A Good Game Marred by Extremely Questionable Design Choices
A v0.9 review. Spoilers ahead.
Intertwined is interesting. It's entertaining. The characters are all reasonably compelling and if not quite lifelike, at least lifelike-adjacent. Renders are good, even if the animations feel more like stop motion photography than anything resembling smooth and seamless. It has all the hallmarks of a good game. You want to like it.
But the problems start to surface the more you play. They're small and harmless at first, letting you overlook them, but it becomes bigger and harder to ignore as the game goes on.
The game is fundamentally built around a series of branching paths. But even in a game with so many girls and so many branching paths, choices feel restrictive. Choices in this game boils down to which character(s) you wish to pursue. But even the choices to pursue them are far from obvious. Certain choices that seem innocuous, like not having a conversation this very second somehow lead to totally terminating the route for a certain character. Because not dropping everything in your life to immediately follow up on a character's whims means that character is no longer in your romantic future, apparently. Worst of all, it may not even be clear that it terminates the route for them until far into the future.
Playing this game without a walkthrough or mod tool like Universal Ren'py Mod is a lesson in frustration. Any given choice can straight up harpoon your future with another character, to the point where if you want a good ending with one character you often have to deliberately ignore all the porn logic characters the game deliberately throws at you every other scene.
The argument about realism doesn't even apply, because the situations are neither realistic nor consistent. Why would two best friends who know each other's feelings about the MC deliberately choose to ignore them so they can both blindly pursue the MC? Why would Elena, knowing Layla's feelings for the MC, choose to add additional temptation to the pile? Why would hooking up with Juliet end the Nikki or Cara route when the MC was in a relationship with none of the girls at the time of the hookup? "Realism" in this game seems to boil down to choosing the girl of your choice as soon as they appear and neglecting everyone else, hovering around them waiting for the first opportunity to white knight for them. I would call that stalking or simping, but evidently you're rewarded for that.
Unfortunately, even this isn't consistent. If you want to pursue Elena, much of her interaction is gated behind pursuing Layla. But romance Layla too much and you presumably won't get anything with Elena. It's a clusterfuck of storytelling that can be handwaved any which way because none of it makes sense.
The developer clearly does this intentionally. "It's not a harem game" is probably one of their chief excuses, practically sticky-noted to the game's splash screen. But in order for this excuse to hold water, the game has to be fundamentally and appreciably different with each playthrough.
But it isn't.
This game isn't a free roam game. This game isn't a free play. It's a linear VN. Even if you elect to play this game ten times, focusing solely and completely on a different girl each time, you'll still see a supermajority of the same scenes over and over. You'll read the same filler sequences over and over. And even if you do happen to choose an entirely different girl, many times you'll get the same scene with a different skin (looking at you Nikki/Cara).
Also remember that we're playing these games as they are released. We don't know the final outcome. We don't even know which characters have meaningful potential relationships. The game throws well over a dozen "love interests" at you, and presumably only 5 or 6 of them are actually major enough to warrant endings, but you don't know that for sure. Is it worth pursuing a minor character? Would doing so destroy your chances at a good ending? Who the fuck knows...
It's a classic example of a developer overestimating how interesting and varied their content is. You go through all this effort and uncertainty to see the content in the game, and the payoff is not worth the work you put into it just to see the story.
And to make it perfectly clear, the story is decent, if a bit formulaic. You play as a young man who moves in with his divorced (and very attractive) mother. You reconnect with old love interests and meet new ones. Your father is your typical Asshole Dad™️ who eventually becomes something resembling an antagonist in this game. Just like how almost every other male character in the game is eventually positioned either as an antagonist or rival, which is odd considering it's "not a harem game."
Why does Ethan still insist on getting in your way if—in your playthrough—you don't give a shit about Erynn? Why does Lucas get in your way if you don't pursue Layla? Why does A Manual care if you don't go after Cara? Why does your goofy old "friend" still undermine you if you don't pursue his crush, Valeria? Who knows... It's almost like the game presumes you're going to pursue those characters, but really it's just tries to bait you into doing it so they can pull the rug out from under you in a bullshit "gotcha! you shouldn't be trying to romance multiple women" lecture later.
Like most VNs, you're supposedly incredibly charming, attractive, and good in bed no matter how you play your character. You meet a bunch of women, each of whom are obviously super attracted to the MC, like all of the most boring, boilerplate games of this genre. Instead of writing romance and build up, where the characters charm each other and grow closer, they just submit to a juvenile fantasy of instant attraction so they can avoid the heavy lifting. However, for the most part all the women have interests and ambitions beyond just the main character. You want to get to know them.
Dialogue is decent, at times quirky and other times snappy and quick. The flow of dialogue to renders is very nice. You never feel like you're settled on the same screen for overly long just reading slide after slide of bad dialogue, which is a huge improvement over many other games in this genre.
But every time, you eventually run into that wall, where you're either bottlenecked by a choice made 400 slides ago, or you didn't hug or ogle the character enough and thus miss a scene (or you ogled them too much even though there's no way to know whether or not ogling would reward or detract points). It just leaves you with that salty taste in your mouth that you missed content for minimal reasoning, leaving you unsatisfied and feeling punished because you didn't interact with the characters in exactly the way the developer envisioned.
In other words, all the choice in this game boils down to a correct way to interact with each girl (plus points vs negative points), and then rigidly adhering to elevating the girl of your choice, spurning all other opportunities. Apparently the developer feels the "correct" way to play this game is to play the same game a dozen times, each time focusing on a different girl (many times seeing the same scene with a different model render), and utterly yielding to said girl's every whim and desire in just the right way to get maximum points with them. It's not even realistic, it just means you get to choose which girl you choose to become a total simp for.
This game ultimately has an objectively right and wrong way to play it, and the right way is incredibly frustrating and restrictive.
The game obviously takes a lot of inspiration from Witcher 3, both tongue in cheek and literally—it pokes fun about how you can't romance both Triss and Yennefer in that game, and shows the MC playing Witcher 3 in multiple scenes. But what the developer seems to have forgotten is that both the VN format and the genre of game Intertwined is precludes it from being like Witcher 3.
Witcher 3 can get away with the one-romance-only ending because it's fundamentally not a romance game. You're plunged into a massive, open world fantasy epic with a war, civil unrest, monsters, and the literal end of the world happening in the background of a game with strong open world exploration and character-building RPG elements, all of which are completely playable and engaging even if you don't choose to romance anybody. If you strip all that away and leave it with just a voiceless linear visual novel of the Triss and Yennefer storylines with bad animations, the game would absolutely suck, just like this game does.
(Also, it should be mentioned that the bad ending only happens if you explicitly tell Triss and Yennefer you love them both, attempting to pledge Geralt to both of them, not because you waved at Triss as you passed her in the Novigrad streets, like Intertwined.)
Many characters are slow-burned and breadcrumbed into oblivion. It falls into the lewd game trap of having sex be some kind of endgame payoff rather than organically weaving it into the story (you gotta rub their arms the right way first before you can proceed to a scene three days later, where you kiss them exactly how they want, before anything sexual is even on the table, obviously). If you're pursuing Elena, Erynn, or even Layla, be prepared to hang on to the barest tethers, because you still, 9 chapters into it, haven't come close to sleeping with any of them.
And other characters like Gabi, Valeria, ShaCarri, Emily, Melissa, Tori, Brooke, Iris? They have points but they're such minor characters that you wonder if they will even have romantic scenes, much less endings. Would pursuing them completely bork your ending with a more prominently featured girl? Is it worth bothering with them? Who the fuck knows! You're left in total limbo not knowing who to romance because it might be years before you get anything resembling a payoff, and making one random wrong choice might completely seal off an ending with the girl you want in the most convoluted of manners.
This game almost makes more sense if you read it as a reverse female fantasy MC. You take all the attributes of an attractive male love interest, put them in the MC, throw a bunch of temptation at him and expect him to spurn them all in order to mind-read and anticipate the desires of his one chosen pedestal girl. Unfortunately, you have to play as this idealized female fantasy without any of the psychic powers or futuresight evidently required.
