Review based on Chapter 2 v0.9 SE edition
Culture Shock begins strong but becomes increasingly rocky and, in the end, a bit disappointing as the story progresses, or should I say, fails to progress. Too many bugs resulting in viewing NTR content when it’s not wanted, adult scenes using stock footage we’ve seen too many times before, and the current updates decline in quality result in a poor showing that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, including fans of NTR content.
Let me start off with my greatest criticism. I enjoy NTR but only when I see it coming. In Culture Shock, I ended up, more than once, witnessing an NTR scene when I wasn’t ready for it, and the experience was memorable in the worst possible way. This is due to frequent, and in my opinion inexcusable, programming snafus wherein the NTR tag is set when it’s not supposed to be.
I’m not against NTR as a concept. In fact, my favorite adult scenes in Culture Shock are the NTR ones, but only when I’m not treating the MC as my in-game avatar. In one scene, the MC notices that his supposed girlfriend is giving his big-dicked friend a handjob under the covers while they’re all watching a movie. He feels instantly jealous and talks like a pathetic beta male would, and later follows them to see him railing her spectacularly while he impishly masturbates in the hall. This is one of my favorite scenes. The problem is that when I first encountered this scene, I was very much on the alpha male path. A bug resulted in the flag being set to NTR, which means when I first saw the scene, I was in the mindset of the MC being my avatar, and so I ended up with all those horrible feelings that are the reason most people despise NTR. If the author had just bothered to play through his own game to test it out, this never would have occurred.
In an earlier scene, again due to poor programming, I ended up getting a beta conversation, where I impishly whine to a love interest about how she chose to have a drunken threesome with my best friend rather than hang out with me on the beach. The scene never actually played, but those awful NTR feelings still came to the surface. I went back and replayed the content only to find it happening again. This was apparently later fixed with an update, but the damage was already done.
Another issue is the dialogue. While reasonably well-written, the correct choices to stay on one path or another are unclear even though the dialogue is marked as alpha or beta. Sometimes the alpha path is actually the beta path and vice versa, requiring the use of a mod to clearly indicate which path is the NTR path and which isn’t. Again, for a game that is supposed to have optional NTR, this is inexcusable. No warning flags come up when you end up on the beta path, so is it really optional?
Finally, there’s the newest content. Not only was there not much of it, but the author is continuing to use stock scenes that he’s used before. Seeing different characters have sex in the exact same way isn’t particularly arousing, especially when it’s so obvious.
It's not all doom and gloom however. The character designs are appealing and unique, the dialogue is reasonably well-written, and the story is well-paced with the adult content reasonably spaced out between sluttier character and those with a slower progression. You won’t have to wait hours for a sex scene, but it doesn’t come so easy that you don’t feel like you earned it. The alpha path is satisfying both in the adult content, with the current story now delving into threesomes and the like, and in the way you frustrate your frienemy who is the one getting all of the women on the beta path.
Still, the flaws are the kind that can make or break a game, and with the most recent update I feel like the author is losing focus and/or losing interest. It would not surprise me if this ended up getting abandoned somewhere down the line. To be honest, with the way things are heading, that may not be a bad thing.
In short, the authors need to playtest thoroughly before releasing. He needs to spend time posing and rendering unique animations and/or spending more time writing and staging the adult content so that it’s not quite so same-y. I’ve spoken to a different author who staged and animated a fivesome scene who told me it took about two months to do, so I get that it’s time-consuming. However, if the current results are this middling or poor, what’s the point of doing them at all? Finally, he needs to add warnings before NTR scenes play, make it clear which dialogue choices lead to NTR outcomes and which don’t, and/or add an on/off switch for NTR content so that the beta path is locked during an alpha playthough. Without those changes, I can’t recommend the game even to fans of NTR content.
Reworking old content is usually frowned upon, but in this case it might be the only thing to save the game.
The Game could also be a bit more Active with actually happenings except of dreams but this will probably coming hopefully in the next Parts
