VN - Others - Completed - Daring Detectives - A New Life [v0.85] [Ashley Ratajkowsky]

The gameplay is terrible — painfully slow, to the point where you have to spam the mouse just to move forward because you can’t even use a keyboard key to progress the story. It completely destroys the pacing. The interface feels clunky and confusing, constantly breaking the flow of the game so much that I often thought I’d accidentally opened a menu.
The story itself doesn’t make up for it either. It’s dull, badly structured, and dividing a chapter into a bunch of short intro scenes doesn’t suddenly make it engaging. I couldn’t even get through the so-called “café chapter” before losing interest.
The overall engine is just frustrating: constant interruptions, black screens showing stats after every scene, and then forcing you to manually pick the next chapter — over and over again. Even simple things like switching between fullscreen and windowed mode are handled poorly.
It’s a shame, because there’s clear potential somewhere in here, but the execution is such a mess that it feels like the developer chose to waste the player’s time instead of focusing on a smooth, enjoyable experience.

Horrible gameplay. Insanely slow, have to progress by spamming the mouse, cant use a keyboard button to progress the story. Completely ruins the game. Graphics seem quite bad as well. Constantly have to spam cheat button for the zoom feature

the renders are ok, maybe the focus should have been on the story rather than the renders, a chapter can't be divided intro scenes and call it a chapter, the story is boring, I couldn't get past the cafe "chapter".

Any good points about the story or quality of the renders is absolutely and utterly smashed by the slow plodding game engine and poorly thought layout of the UI that breaks things up so much that I kept thinking that I had unknowingly opened a menu or something.

There is a very good reason why Renpy makes up for the bulk of VN's because it is so streamlined for the player. When you break out of that mold your game must be especially sorted out so the player hardly notices that they are playing a different kind of game.

Edit: 2023/04/24 (not much changed)
This game have good renders, good looking characters, and a somewhat interesting story.

But the way you have to stop after 2 or 3 texts to have an image transition makes the game absolutely unplayable, to the point it pissed me off.
And it gets worse, between every single scene, you see a black screen with the resume of your character points and you have to select the next "chapter". This happens over and over and over again.

The engine is really bad, you have just 20 save slots available and every time you press ESC (as we're used to in other games), it goes to Windowed mode, and ALT Enter doesn't put it back in Fullscreen as it should.

I feel sad cause Matilde is a great character in a bad game...

It's clear that the DEV have potential to make a good game, but just decided to screw with the reader's time for no reason whatsoever.

I gave it 2 stars because 1 is the minimum and 1 for Matilde.

I find the story hella interesting, but I hope that you add a lot of intimacy and sex scenes into it. I personally have a lot of fetishes, and a foot fetish is what always pulls me in and makes me interested in giving a game a try. I will keep coming over to see wassup. Keep up the good work champ.