So, I normally like my corruption served with a sprinkle of grind, and this follows my favorite. So with hot renders, I should love it, right?
Unfortunately, while the content is hot, the game itself is just plain broken right now. I can only imagine that the people who actually like it are the ones that have played it one episode at a time. Starting from scratch. as of v11, it's an unplayable mess. There's a reason the devs of Summertime Saga have gone back and redone parts of the game several time even though it displeases current Patrons who want more content, and it's sorely needed here as well.
The grind (which approaches ridiculous levels) isn't even the worst part. And don't get me wrong, it's bad. The progression is determined by an insane tangle of stat checks and linked scene flags that make no logical sense. Brute force ALL the things! But on top of that, the REAL problem is that the game is almost 100% likely to end prematurely by leading you onto a path that breaks the game. It does this by presenting you with options that you're really not meant to do yet. At best you lose out on lots of content but more likely, you hit a dead end and can't progress because some condition can no longer be fulfilled because you started that other thing the game kept rubbing in your face. As an example, there's a whole section where you can't visit the kitchen at a certain time of day because it can start the endgame prematurely... Yeah.. It's that bad.
PROS:
- Hot scenes
CONS:
- You CAN'T play this for the first time without the walkthrough. Seriously. It's not a matter of not finding everything. It's the fact you are 100% guaranteed to get progress locked by the game's inconsistencies.
- scene flags and stat checks are an interwoven mess and I'm 100% sure not even the author is able to keep track of it anymore given the broken state of things.
- False hints. There's a a bunch of "THIS IS ALL YOU GET IN THIS VERSION" messages that signal there's nothing more to see along certain paths, when in fact there is?! They're leftovers from previous versions that the author never bothered to remove.
- False choices and daily stat decay.. Rhonda's inhibition didn't want to stay down. Great, more opportunities to grind!
- needing to repeat events literally 10-15 times before things progress to something actually new instead of just tiny dialogue variations
- a large amount of the aforementioned events only happen at a specific time and day, for example 1000 on Saturday. finding them is a brute force crap shoot.
- No form of in-game quest system or proper scene list. There's a tiny hint section to be fair, but it's woefully incomplete and basically useless.
- Hell, even with the text walkthrough is hard to figure out why or where you're blocked because it's basically an exact recipe you need to follow from day 1. Where the hell do you pick up? Unless you enjoy following a script step by step, don't count on the walkthrough bailing you out of the rote repetition.
TLDR:
Starting from scratch, the game as of v11 is almost completely unplayable. If I wanted to follow a recipe (the walkthrough), I'd bake a cake. You need to be METICULOUS to follow that thing.
It doesn't help that the cheat mod doesn't work properly with the latest version either but at best, the mod would only save you from the stat grind. You'd still need to tick all the scene flags.