Just tried this out and it has many positives: excellent use of music to set the mood/establish tension/etc, great worldbuilding and sci-fi setting, good dialogue and humour that actually made me laugh out loud twice, well-written prose with only occasional typos and grammar mistakes, interesting visuals and quality renders, decent pacing for the most part...it does feel a bit slow at times, but since the exposition works well in service of the great worldbuilding I'll forgive it, and it has choices that actually matter in what appears to be an ambitious branching storyline. There are some negatives as well, but I won't go into those in detail since the main drawback for me unfortunately occurred in the one area that an adult visual novel absolutely has to get right: the love interests. Or specifically, the lack of compelling love interests.
First off, the ditzy airheaded ensign was way too annoying and shallow, and so I quickly decided to start the game over and take what appeared to be the corruption route with her. However, she kept getting less and less attracted to the MC as that route progressed, so that character fell off the radar and no longer had any appeal.
The chief was intelligent, competent, and decently cute, so she appeared like the next best option. However, in my first playthrough she straight up murdered the MC, and thus she was permanently off the list of potential love interests. Do not stick your dick in crazy.
So that just left the commander. And she was okay, but it felt like choosing the least bad option. Plus, she seemed only interested in corrupting the MC, which unfortunately makes for too passive of gameplay (for me anyway). Though at least in that relationship the MC seems to find her more and more attractive when she pushes him around and tops him, which makes me wonder why the same thing isn't done when the MC pulls rank on the ensign. It feels like a bit of a double standard tbh.
I held out some hope that the new sister character would maybe save the day (<sigh>, oh well, I've seemingly gotten used to putting up with incest content I guess), but it took a very long time for the MC to finally meet her face to face, and so it ended up feeling like she would always be a side character. Then, MC was sure he would lose the bet to seduce her to his XO, because he wasn't interested in her. Well shit, that's not a promising setup/introduction. Heck, even just being a voyeur and watching the commander seduce her after setting up the bet/competition? Nope, the initial meeting and interaction between those two characters was done completely off screen.
It's very unfortunate, because there is a very good visual novel here, but alongside it is so far an underwhelming adult game.
No criticism, or praise. It's a walkthrough, not a review.
