I am honestly curious, if you had to distill it down to one or two points, what are the main reasons you think this game deserves zero stars?
Simply put, because good sibling banter doesn't make a whole game.
I genuinely feel that every update that came out took something
away from the game, obviously starting with the rape update. What
was the fucking point of that? The dev did fuck all with it. Had he, I would have given him some props for handling the situation but once it happened it seems he wanted to distance himself for it as far as possible. It was barely talked about, and not even mentioned in the endings. He either didn't trust himself in adding it in the first place or the outcry was so bad from fans that he felt he had to bury it. Either way, it ruined this game and it only got worse from there.
You brought up realism, but that's a double edged sword. Sadly, it leads to the question of "does Haley only like MC because she was raped?" Did Klaus break her mind so that her own brother started to be a valid sexual interest? You get into some really sick, twisted shit when you introduce realism into plots and characters. I understand you might not have thought about all of this, and that's fine, but I sure have and it heavily weighs on my opinions of this game. The dev not curbing any of these thoughts either points to him being ill-prepared to handle something as serious as rape, or just plain too lazy to put the work into it for it to have been a valid plot addition. Let's talk about other stuff now.
I'm not a fan of Sandra, and we're forced into a relationship with her with no player input. Sure, we can dump her later, but that's not a point I can give the game when it forced me into it in the first place. I'm not a huge Lisa fan, she's
fun but she's not my type at all, and she gets her own ending over Diane who had similar "screen time" where I personally heavily preferred Diane. Much like the rape, everything seemed to move backwards, like the dev thought he made a poor choice and had to fix it by ignoring the existence of it in the first place. Alana is another character that gets completely sidelined to the point where her existence is pointless. Why introduce all these characters, have a couple sex scenes, and then dump them all back into the ether?
Here's my review as well:
If none of this stuff bothered you that's fine, but it
really bothered the shit out of me. As I noted in my review, would you rather eat a bad meal, or would you rather get about half way through a good one when you find an insect in it? That's why I think this is a zero star game, it used to be good then the dev ruined it with stupid decision after stupid decision.