Ugh. I kind of wish I could wipe this game from my memory. It's quickly gone from probably my most anticipated game to the one that repeatedly stabs me in the heart every time I see an update for it - "oh! it's Hypnosis! grea- oh. right. don't expect too much..."
Once we got into the endings series of updates, I've been really let down. They feel like incomplete teases. At this point, the dev is even kind of making jokes about it in-game. There's some really fun ideas there, but they almost always go "look at this cool idea, it seems fun, right? haha fade to black." And I don't just mean sex scenes. It's kind of like watching a summary of the first few seconds of all the best scenes in a TV series instead of actually getting to watch an actual episode.
Now, there's reasons for this. I don't think the dev went and lost his touch when making these updates. I think these are the dev making the best of a bad situation. However they don't seem to trying all that hard to fix the root of the problem when making these updates. I'm not sure if they feel the problem is too core to the rest of the design so they are intentionally leaving it in for the endings, or if they don't actually realize why they are now needing to desperate dig out of the huge hole they've found themselves in.
The culprit here are the choices. There are way, way too many of them. Ironically, the problem is that the dev does too good of a job with the choices. They've done a great job of making them feel impactful and giving the player a strong sense of agency. But they also just won't stop adding them. And that means that if they are now stuck between actually fleshing out the last half of the game, or finishing it in the next five years. And fleshing it out would mean either gigantic times between releases, huge gaps between releases with content any particular player is waiting for, or having players finish updates in about five clicks. Each choice also makes future scenes harder to write as there are way more things to keep in mind. I really don't blame them for deciding to just finish this so they can gtfo of this mess. It's probably the best choice, even if it has made this one of the first games I'd think of when it came to being disappointing.
I really hope they learn from this. They do everything so well, but having a huge numbers of choices means the end of the game takes far, far, far more time to create. This might not be a problem if you've got the time to dump into it, but when you're effectively writing a serial... you don't have that luxury. You can't write a serial like you write a novel, and the results aren't the same in the end either. I'd like to go on about how this is one of the hidden negatives of Patreon and co., but well, that's a whole other can of worms.
