My latest review:
The artwork and animation are phenomenal and Sad Crab does some great coding that bring a lot of life to environments. The game has so much potential yet here we are 7 years later and the story is still a complete mess.
The story is still nonsensical and unfocused. I've played this 5 times in as many years yet the story is still disjointed and poorly paced. Sad Crab made good progress ripping out MCs long diatribes that plagued the game the first 4 years yet the rest of the story line remains incoherent. If the visual artwork is 10/10 the written artwork is lucky at a 3 or 4 out of 10. Maybe Chat-GPT can help them.
This is not a corruption game or a romance game. MC doesn't really corrupt anyone like in Witch Trainer. Any fans of that game are unlikely to find many similarities here beyond the character names.
One of the biggest faux pas this game engages in is intentionally wasting the players time. There are 4 hours of "pauses" built into the game, Sad Crab is trying to one up Hideo Kojima for non-skipable content. A "pause" is coding command to tell the program to stop processing any code and not accept any input. Every time MC starts a conversation the program halts for 1 second before displaying the dialogue box then the conversation will be interspersed with 50 other pauses, some as long as 15 seconds. The result is incredibly stilted conversation and user interface, the user can't simply click to the next line of dialogue when they are ready instead they have to wait for the forced pacing. It's mandated frustration which Sad Crab believe is mandated enjoyment, they are wrong.
Constructive steps for Sad Crab:
1. Remove the extraneous pauses, google UI responsiveness guidelines
2. Remove the black screens interspersed into animations. You don't see this in any good animation why do you think it's a good idea? It breaks up the animation.
3. Go play Witch Trainer, the original one, and take away some lessons in streamlined UI, character interaction and character development, it was successful because it got so much right. This games failing isn't that it's not Witch Trainer, it's that it's the extraneous nonsense in the game. Nia is a great example of this wasted developer time, there's an entire character with wardrobe changes that has nothing to do with the game or story, nice but irrelevant and distracting. Witch Trainer on the other hand is lazer focused and sticks to a simple interaction loop, the MC pushes Hermione to do something outside her comfort zone, she pushes back then relents multiplied by a hundred corruption events. Sad Crab get this somewhat right with Susan Bones and cake baking but the user experience completing the quest is clunky instead of enjoyable.
4. Devs play this game yourself without DEV mode enabled, seriously actually play it from start to finish yourselves instead of just testing the latest content. You will see the pain points.