v1.1
It starts out as a 4-5 star game, and roughly between the second half/last third of the game, it starts taking its spectacular nosedive.
The slice-of-life story revolves around incest, and it was well explored at first, through a nice, slow burn, with frequent timeskips of days and weeks to keep the story from feeling rushed and the game from feeling like a slog, all of it accompanied by a mood of upbeat cutesy set by the music, the characters, as well as the situations themselves.
And that evidently wasn't good enough beause the positive air was poisoned by the revelation of the title character's history with paedophilia/rape.
Not only did this come out of the blue, and pretty much changed the tone of the game irreversibly DESPITE continued use of upbeat cutesy, it was also poorly explored, inconclusive, and wholly unnecessary to the plot.
We (the players) never learn exactly what happened or how exaclty it ended, only that "Mom" (yes, that's her name) somehow "put a stop to it". That's literally all we're told.
We don't know the effects it had on the victim Haley short term, because it's never even mentioned, nor can we confront Mom, not to learn about what happened, learn how she "put a stop to it", why she started treating her own daughter as the unwanted child after the incident, or how there were evidently no consequences for the rapist, as if the topic wasn't important enough to varrant a discussion.
And as we play catch-up with vague, bare bones of past events, we also meet potential new victim(s), the rapist's new wife and step-daughter, whom he has been likely grooming, and who may or may not have been molested already. And also whose fate remains a total mystery because it's never mentioned again, after all, it was just a plot device to get Haley to begin addressing the problem.
We're also introduced to some super secretive high-class mysterious badass criminals (soo kewl) who can "deal with" the rapist.
So they do exaclty that.
What did they do? "Dealt with" him. What that means? No information given. Did anyone realize something happened? No information given. Consequences of that for sister? No information given. Consequences for the rapist's step-daughter or her mother? No information given. It's a bare bones addition, lacking close all the details, and was an absolutely unnecessary arc to the sister's character as it literally didn't change shit about her, or even play a remote role in the rest of the story, including all the endings.
The story of other characters aren't much better either.
One in particular, who potentially becomes the girlfriend/wife of the MC, whose mother experienced something similar, which also affected the girl in question. Even if you go down that path, you'll learn almost nothing of their story, after all, who cares, it's just your girlfriend and her mother, not a topic worthy of discussion, much less actual resolution.
Another girl, who was introduced as a free-spirited semi-slut collegue student got the ending where, disregarding everyone's established character, all sexual acts with her stopped, and she was essentially demoted to a roomie and "adopted" by MC and his sister. Until out of nowhere you just have a threesome with them the end thanks for playing bye.
In any case, Haley, the title character and MC's sister, is always going to be in the picture no matter what (not that I'm complaining about this fact, "Haley" is literally the title after all). Unfortunately it looks like the author ran out of ideas on how to make this (polyamory between 3 characters) happen naturally, and reached for convenient tools, like excessive amounts of alcohol to jumpstart things, simply and forcibly inserting sister into the relationship and blaming it on/justifying it with her antics, and/or straight-up manipulating characters to accept the brother/sister combo as part of the deal of being with the MC.
And while it looks like Haley's character develops slowly (at first anyway), it's undone by some of the endings, and in others her character is just arbitrarily changed.
Gameplay was, at first, typical of what you'd expect of a VN game, that is, choces are presented on a semi-regular basis which affect the story/characters.
However by the second half/last third of the game, choices became extinct and the game turned into a lengthy kinetic novel (with some endings being so...so...SO much longer than others).
There is also a problem with the routes themselves. You can get on any available character's path, however it is not made clear to you whose paths you are on.
Here I would also like to mention that this is NOT a harem game which is not a bad thing, but it IS tagged as such when it clearly isn't.
Anyway, you will ALWAYS end up with Haley, and depending on which path you're on, you may end up with an additional character also. Even if you (repeatedly) step on every available characters' paths, you will get the ending of only ONE of the paths, with the (singular) character associated with that particular path. The rest of the characters, and their (until that point, often half-finished) stories just fade out of existence and aren't mentioned ever again.
It is also not made clear which path superseeds which. Meaning fuck you, figure it out, or don't.
Grammar/spelling also started out quite well, no complaints, but then errors started piling up, it looked as if it wasn't even checked once it had been written.
Visauls are...okay overall. Model quality is good, they are fairly realistic, aren't exaggerated, fairly varied also, no complaints here. Lighting is usually good also, except for a couple of night scenes where you can't see shit. Those aren't very frequent thankfully.
Animations, on the other hand are bad. Just...bad.
Sounds boil down to music (and maybe some slapping sound effects? I am unsure). There are maybe 3-4 tracks overall, and while they are fine, they got old fast. They were used appropriately at frst, but their use to set the mood became half-assed towards the end (like everything else was), such as using upbeat music when discussing abuse. Talk about tonal clash.
Overall it's pretty obvious how few fucks were given by the end of it. It feels like nothing was really fleshed out or even finished, not even the title character's story. And by the time you reach one of the endings, it also becomes a "lonely" experience, because aside from Haley (and maybe a 2nd character), interactions with other characters all but cease.
So while I could applaud the author for wrapping it up despite the evident lack of interest or care, I won't, because I don't think running it into the ground is any better than abandoning it while it's still good.