English: 8/10
User Interface: 6/10
User Experience: 5/10
Art: 7/10
Dialogue: 8/10
Story: 6/10
Opinion: 5/10
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Avg: 6.43/10 [3/5]
It's been about a year, so let's see how things have changed. Yeah, The UI updated.. Eh.. It's gaudy, not set up well, clunky, text leaves the textbox, and STILL USES DEFAULT FONT. At least it's custom and does all the things. But. The WINDOW IS LABELED "A Ren'Py Game" ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Let me tell you why. The Options file has config.name and config.show_name, config.name labels the window and if config.show_name is True, the main menu shows the title for the default renpy project. Instead of changing that to false, or removing the title text from the main menu screen, they erased the title of the game, making it look infinitely less professional. My god. INB4: "Just play full screen." Windowed > Fullscreen. Snappier and less restrictive. Those issues I constantly harp on aside, the writing is fine. It's still fine. It's better than most stuff on this site. Are there still issues? Yeah. But it's original, focuses on characters and growth(ish), and I don't want to break my keyboard critiquing every aspect of the story. Do I have things to say? Yeah. But if all my issues end up being "The UI is a bit much, there's contrivances in the plot, minimal sex(which I usually don't care about, but this time it feels pretty anemic), and removing content is dumb." This isn't bad.
The story starts a little tropey "MC is 2 weeks away from retirement, tragedy ensues." That whole joke. But it's not thrown in your face and mostly ends there. He's an indentured servant that was bought by a baron in a futuristic corpo hellscape. Thank fuck it's not cyberpunk themed because I don't think I could handle any more of that. The baron bought MC's mom because sex and the mother just abandoned her son there at age 4 for reasons? And he's rightfully mad. Which, by the grace of whatever you believe in, it's FINALLY not a throwaway incest tale where MC screws his family... Unless Eight, Nine, and Ten somehow end up clones of his mom, in which case I will lose my absolute mind. Moving on, The baron brings the aforementioned trio to his palace(?) they're his new clone wives. Like I said in my previous review, Eight is the pop culture references with androphobia, for good reason. Nine is the motherly type. And Ten is, really, given all the more complex character traits which is a shame. I think it might be a dumb bias toward redheads, which I don't understand, but I couldn't be sure. Either way, Ten is written as a better character than the other two. Sure, Eight was sexually assaulted and is traumatized, rightfully so. But after that it's sunshine and rainbows pretty much. Anyways, the baron brings them home, lets them acclimate as he's away for two weeks, and once he comes home and tries to sleep with them, Eight freaks out. And since every other male is, of course, a rapey goblin troglodyte, the Baron says "Fine then I'll kill you." So MC saves them, is useless, and gets imprisoned.
So, right here is the first contrivance. The baron is evil, doesn't care about killing, and has total power. Why didn't he immediately kill MC and instead throw him in a prison to kill later? Nobody knows. But the clones rescue him because they're essentially 3 months old or whatever and think "He was nice, lets help him and ruin our lives." Because, you know, they're stupid. They escape, and find jobs on the dark web? Do you ever feel like you're the only person that actually read something? That's what that feels like. A slave with no access to anything but a library and clones that barely know what a TV is found the dark web and accepted the first job they found... Okay. And the snowballing keeps going from here on out. They're just given the crime boss' address, show up, and after they're found out to be green, are given a bogus job by probably the most interesting character in the game. That, to my understanding, had content removed? Why? This is a disservice to everyone, including the dev. If nothing else its ACTUAL early game sexual content to keep the more simple minded users engaged. My only gripe with her is her lines are written for a Russian/slavic accent which I could only assume is a jab at the russian shovelware asset flippers in this "community." But whatever, MC and the gang does a job for her, she likes MC, they leave to find the only nice lady at the cloning facility.
It's at this point I'm going to tell you, I wrote all of that from memory. Anything written after or during gameplay will be in brackets. The next bit of the story is MC and the clones living at that woman's house attempting to be normal for a bit until Eight gets sick. From there it gets hazy, so I'll pick it apart as I go. They head to light city for a cure, trying to keep it from the other clones. They have to steal it from an abandoned warehouse? Using youtube videos? AGAIN? It's a little lazy to use the same contrivance of "Character watches a youtube video to get through super secure door." more than once. And the clones gush about how MC is the nicest person they've ever met, but he's generously, the 10th person they've ever met. But I guess I gotta put on the "dumb porn game" blindfold, otherwise I'll look too far into it. Then they stand still in the forest for 3 days, I say that because the CG for them in the forest never changes, and find MC's mom. She drops a bombshell on MC and tries to get them fake papers to leave the country. Everything that can go wrong does, and they end up back at Anoushka's. Only this time, her accent is completely unreadable? Her first appearance it was mildly charming and you got what she means. This time, borderline gibberish. They train with her, and instead of getting serious, like MC internally monologues constantly, they treat it like happy fun times goofing off. And suddenly Victor is a doctor that can help Eight with her disease that wasn't cured by the magical cure-all they stole a few chapters earlier. Have you been counting contrivances? Add that to the ticker. And MC has the AUDACITY to say "Nothing's ever easy" But the solution has always fallen into his lap. You get the drugs, get the sex, end of update 11.
There's a lot of issues. The more I play stories written by the "super writer" the more disillusioned I am by so many simple things that compound on each other to make the story a mess. And the visuals have a lot of issues to. The handgun changes skins in the Zeke gun scene, why weren't we asked to get the "getting peed on" angle with Eight? The extreme closeups need a different field of view because they look weird. And when they get to the "buffet" they're not even looking at stores that have food in them. Also a lot of the poses were so stiff or exaggerated to a straight up T-Pose. And DO NOT tell me that the visuals don't matter when 90% of people "play" this shit for the visuals. Gotta be one or the other. MC just being this encyclopedia of knowledge doesn't make a lot of sense, and the references to these far reaches of books and media just to try to show how big brained he is gets grating. And the sex feels shoe-horned in. Like not only did it take forever to see anything but it also felt rushed at the same time somehow. They all came at weird times and MC never initiated anything it felt a little weird. But whatever, they weren't bad.
And this is more to other reviewers/commenters that said stuff about "The man hating one" You'd hate men too if they tried to assault you your whole life. You obviously hate women because they reject you, so maybe a little self-reflection instead of lashing out at pixels on a screen, yeah?
All in all, I don't hate it. There's more story than most games and thank fuck it's not a throwaway incest tale. The English is good, as always, but there's frequent wording and tensing issues. Which is idd, but they're sparse. The UI is customized, I'll give it that. However the imagebuttons on the main menu overlap each other, making it hard to use. Also you have no way to get to the options menu if you go to the save menu? And the font is default, burn it with fire. The UX suffers a bit for that but it's fine. Art, like I said, it's weird but good. Certain artistic decisions don't make sense to me, but oh well. The dialogue, as always is naturalistic and good to read. Nothing is stiff, but characters are stupid and aren't equally fleshed out. The story is alright but it's walking one contrived story beat to the next. I like it, but it needs work. Do with that what you will.
