reviewing v0.5.2
When I see a game in development for four years, I expect to see a lot of content. Now I won't say there's nothing here. There's content that looks good, but all but the spiciest scene would pretty tame if it weren't an incest situation. The annoyance is that it's padded out by plenty of grind, and certainly nowhere near what I was hoping for. Now I'm not a bitter patron or an entitled fanboy with an axe to grind. I have no opinion about milking patrons or any of that drama. I'm under the impression that patreon lets users unsub at any time. Some devs take their time, and it seems like that's what's happening here.
I'll start with gameplay, because that's what was on my mind most as I was incessantly clicking. I started a "standard" game. The other option is "free", and it's not explained in the game what the difference is. I suspected "free" might have less content, but after about 45 minutes of grinding, I searched this thread and found that "free" removes the MC's happiness requirements from gameplay. For the uninitiated, that means you don't have to regularly eat, shower, watch TV, and use the toilet with the correct frequency to keep advancing the game. I tried a new "free" game, and although it did make things simpler, it didn't really speed the progress in the game. You still have to do the boring grinding activities between the triggers in the relationships. Even when you've reached a milestone, many delays are still in the script. Basically, no matter what it's a slow burn. "Free" mode just lets you be mindless about how you grind, which IMO makes the grind even more insufferable. So I decided to stay true to the dev's vision and grind the fuck out of this thing. Let me tell you, dev's very dedicated to grinding too. Renpy's rollback, skip, and quick save features are disabled. He wants you to spam that mouse a half dozen times for each shower, TV show, and spreadsheet. Getting arthritis? No problem: the spamming actually only shaves a couple seconds off each grind montage. Just chill and watch each 7-12 second montage a couple time per minute about 100 times. Did you miss something because you got overeager on the LMB? See?! You shoulda just been patient. Now you can load up your last save from 5 minutes ago and grind it again, son! It's called replay value!
Now, I didn't use
Cursor2's mod, because it hadn't been updated to the current version yet. After the third time that I needed to rollback though, I used Unren to force enable rollback. It's one of Renpy's best features. Why disable it if it doesn't break your game? It was a godsend. A few times, I rolled waaaay back and Renpy threw errors at me. I spammed the "Rollback" text button on the error messages and made my way back into playable game with no harm done. There's ways to handle that problem so that rollback needn't be disabled, so I don't think that's the excuse for disabling it.
As far as the complaints about sandbox, they're mostly overblown. We can all see the tag and know what sandbox is going to mean. It's a bit annoying, but this isn't that bad of an implementation. The map usually tells you where a LI is during any given timeslot, so if you're trying to advance her plotline, then look for her. The "usually" in that last sentence is really the frustrating part. Sometimes (whoopsie daisy!), dev doesn't have a LI's icon showing where she is. I found Mika hiding in her apartment when she wasn't showing there, which kicked off one of her events. The LI's generally follow a schedule, but later in the game parts of that schedule shifted. It could've been due to my rollback shenanigans, could have been dev's intention, or a coding oversight. It wasn't a major problem to adjust to, but noticeable after an in-game month to have them suddenly bathing and flicking the bean later in the day than usual. A tips section would help ease the sandbox burden, which is listed as a feature of the mod, because there are more than a couple times where progress just plateaus with little to no clue what will move the game forward. The most notable example is when I got stuck in "sick mode" for almost two weeks in-game. "Sick mode" disabled almost all the story progression and levelling with the girls, and lets you focus on what you came here for: grinding a "real life" simulator. What makes sick mode even more outlandish is that it starts with
declarations from Rosie and Lucy about how they're worried about you and will take care of you, but then they just don't do that. I really had no clue what I should do to let me progress. I wondered if "sick mode" might have been coded to last a certain number of days, but then I tried
cooking with Lucy, she gave me some medicine, and next day sick mode was done.
The artwork is really good as long as you can accept the Bratz doll style. The first time I saw this CG style in another game, I rejected it on principle. I've played a few games with these models now, and while I'm still not a huge fan, it's not such a hard pill to swallow. A few minutes into it, and I kinda forget that they look like dolls. The girls look good, even if you can only appreciate them as dolls, they're sexy dolls, as creepy as that makes me feel to type. There's
some variety in body types, but the "flat is justice" crowd won't find a princess they can idolize here. Rosie and Lucy are curvier than the other LIs, but they all have some nice curves, which I appreciated. The scenes look good too, there was a lot of attention put into the environment to make it look about as realistic as you'd want characters that look like dolls to be surrounded by. The animations are really smooth and have some impressive pans, sweeps, tilts, etc. The animations are worth checking out, but there's not enough of them.
The writing is in clear, concise, grammatically correct, and readable English. While there are some unusual sentence structures and dialogues are sometimes pretty stilted given some of the relationships between characters, emotions are conveyed almost realistically. The writer has either spent some time around native English speakers or has a good proof-reader. The plot is nothing exciting. It's the beginning of two incest stories with some side girls. It could turn into a harem, but right now it's MC
just winning hearts by being Mr. Nice Guy. Really, I wish there was more actual plot, because it's honestly fairly thin.
Hang out with shy, cute teens (and your 25-year-old little sister), tell them they're cute, buy them things, and sometimes help them get low paying jobs. That's this dude's game.
It works too: he's gone all the way once, gotten (I think) five BJs, and gone down on a few of them. There's repeatable shower handjobs and bathtub footjobs if you prefer your sexual encounters to not involve holes. Optionally, the MC can play a game on his computer that can end in a MMF sharing scene with that game character, his gf, and an old dude. Apparently, some fans count this sexual content also, but since this
pornception has nothing to do with any plot going on in the actual game, it scratched none of my itches.
There's also a few details that when put together cast a different light on the MC. Early in the game, MC comes off like a pretty normal guy, occasionally noticing his hot daughter and other young women, and rebuking himself for it. This is the starting point for the surrender to forbidden love/lust plot in an incest story. Early on, we also learn that MC was
the betrayed party when his cheating wife left her family for her lover. As mentioned, he's Mr. Nice Guy, defender of women, hardworking and loyal. Later, we find out
he bathed with his sister until she was five, but we already know he's 12 years older than she is. Dev has gone to painstaking effort to create a "real life" sim, with food, waste, and stress/boredom accounted for. We're supposed to accept that
a normal 17 year old boy and his five year old sister were bathing together? Okay, very weird, but only slightly untoward. Even later later, we find out that
7 years ago he propositioned then 18-year-old lil sis for a handie, and she was down but got scared. Wait a minute!? It's not explicit, but at various times, it's strongly implied that Mr. Nice Guy MC's wife left him somewhere 2-4 years ago, and both MC and lil sis vilified the ex for cheating. So evidently, Mr. Nice Guy MC isn't beginning his surrender to forbidden lust. He's been willing to cross that bridge before. It makes all his and lil sister's reluctance earlier without any mention of their past seem unwarranted. Mr. Nice Guy MC isn't struggling with new ephebophiliac tendencies. He's always liked them barely legal and taboo. It's not addressed in the script, so it doesn't feel like we're adding depth to the MC. Instead, it comes across like the dev has been working on this game for so long he forgot what archetype he was following for the MC's character. It's okay for your story to reveal that
Mr. Nice Guy is actually a closet Mr. Perv Nasty, because really all Nice Guys are, but you have to address it in the story or it's just ludonarrative dissonance.
I'd like to give this one more than two stars, but those would be "potential" stars, which I'm ethically opposed to. More importantly, after more than four years, I'd expect much of this game's potential to be visible already as well as for the grind problem to be more effectively mitigated or balanced to allow players to enjoy the game. If I take a look at this game again, it won't be before 2025, and it won't be unmodded.
