Cute little game focused on exploration and dialogue. It certainly has it's issues, but it has great potential.
The art style is probably the first thing that stood out to me. As popular as the pixel-art aesthetic is in traditional indie games, it's surprising to me that we don't see more adult games in this style. Personally, I'm not huge on pixel art for hentai, but I can absolutely appreciate the level of polish that is on display here. The character designs are individually distinct, but they maintain consistency and a common theme.
This theme extends to the greater game world, which is very well characterized imo. It's not like the world feels "alive" or anything, but several of the design aspects do come together to make the setting feel convincing. Visually, the areas again feel distinct without becoming too homogeneous. The music contributes here as well, with a variety of high-quality tracks being featured. Always a treat to hear something other than the standard music library stuff.
Something that really surprised me on starting the game was the voice acting. I've seen several adult games attempt it, but this might be the best. The lines are well-recorded and I thought most of the performances were quite good. However, a substantial chunk of the dialogue comes off as stilted, and this game suffers more than most from this issue due to it's nature. Much of the value this game offers is in it's world, characters, and aesthetic, which means that shitty writing hits that much harder. Fortunately, the grammar is fine, which I seem to care about more than most people. A previous reviewer stated that the writing is cringey, and I don't know that I would agree with that (most of the time). It's certainly silly and wouldn't be appealing to someone looking for a serious tone. At worst, I'd say that the dialogue is more dorky than cringey. I don't think that it would bother most people. Of course, that's relative to other games in the genre, which admittedly doesn't set a very high bar.
As I mentioned previously, the majority of actual gameplay in this game comes in the form of minigames. There are a good variety of games and they usually don't overstay their welcome. The wrestling game, which is a button-timing game reminiscent of a QTE, is probably the worst imo. The main issue is that each play is too long and that the timing is strangely hard to nail down due to a lack of visual clarity. Compounding the issue is a very poor design choice that unfortunately plagues most of the minigames: you're often expected to play one game multiple times in a row to progress the story. As the game gets further in development, I can see this issue being resolved by using the "rewards" (e.g., wrestling power) in more than one place. It's also possible that some degree of plot-branching or sidequests would mitigate the problem, as you wouldn't be completely blocked from progression by the minigame. As of v8.1, though, even the best of them are kinda made to feel like tedious chores.
Really, "tedious" is the common theme for most of my criticisms of this game. It's these small design choices that build up and lead to frustration. As a previous reviewer mentioned, the your "energy" can only be replenished in a couple of ways, all of which are unnecessarily annoying and time-consuming. Like, it's only a minute or two, but it's frustrating when you're interrupted from normal gameplay and only bathing or eating breakfast so you can go back to what you were doing. Another specific example is the "outfit" mechanic. When you do the wrestling minigame, you have to change into the wrestling outfit at the gym locker, which you have to manually change out of before leaving the gym. The player character also changes into a bikini when entering the beach area, which comes with the same two lines of dialogue every time. Even though it's automatic, those two lines of dialogue turn something good (the added flavor of the PC wearing a swimsuit at the beach) into something that's annoying and tedious if you're entering the area more than once in a short period of time. I'm sure that these small things will be ironed out to some extent by the time the game is complete, but the overall tedium in the current version impacted my otherwise great experience.
Overall, I have to give props to Cherry Blossom Games for their work here. The game's not perfect, but it does what it does very well. The level of polish is highly impressive for a game that's still in development. Most of all, it succeeds in being more than just porn, which is more than most adult games can say. I'll have my eye on this one. Looking forward to seeing what they can accomplish in the future.
