Well, having not played this game for like half a year, I found the last update to be very solid. It's in line with what I originally expected from the game after the first few releases. Viewing the game so far as a whole, I only find problematic the pointless several releases that followed the first 3/4 updates up until this one.
Contrary to what was becoming the regular, this update does manage to advance the story and relationships, while at the same time, justifying the aggression which characters show towards others (e.g. father has a real reason to dislike his wife, the father does not seem to hate the aunt and niece for no reason anymore, the mother stops being so unjustifiably antagonistic towards his son, etc.).
This brings the game closer to the kind of psychological horror that I expected after the first releases. It's now darker, more motivated and doesn't spend as much time with trivial melodramatic conversations. The conversations in this last update had, for the most part, a strong underlying motivation and context. No more emo dialogue out in the open while supposedly spending the day on the beach or emo dialogue at a party. Now the emo parts take place in reasonable scenarios, under rational circumstances (for example, details like the mother approaching her son after being let down by father/daughter leaving for dinner, aunt/father meeting after his marriage seems impossible to save, father/cousin getting closer after she explains how she has nowhere to go, etc). Up until this point, that was one of the major issues I had with the game.
Compare this last update with the whole series of events that took place in that house on the coast. In retrospective those events have proven to be utterly pointless, which shows how weak that update was and why I criticized it back then. I say pointless because we now see that the father does not hate the aunt (even though he has been consistently described as an overly prudish guy), that the son shows no signs of even pondering over raping his aunt (even though he spends a lot of time thinking), that the aunt herself seems to have completely forgotten about it, that the father never questions the aunt about forcing her daughter to do what she did (how does that even make sense?), that the father suddenly understand what his niece is going through (even though what happened at the beach house would make it so he hates her even more), etc. It's hard not see that beach subplot as getting into the way of the story rather than helping develop it, an attempt at forcefully extending the game's life.
The strongest points in this last update are the dialogue with the mother, the aunt/father conversations, the "flashbacks" that provide some desperately needed backstory, the father/niece interactions and the son/cousin scene during the night.
The random and unexplained antagonism has been toned down in favor of expected reactions to specific actions. In general, you can now start to understand or infer why characters behave as they do. This was long overdue.
As always, the lighting in this game is top notch, which goes to show that complex scenes with numerous assets are not always necessary to create a deep immersion. It's still my favorite aspect of the game.
There are still some weak points: overuse of Dutch angles and closeups (there is a literal render of a closeup of the daughter's hair, what even is the point of that?), which are notoriously annoying and immersion-breaking during sex scenes; bizarre behavior like the son waiting for his date in his room (how fucking weird is that? just make him visit her or make them go out for a walk); the random easy girl that shows up and fucks you in your room while being drugged seems forced, the feel-good hoodie girl character that we learned nothing about but somehow shows up in your house after wanting to kill herself (the MC can cure depression and suicidal thoughts with a few lines now?); quite obvious continuity issues (you never know where other people are and you find empty rooms all the time, even after you played the other part of the story); some cringe inducting fashion sense here and there; overeliance on dreams to express what a character subconsciously thinks, which ends up exacerbating the continuity issues.
Furthermore, although I can now see a clear growth in almost all of the main characters, the daughter remains an exception. She is still an incredibly one dimensional character whose emotions are rarely justified: why does she hate the cousin so much (the game barely tries to explain that)? why is she so distant and cold towards her mother? she seems to be barely more than her father's pet so far. How did a person like this ever get a boyfriend? it's impossible to explain considering how she has been portrayed so far.
In essence, if the game had updates like this instead of the filler emo dialogue that became the norm after the first few releases, I would consider this game one of the top 5 western porn games I have ever played. Many of the most popular and famous Japanese VNs fall into the psychological horror category, and this game has the chance to fill that gap among western games if the developer focuses on advancing the story and adding dark elements instead of trivial melodramatic conversations which repeat themselves and ultimately go nowhere.
I will wait for a few more updates before updating my rating, but the game does look very promising now, even more so than when I first played it.
Lastly, I have no problems with "late game sexual content" which is quite common in Japanese eroges (except nukiges), but I wish the dev was transparent about it so people stopped expecting this game to become something that it clearly isn't.