is called "Settings" in the main menu and "Preferences" in the in-game menu. Several of its options have Spanish names in what is otherwise an English-only game. Similarly, the word "click" is systematically misspelled "clic" in the main menu.
- The textbox is fully transparent by default, which works very well. If you use the slider in the Preferences/Settings to make it opaque, you can see that it is misplaced to a location higher than the text, in the middle of the screen. For now, the simple workaround is not to use this slider.
Conclusion
I am sure the technical issues will be solved in one of the next releases. None of them are insurmountable obstacles, so I have ignored them for my rating.
I am basing my rating primarily on how eager I am to read a continuation: very much! In fact, I am tempted to give it 5 stars to offset the 1 star rating, but it's objectively not worth 5 stars yet. If it continues the way I think it is intended, and if the developer keeps up the quality of the renders, this can change very soon. But for now it's basically just an extremely promising demo, so 4 stars.
Note on file size
Version 0.1 has an overall download size of over 900 MB, which is a lot for such a short release. I recommend downloading the compressed version instead. It has only a 7th of the original size.