I've had bad experiences on here from users trolling or just being rude, but I don't think it would be fair to just automatically be rude to everyone else because I'm fed up.
I'm in this thread to answer any questions and listen to constructive criticism. I have taken ideas and feedback from you guys and implemenetrd them in my game, like Anoushka becoming a love interest instead of a side character.
Or changing an option where you could only sleep with Anoushka if you stopped Nine.
So, I will absolutely listen to everything you have to say, let's just please be respectful to one another as human beings.
Okay, fair enough.
Mea culpa.
Let me try again, with far less snark.
I wasn't enjoying the game, because I kept being frequently taken out of the experience by a number of things; mostly centering around the premise of the world itself, the actions of the Baron, the personality of Eight, and how they all don't mesh well together.
So first off, the world. It is one in which slavery is legal, and both human cloning and age acceleration exist but is illegal. But, we got slaves using mops to clean the floors. So either nobody invented the Roomba in this future, or it's another idiosyncrasy of the Baron. I get having slaves to do manual labor, but this choice just seems really anachronistic given the silver space onsies and the rest of the décor. There are plenty of other things the MC could be toiling away at other than something that my own middle class parents have been automating themselves since 2019 (and the Roomba itself dates back to 2002). Not that you can't have a future where the MC slaves away moping the floor, but you need the right setting for it to make sense rather than being anachronistic. It doesn't look like you opted for a grungy, lived-in, future setting
a la dieselpunk, cyberpunk, or something along those lines.
Next up, the Baron. He is powerful and wealthy enough to have a personal harem of illegal vat-grown women that he rotates new stock in and out of on a semi-regular basis, his own security forces, in addition to owning slaves to do manual labor (again, in place of Roombas). We learn that the Baron has had prior vat-grown harem girls before the current batch, which is why they're numbered Eight through Ten, because apparently he has had so many of them he got tired of naming them and just went with numbers. So, he's evidently done this quite frequently before.
But what really puts a spotlight on most of the idiosyncrasies that keep breaking my immersion, is Eight and her personality and actions.
As a group, Eight, Nine, and Ten are vat-grown human clones. They had an accelerated growth program, in that they emerged mature rather than being born and raised on a normal human timescale. They also were subject to some sort of knowledge implant procedure that imparted them with the ability to communicate and interact with the world, but not any real experience living in it. This allows the entire harem to partake in the 'Really Was Born Yesterday' trope. This can be a fun and endearing trope, but can also turn problematic (when it turns into 'Born Sexy Yesterday' like Leeloo in
The Fifth Element). From what I saw, it seems a pretty generic version of the former. The problem comes with how Eight approaches sex and sexuality.
At face, Eight reads like the worst kind of man-hating, third-wave feminist caricature. Okay, so why is she so much different than her equally vat-grown and information-implanted sisters? How and why do any of them know that they are an illicit commodity? If they can be implanted with knowledge of language and communication, why not also an acceptance of their role? It just seems like 'we have the tech to clone, grow, age, and implant-knowledge - but suggestion, coercion, or brainwashing is all just a bridge too far' seems
really silly. Eight's personality and actions raise all kinds of red flags that cause me to question the underlying premise of the setting itself.
Now, when Eight and the Baron collide, things get even worse. After apparently putting up with her being standoffish for quite some time, the Baron decides to lay down his ultimatum; put out or else. Eight counters with threatening to expose his illegal cloning activity. This right here, this was that moment that cause the entire game to come to a screeching halt. This interaction is what highlighted everything else that had been bothering me a bit already, and shone it in stark relief.
For starters, again, why is she acting like this? It would seem like 'unwilling to have sex' would be a huge design flaw for a purposely vat-grown human clone destined for life in a harem. So, can they not control ther knowledge implant process enough to weed out such tendencies? If they can't, then why don't they have a Q&A system in place to weed out uncompliant clones if they're unable to simply prevent them from happening? Seems like the Baron should demand a refund for a purpose built sex slave that won't put out; that's a clearly faulty product.
If your Bugatti is having engine problems and isn't performing as advertised, you take it back to the dealership;
you don't blow it up with a rocket launcher because you can.
Even assuming that they can't prevent uncooperative clones from happening and becoming the final end product, how do they come to learn of their predicament? How did they come to learn that they are clones, and illicit ones at that? I can perhaps buy not being able to completely indoctrinate al living human, but you can at least not give them access to the internet. They are cloned harem girls, purpose built for fulfilling the Baron's sexual pleasure. If they're capable of independent thought, giving them unfettered access to the internet seems like a really stupid idea. They don't need access to that level of information to make them better sex slaves. Smart people, aware of the limitations of the vat-grown indoctrination process, would exercise strict information control; especially if you want to maintain power and control over people whose very existence is highly illegal. You don't need science fiction mumbo-jumbo to figure this out, plantation slave owners in the antebellum south recognized that
education was one of the single greatest threats to maintaining the status quo.
Even assuming all that; that Eight made it through illegal clone Q&A, that the Baron put up with her instead of immediately returning her to sender, that he gave them unfettered access to information that would empower them. He has now confronted her, and she makes her threat. Why does he react like it has any teeth? She's not a free citizen, she an illicit slave. He should control every aspect of their lives. Even if he was stupid enough to allow them access to such information before, he can simply strip that privilege away and lock her up in a room and be done with her. Her threat has no merit, because she hasn't been shown to have any ability to act upon it. How exactly is she going to contact the outside world? Especially when seconds later, we're introduced to the speed and ferocity of the Baron's personal Goon Squad.
She could do nothing, the Baron had all the power here. He could isolate her. He could have raped her. He could have gotten his Goon Squad to help rape her. He could have pulled the gun and raped her under threat of force. Did the Baron do anything of these things? No. He just went straight to the dumbest, most egomaniacal option; kill all of them (with a super anachronistic 1911 style pistol). Not even 'let the guards take her away, have some fun, then kill her'. Nope. Just kill her yourself on a whim. So the Baron took her threats seriously enough (again, when she has zero power to act on them) that he feels so threatened by the potential consequences of his illicit cloning being discovered, that he opts instead to commit a triple homicide.
I'm sorry, but there is no kind way to put this; that's dumb as hell.
It would be one thing if this was the culmination of a history of stupid mistakes made in the heat of the moment. But it isn't. You can say that this is a power trip, and maybe it is, but you haven't put the work into developing the character of the Baron enough to actually cash that particular check. So this doesn't come off as a tragic character flaw, but rather as the Baron make every dumb decision that is required to move plot along. The Baron isn't a character, because his constant stupidity is a necessary plot device.
Again, I'm sorry, but that really takes me out of the experience. I also don't know how to fix that without serious re-writing that would require either a redo for the entire premise and the world building, or a whole lot more time building up the characters and the world so that they do make sense. Because as of right now, they very much do not. They don't read as the actions taken by well motivated characters trying to obtain their desires, but rather as going through the motion required to move the plot along.
To use an analogy, you're on par with the final season of Game of Thrones, where the entire cast made bad decisions and acted against character (to be fair, that's not a problem when you've yet to really establish your characters) explicitly to move the plot along and wrap things up. It didn't come across as organic, but rather as cynical and contrived; because at the end of the day it was, as the show runners had grown tired with the series and just wanted out. So they contrived a plot to get from point A to Z as fast as possible, and then had their cast do all the stupid stuff required to get there (dragon lady turning genocidal, John Snow killing her, etc.). So I can't say for sure that's what happened here,
but it feels like it. It reads like characters acting stupid just for the sake of plot contrivance.
After all that, I got to the part where the harem is helping to break the MC out of prison (again, a prison the Baron didn't use on Eight) with a butter knife, before I just couldn't take any more. I had to stop.
I get that you have Patreon supporters and a development schedule to keep, and even if you agreed 100% with that I wrote here, it almost certainly isn't feasible to put in the work to actually fix this. Maybe I'm the only one bothered by all this contrivance,
but I still felt I had to say my piece, and I hope this time I did so with enough grace and respectfulness.
Now wait for all the butt-hurt fans to just scroll to the bottom and react with the facepalm emoji, because someone deigned to not like something that they really like, and further reinforce why putting this much effort into a thorough critique is usually a wasted effort here...