Extremely good. The characters are great, and I spent a solid chunk of time without any of de lewds without being bothered by that. The renders aren't amazing (I'm not losing my mind over how good they are), but they're not bad, and they're used well, so that doesn't affect my rating; I could easily rate this 5 stars with the current renders. More importantly, they all have personality (even if I'm half-convinced that two of them were liberally copied from a certain anime which I won't name out of fear of the retribution of weebs angered by my labeling it as such - I mean, Evie is
so totally Neo - mute, pink hair, a bit freaky and violent [if in an
exactly reversed way], uses signs to communicate with similar mannerisms). The characters aren't all amazing bastions of holy light, but they're also portrayed in a - well, I'd say "human" manner, but not all of them are
The story is shockingly consistent for something found on this site (no offense to any devs / writers who might happen to read, I've played both roles [on non-lewd projects lol] and I know it's not exactly trivial

). "Hey, uh, remember I mentioned a while back that there's a goblin outpost... you took care of that, right?
Right?" I dunno, I just really like the flow here.
The one thing keeping me from giving this five stars is a subtle problem which you might not notice on a sufficiently powerful computer: the performance is downright
atrocious. I don't mean that "it doesn't run good on my machine!!!," I mean that it doesn't run as well as it
can by probably an order of magnitude and I'm pretty sure, from a backtrace, that it's using a ton of calls instead of jumps in the scripts which are inflating the call stack more and more the longer you play thus causing a perpetual growth in RAM usage (and a severe degradatation to performance on e.g. backtraces, where it has ludicrous elements to count). That said, performance is - for
now - acceptable. It ran well on a pretty mid-range laptop (2GHz top speed), even if not as well as it
should have. However, I can easily see this becoming a bigger problem as the game expands if nothing is done about it (technical debt, in other words). Of course, it's not as simple as just pressing a magic speedup button; it'd probably take consistent concerted effort and a solid block of time to fix, which would detract from the continued progress of the game itself. One solution is "just get a better computer," but a) that's a terrible answer unless you're talking to someone who is literally using a 686, and b) I
have a better computer, but this has the nicest battery life, and is my go-to for lightweight work such as running (nearly every other) Ren'Py games. This is the first RenPy game I've used which consistently keeps the CPU at full load while it's doing approximately nothing; normally, I can hard-cap the CPU at ~1.3GHz (to further extend battery life) without a noticable performance impact.
One reason for this is that the mechanics of the game are more complex than most point-and-click Ren'Py games, which is a positive. The game is genuinely enjoyable, isn't a generic VN, and is definitely worth a try.
My one other annoyance is that there's almost no Ari content at present

Overall, there's quite a lot in this for an early release, so I'm content to wait for content
