Defending Lydia Collier is a sometimes rewarding, sometimes frustrating experience. The first thing you'll notice is that this is an extremely high quality AVN. The renders, the story, the world building, the characters, the gameplay, even the occasional voice acting on the radio; it's all had a lot of work put into it, and it shows. Perhaps most impressive is pulling off a true mystery/thriller in the AVN format without it becoming boring or predictable. I can't adequately summarise everything that makes this game impressive.
Why am I only giving it 4 stars then? Because a central part of the experience of playing an AVN is how it tackles player choice. Some games opt for branching routes, others for a more linear approach. Both are fine. But Defending Lydia Collier looks less like a branching tree and more like a messy bush which hasn't been trimmed in years. The sheer quantity of choices is overwhelming, and it isn't at all clear to the player which routes their choices will send them down, or even which routes exist. To some players this is fine; they don't much care about whether they miss content, they just want to immerse themselves in the story and experience whatever comes of their decisions. Players like me, however, want to be able to experience the best a game has to offer without having to do lots of playthroughs, and that involves some degree of planning. Normally I would rely on a walkthrough, written or in-game, to do this. However the ones that exist for this game are woefully inadequate, because while they tell you the immediate effects of your actions, they don't tell you where those actions will take you in the long run. And indeed they can't, because the game's decision tree is so messy. If you're a completionist and want to experience every girl's scenes, including variations such as bimbo or not, you have to either be prepared to play through hours with the skip button on before you reach new content, or keep an exhaustive history of saves at crucial decision moments, and you'll have to figure out where those are yourself. It's also not entirely clear from the walkthrough how much interacting with optional elements like the newspaper articles and betting matters; it probably doesn't, but be prepared to either waste your time clicking through fake buggy websites or worry about whether you should have.
There are no good or bad games, there are only preferences, which are entirely subjective. For many people this is a 5 star game, and I envy them, because while I deeply enjoyed it, I was unable to overcome my aversion to the gameplay.
You must answer mails and smses, read and analyse legalese and so on.
