Yet another game that begs the question: Why do people enjoy this shite? I sincerely cannot comprehend its appeal beyond the first impressions. Disclosure: I first played this a few years back and promptly gave up due to the frustrating nature of the game, recently I decided to try it again with a few mods to see if it was any better and my experience was basically the same despite it all.
What's so bad about this game? It's frustrating, but not just that, it's designed around the idea of being as frustratingly unfair and grindy as humanly possible. That's the main design philosophy. How so, you ask? Three reasons, the first being that your character is essentially inept at everything, pretty much any actions you take result in some kind of failure, which conveniently enough often results in a lengthy and boring rape scene. The solution is to improve your skills, but that takes forever and I mean it, you need hours in real life navigating through the menus and all the bullshit the game throws at you to get anywhere even decent enough to start not being inept at everything this game tries to inflict upon you. That also applies to your relationships. Building friendships is a sisyphean task to say the least, especially when certain NPCs can only be interacted with once a day in very specific places. Hell, I don't think it's even possible to start sex scenes by yourself, now that I think about it.
Which leads me to another of my major complaints, the game sells itself as a porn game of sorts, and the porn in this game is terrible. All the sex scenes are, in one way or another, rape scenes where you have very little control or agency whatsoever. They wouldn't be so terrible if the writing weren't done almost entirely in short, lifelessly robotic, descriptive sentences while you're dragged into random actions repeatedly. The bad writing also applies to the rest of the game as well, not that I expected this to be Shakespeare, but it's all done in the same lifelessly descriptive way, without any flavor or prose of any kind, it just feels bland and uninteresting to read, there are no interesting dialogues and the characters themselves don't really stand out at all.
And lastly, I think this is probably the main complaint everyone has with this game, the debt. Oh, the debt. Yes, I get it, the game needs some kind of challenge to keep you moving forward, but when that challenge is borderline impossible to win, it's not really fun or fair is it? So the debt is something that you need to pay weekly, at first it's manageable, but quickly it starts escalating to amounts that are basically impossible to pay without cheating. That wouldn't be much of a problem if the game didn't harshly punish you for failing to pay it, and no, there's no way to avoid paying it, you can delay it with the right moves, but that's it. And even if it didn't get impossible to pay, it just takes so much of your in-game time that you're forgoing interacting with this game world just to make ends meet, it's terrible design. Imagine playing something like Dark Souls, except every new boss has double the health of the last one, and when you get to Gwyn you need to pummel him non-stop for 30 minutes to win the fight. That's how it feels to play this game, except it never ends. And that's the main reason why I quit this game. There's no feasible way to advance unless you're following a step-by-step guide on how to abuse and break the game mechanics, and even then you still need to deal with the debt unless you're willing to cheat.
That to me is the perfect example of a badly designed game, one that mistakes being utterly hostile towards the player with a fair, but hard challenge. The bad sex scenes and the annoying stats minmaxing also don't help its case. It's even more frustrating when you take first impressions into account, you have this game with lots of locations to explore, lots of events, lots of customization options and different kinks, but you're too busy trying to avoid paying your debt or suffering through boring-ass rape scenes to enjoy anything. Again, I wonder why people like this?
What's so bad about this game? It's frustrating, but not just that, it's designed around the idea of being as frustratingly unfair and grindy as humanly possible. That's the main design philosophy. How so, you ask? Three reasons, the first being that your character is essentially inept at everything, pretty much any actions you take result in some kind of failure, which conveniently enough often results in a lengthy and boring rape scene. The solution is to improve your skills, but that takes forever and I mean it, you need hours in real life navigating through the menus and all the bullshit the game throws at you to get anywhere even decent enough to start not being inept at everything this game tries to inflict upon you. That also applies to your relationships. Building friendships is a sisyphean task to say the least, especially when certain NPCs can only be interacted with once a day in very specific places. Hell, I don't think it's even possible to start sex scenes by yourself, now that I think about it.
Which leads me to another of my major complaints, the game sells itself as a porn game of sorts, and the porn in this game is terrible. All the sex scenes are, in one way or another, rape scenes where you have very little control or agency whatsoever. They wouldn't be so terrible if the writing weren't done almost entirely in short, lifelessly robotic, descriptive sentences while you're dragged into random actions repeatedly. The bad writing also applies to the rest of the game as well, not that I expected this to be Shakespeare, but it's all done in the same lifelessly descriptive way, without any flavor or prose of any kind, it just feels bland and uninteresting to read, there are no interesting dialogues and the characters themselves don't really stand out at all.
And lastly, I think this is probably the main complaint everyone has with this game, the debt. Oh, the debt. Yes, I get it, the game needs some kind of challenge to keep you moving forward, but when that challenge is borderline impossible to win, it's not really fun or fair is it? So the debt is something that you need to pay weekly, at first it's manageable, but quickly it starts escalating to amounts that are basically impossible to pay without cheating. That wouldn't be much of a problem if the game didn't harshly punish you for failing to pay it, and no, there's no way to avoid paying it, you can delay it with the right moves, but that's it. And even if it didn't get impossible to pay, it just takes so much of your in-game time that you're forgoing interacting with this game world just to make ends meet, it's terrible design. Imagine playing something like Dark Souls, except every new boss has double the health of the last one, and when you get to Gwyn you need to pummel him non-stop for 30 minutes to win the fight. That's how it feels to play this game, except it never ends. And that's the main reason why I quit this game. There's no feasible way to advance unless you're following a step-by-step guide on how to abuse and break the game mechanics, and even then you still need to deal with the debt unless you're willing to cheat.
That to me is the perfect example of a badly designed game, one that mistakes being utterly hostile towards the player with a fair, but hard challenge. The bad sex scenes and the annoying stats minmaxing also don't help its case. It's even more frustrating when you take first impressions into account, you have this game with lots of locations to explore, lots of events, lots of customization options and different kinks, but you're too busy trying to avoid paying your debt or suffering through boring-ass rape scenes to enjoy anything. Again, I wonder why people like this?
