Reviewing v0.3.8. TLDR included.
There are a lot of positive things that could (and shall) be said about this particular visual novel. But I do have some minor to medium-sized nitpicks. So let's get into it.
Characters (5 stars)
I really enjoyed this diverse cast of characters. All of them seem deep and complex and with complicated backgrounds even if not all of them get that much screen time. And for nearly all of them there still remain lingering questions about their motives. I find Evaline and Tara especially intriguing but I can't really say too many bad things about the other characters either.
I especially related a lot to Vivian and this is one of these rare games where the MC might actually be my favourite character. I did think that her acceptance of her bi or possibly completely lesbian identity was a bit too rushed (I'm bi myself, and believe me, that acceptance didn't come overnight; no matter if a catalyst like Tara is thrown in there), so that threw me off a bit but all in all, I think she's very relatable while still having a strong, unique personality with her witty, self-deprecating manner.
Story (5 stars)
I also very much enjoyed the general trajectory of the story. Between the mystery of Tara as a whole, the weird deal Rebeca seems about to go into with Malina, the uncertain future of Vivian and just general character backgrounds waiting to be explored (just tell me already what exactly happened between Des and Evaline), there are a lot of moving pieces but I didn't feel overwhelmed at any given point.
I think the pace of the story generally feels pretty natural (apart from the lightning-fast lesbianification of Vivian) and I like the rhythm in which the different story elements are being explored.
Gameplay (3.5 stars)
Here's the point where we might be moving into some 'meh' territory. In general, I like that the dev chose to go with the pure visual novel approach here; free roam and grinding and all that can be fun, but I feel like it's very dangerous and there are a lot of devs that misstep once they venture into that particular style of gameplay. So overall, I'm pretty happy that the dev in this instance chose to forgo that route.
My biggest issue lies with what I like to call the Being-A-DIK-problem: having loads of choices and a huge branching structure of the story while not being provided with any means to help you along in finding all the good lewd stuff—which, I would think if others have a similar sort of completionist mind like myself, is one of the primary goals of these sorts of VN's that don't offer you any other sort of feeling of achievement apart from "reading the story to the end". And that last one isn't really satisfying in the way that reading a book can be satisfying because you know that you haven't actually experienced the whole story.
In my experience, the best way to remedy that situation is by adding a sex scene gallery, where the scenes are named even when not yet unlocked something like "Evaline scene 1" or "Evaline day 4" or "Evaline & Vivian scissoring". That way you know what you're missing and you might try and figure out a route to get to it and you also know when you have found everything of import.
That is of course just a suggestion but I'd like to see some way of fixing this situation in future updates, otherwise the game won't really be satisfying to me (or other people like me) long term, in the same manner that I've stopped enjoying BAD after a while for all its virtues.
Visuals (3.5 stars)
So in general, the renders and the models are really not that bad, I quite enjoy them actually.
The problem here doesn't seem to stem from a lack of talent by the dev but a lack of time or effort or proper equipment to speed some processes along allowing for better results.
While the renders of the models are mostly really good, every model only seems to have a handful of poses that we ever see them in (except for sex scenes which I'll get to). And apart from the models themselves, the rest of what you're seeing on-screen are just some extremely generic-looking backgrounds and environments that the models aren't actually standing in (requiring more rendering work and time) but just in front of as sprites. That makes the action feel pretty detached and somewhat immersion-breaking.
The sex scenes are better... but also lacking. In these scenes, and these scenes only, the models are actually featured interacting with the environment, not just standing in front of it, but the action still feels very standstill. For any given sex scene there are still not more than a handful of renders while the action described in the text is much more dynamic; but we don't see it on-screen. If you're not gonna do dynamic animations—which I get, they're extremely time-consuming to produce and still oftentimes unsatisfying and robotic—then at least give me a few more renders during the sex scenes so that they match the action that we read about.
Writing (3 stars)
In terms of natural dialogue or sentence structuring, the writing is really not that bad. Improvable, but I really don't expect a Dostoevsky writing these smut games.
The really big problem, and which cost a lot of my nerves while playing, are the endless amounts of typos and spelling mistakes, and both of them are annoying in their own way.
Now these are not the same thing. Typos occur when you just literally mistype on the keyboard by mistake, something that happens to all of us. I would still think that 80-90% percent of these typos should be really easy to weed out by just rereading the text yourself a couple times, not even hiring a proofreader, so it's really irritating to see just how common these typos are.
But when you see the amount of spelling mistakes, so instances where the dev actually didn't seem to know how to spell words I'd expect from a fifth-grader, then maybe the amount of typos aren't as shocking.
E.g. "she pursued the dresses" (perused), "I spoke my pease" (piece), "If it's finantual I can offer you a job" (financial), "sentually" (sensually), "I think it obvious you're not exactly a phalathapist" (philanthropist? I'm actually not sure...)
I'd maybe chalk it up to the Engrish of a non-native speaker but as far as I can tell from the Subscribestar page of the dev, that's not the case (and the writing doesn't read that way anyway, it's not bad English, just misspelled constantly) so I just have to assume a simply terrible grasp of English orthography.
Normally I'm pretty chill with spelling mistakes and typos, English isn't my native language either and while I've improved a lot, it really isn't that easy, but here it was actually hard to enjoy reading the story because you couldn't go a couple of dialogue exchanges without seeing a typographical or orthographic mistake or two, so that was really annoying.
Conclusion
Despite its flaws or apparent underdevelopment, the story and the characters hooked me enough to want to continue on with further updates. And after reviewing and playing a lot of games that wanted to focus almost exclusively on the renders, general graphics and animated sex scenes but ignored putting seemingly any effort into writing, character development or enjoyable gameplay, I can't, overall, criticize this game too harshly—in many ways, it was a breath of fresh air.
So yeah, if the dev gets enough backers, they might be able to invest in some more powerful hardware, enabling more and better renders, and hopefully, please, hire a proofreader, and then this game might rightly belong in the upper tier.
TL;DR: Great characters and story which seem to outweigh the mostly average visuals and at least off-put somewhat the tons of typos and spelling mistakes.
