There's an entire subgenre of smut games that are basically visual novels with pretensions towards greater game design. This is one of those games. The framework of your typical Ren'py game is there. A map with multiple locations and simple point-and-click adventure game mechanics, with an inventory and a cycling time-state feature. From what I've played, games that start to heap on more complexity than this, given what they're working with, end up obtuse and bloated. Innocent Witches is no exception.
What Innocent Witches has going for it is very nice art assets and moments of cute character writing, but the game is much bigger than its positive qualities; all the gameplay is modestly interesting exactly once, but repeated litearlly dozens of times. This is no doubt used not as mechanics to entertain, but to draw out the play time. In short, the game doesn't have enough good content, so it wastes the player's time in hopes of hiding the fact.
The major "gameplay loop" of Innocent Witches is not any of the specific puzzles or tasks, but just Save Scumming. That, and repeatedly tapping the Skip Dialouge button. The dialouge is not cute or fun enough to read more than once- but you'll be forced to see it dozens of times unless you cheat with a guide. However, you can't just hold down the button, because you might miss a randomized visual cue that will inform you of the answer to a multiple choice question... which you'll be answering so, so many times.
You as the player will spend most of the time spamming invites to girls, and your decisions are simply making sure certain progression criteria are met or not (e.g. invite X girl on this day, but ONLY if a box is checked or unchecked appropriately). You have to check your journal against the calendar, which is another set of clunky menus, to make sure you're inviting the girls on the right day under the correct circumstance. There's a 12 hour system, but since you don't control what hours girls come to your office, it doesn't matter. It's bloated and awkward.
The major decisions you make are also up against grinding up stats that are simply mechanics meant to slow down the pacing so the player doesn't chew through the meager content too fast. There are four indistinguishable attributes, which are linked to each of the four waifus. You can push a button to improve two of them daily, but it eats up hours of the day. Frankly, this sucks. Again, if this was in a better engine, each training could be a minigame. Intelligence gets a wordfind. Perception has a simple hidden object game. Control with a precision-mouse based thing. Brutality has you squish cute little cartoon animals or something. Point is, you'll be holding the Skip Ahead button a lot.
Even with the grind, there is a lot of downtime. To further pad things out, actual required progress is sometimes gated off to two days a week, for like 4 or 8 weeks, with nothing to do during the course of the week besides grind stats and money! This is terrible game design! Do not gate off major parts of progress off like this! Let the players play the game at an even pace!
The naughty stuff is an interminable drip feed of softcore stuff. The four hardcore (yes, there are only four so far in this porn game that's been under development for years) take hours and hours of grinding past repetitive input loops. Play a slider puzzle 9 times to see some panties. Match a girl's expression to a color of underwear 11 times (though it will randomly repeat, so you can do this literally dozens of times just to see panties). Guess some lore trivia to see progressively more underwear until you get a boob flash. Guess dessert flavor combinations over and over to get another boob flash. A Harry Potter smut parody shouldn't take this many hours! Life's too short for this crap!
The art keeps this from being a 1 star.
