An engaging. promising, but also flawed riff on both transition stories and femdom stories.
As someone who consumes a lot of TS/CD/Futa-related content, it's interesting to note that these kinds of stories generally fit themselves into one of two specific framing narratives.
On the one hand, you have the fantasy of having your agency taken away only for the process to reveal that it's what you wanted deep-down all along. These types of stories are generally about some dude being *forced* to cross-dress by a relative or some unlikely turn of events, him getting into it, and eventually deciding to live full time as a woman.
On the other hand, you have stories that emphasise not the transition but the act of submission. These stories generally take place in some version of the world where women are the dominant sex and they wield that power with all the even-handedness of a 1800s patriarch. These worlds also tend to feature transwomen not as people who live as women despite having been born into male bodies but rather as a kind of third sex who are assumed to be naturally dominant, incredibly libidinous, and hugely strong. In these worlds, men tend to be naturally submissive. Games set in these worlds often revolve around guys trying to work out whom they should submit to.
Fall 4 Love is a game that draws from both sets of fantasies. On the one hand, it's a game where you are a squirrelly little dude who is forcibly feminised by his workplace. On the other hand, it's clear that the world of the game is considerably more pro-kink and pro-trans than our world so you get fun little things like cross-dresser maid cafes that serve 'milky' coffee.
I suspect the first set of fantasies will apply to the early stages of the game and then the narrative will open out into a fantasy of the second variety but we'll see how it goes.
Fall 4 Love is a game that is full of potential: It is mad kinky straight off the bat and you can kind of see the early stages of different pathways into the game. Interestingly, unlike a lot of game where you choose your path, Fall 4 Love imposes a path upon you based upon your actions. The fact that some of those actions might be mistaken or based upon incomplete information only increases the sense of submission but I can understand why people would find it weird and frustrating.
This approach to player agency is not without its pitfalls. You can miss entire plotlines if you don't happen to be in the right place at the right time and certain plotlines seem to unlock purely at random or based upon considerations that are hidden from the player. This sense of alienation is slightly odd as the game is constantly telling you that your skills and fetishes are changing but there's no direct link between actions and consequence. It's not so much a 'find-your-own-adventure' structure as 'fuck-around-and-find out'. This sense of a life governed by chance and happenstance is reminiscent of Good Girl Gone Bad and I suspect a more mature version of this game will have a similar game-play mechanic whereby you wind up re-playing the game multiple times in order to unlock all the different paths.
The problem for me is that this kind of narrative structure does not sit well with a game where you have to tell your character to go to the toilet or where you're constantly grinding for 5 bucks in order to buy yourself a razor. Also annoying are the unskippable, over-long and profoundly un-fun mini-games that litter the foreground of the game.
There is a lot of potential here and I really love the game's slightly sleazy vibe but it is also one of the most frustrating games on this site.
