Well, ok, If the reputation is not that important, if it is just like ...an alignment of sorts, then how do you not starve after loosing a lot of reputation? From what I read, sources of income depend on reputation, do they not? You don't get any job offers other than the restaurant as far as I can see (at low reputation). Eventually you run out of bread, you don't make nearly enough money in the restaurant to: eat, wash, and rent. So you loose the room, cannot wash, earn even less. I quite liked the one scene that I got to see, but it's not fun to make choices and then later notice that the choices you made will inevitably lead to starvation. The thing you wanted the player to experience (selfish, dominant women who use the protagonist for their selfish needs) will probably not be experienced: everyone will almost certainly just die because it's impossible to figure out where to find enough money (at least early in the game, don't know about what happens later on). It was one super awesome scene buried in misery and non-fun-stuff.
I find it acceptable to make it hard to improve your situation: say, getting a better place to stay is hard, fine. But if merely staying alive is hard, then I don't need that kind of stress. It's very similar to grinding, but way worse. I can only imagine that if you ever write a walkthrough, players will just blindly follow the instructions, and not read anything in-game as it does not help ...just click through to the content. If enough people agree, I suggest to not write a walkthrough but rather make the game playable no matter which path the player chooses, as long as it is somewhat reasonable, without guessing which path we are supposed to play (make the game more forgiving).
