I definitely didn't mean for you to see nothing while playing well. Also, some of the most fun stuff requires you to do something other than typing. Hearing stuff like this might mean I set my balance between the two in the wrong place.
Apologies in advance for the Great Wall o' Text. Hopefully someone gets something out of reading it!
Long time thread lurker, first time poster. Been playing the game off and on now for a couple of weeks, probably a good two dozen or so playthroughs. And I have to say, I beg to differ. I think you've nailed that balance perfectly, my man.
Going in, I had zero experience with these typing-based tease games so initially I was just focused on the prompts and the timer - trying to "beat" every single girl thinking that was how to "win." I type crazy fast so that was never really a challenge for me so I came away like the poster above thinking "what the H, I'm not getting to see jack squat in terms of sexy time, what gives?"
But continuing to play on, I realized I was approaching the game totally wrong. It's not like a traditional game where you just try to max out your efforts to "win." The player has to approach this game differently and instead of trying to dominate it, you have to strategically balance when you "win" and when you "lose," as "losing" in this game is actually still giving the player a reward in terms of getting to see what you want to see, hence the whole point of the game, which is temptation.
Once I figured that out, I fell in love with playing it, as that's where the strategy comes into play. With all the play time now logged under my belt I've figured out how to balance it to where I get to see (mostly) what I want to see while still holding on to enough hearts to keep progressing forward to each level. That's where I feel you've balanced things perfectly, as there's still times where I don't get the balance quite right and end up falling short on level 3 or so, or I make it to BossyPants and don't have enough files or bugs left to take her down. That, coupled with all the variety of different girls to discover, leads to this game having a TON of replayability.
If you're a player feeling frustrated that to "win" you're not seeing enough of what you want, then you really need to try thinking things through better as you take on each girl, and adjusting your thought process as to how you approach the game. If she's not someone you're interested in, then blitz through the text and smoke her ftw. If she's someone you do want to play around with, then you need to know when to type so you get her low enough that you can still beat her before cumming at the end, but also know when to use "wait", when to use "strip", when to use "run", and most importantly, when and how to use your hacks to still get to see what you want to see without dropping a life, or losing max file count by cumming. The girls with the unique abilities and afflictions can actually help you out with this sometimes if you pay attention to what they're saying and/or offering. In short, it's absolutely possible to get what you want out of each girl and still progress if you play your cards right, but it is a challenge and most certainly a balancing act, and THAT is the fun of this game!
I recommend keeping a text file that lists all the hacks, what they do, and how many/what bugs they cost to use. That way you always know what you have at your disposal to take them down while still getting the most "show" out of them as possible. Just also keep in mind you are going to need a certain amount of specific hacks to help you defeat big bad boss lady at the end. Again, choose wisely what you use and when you use it!
All in all I love this game and how it's set up so I hope (to dev) that you don't rework much of the balance in it. I think it's great as it is, as it's a challenge (that is still beatable if you know what you're doing), instead of the usual "click here click that see bewbs" that most adult games are. I guess if a player is just looking to rub one out then maybe this isn't the best game for that, but then again, know what you're playing beforehand and adjust your expectations accordingly. The whole point of this game is to be a tease and temptation balancing act, not to just bombard you with easy peasy tiddies.
I also wanna say (again to the dev) hats off as well for being creative with the game's premise. Too many adult games follow the same old same old dating sim storyline/environment and this is anything but that. In a sea of "been there, done that" games, this one stands out as unique in a lot of ways and that's awesome. I'm glad I stumbled upon it as it opened me up to a whole new type of game engine and adult game mechanic that I thoroughly am enjoying. I've since also given Trials of the Succubi a try and am loving that as well so far for all the same reasons that I enjoy this game.
I hold myself to subscribing to only 5 Patreons at any given time, but there's a couple where the updates have really died off, so when I drop one or two of them I'll definitely be replacing their sub with subscribing to this one as it seems you're very active in communicating with your playerbase in terms of discussing the game and keeping people in the loop on Patreon each week as to what you're doing and where the next update is at, as well as putting out a good product that is also unique and highly enjoyable. Good on you, Sir!
As for critiques, I don't have many, as I really enjoy the game as is. The needing to transition from mouse to keyboard gets tedious, but that's a game engine limitation that not much of anything can be done about.
I wouldn't mind if some explanation was added to some of the afflictions and player states in the inventory (not sure what else to call it) portion of the screen. Like, if we were able to hover over the icons and a text blurb popped up giving some detail to what the icon represents and what effects it's having on our player state.
Would also like if the "new hacks" from the Camping zone were added to our hacks database. That would be helpful. Might also be nice if those new bugs were available in other areas than just that one, but maybe that is coming down the road in future updates, I dunno?
Some extra categories on the girl preferences would be nice too I think. For example, I'm an ass man so would be cool if that was a category in this game like it is in Trials of the Succubi. Maybe a category for FFF or FFM or "group" as some of the photosets feature those scenarios. Stuff like that.
The only real irritation I've come across while playing is browser function and save state locations. I use Opera GX as my main browser and for the life of me I can't get sound in the game to function at all when using that browser. Not a big deal as I just used Chrome instead as I keep that installed for playing around with Stable Diffusion and AI image generation in Automatic1111. Game works fine in that browser, but I'm also a habitual and incessant drive space cleaner, so whenever I clean my rig up with CCleaner before shutting down, my saves were always getting deleted. That drove me nuts as I really like keeping my girl preferences in tact for new playthroughs, so I searched and searched in Chrome's AppData files trying to find the save, but gave up after an hour of no joy, lol.
So on to Firefox I went and the game works perfectly as well in that browser and I was able to find the save files for both this game and Trials of the Succubi. For anyone wanting to know where and what they are, they can be found in the following locations if you play the game on the Firefox browser:
Keystroke: C:\Users\"your username"\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qh0e1pc2.default-release\storage\default\http+++127.0.0.1+5000\ls
File you're looking for is data.sqlite
Trials of the Succubi: C:\Users\"your username"\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qh0e1pc2.default-release\storage\default\http+++127.0.0.1+6969\ls
File you're looking for here is also named data.sqlite
For the record my system runs Windows 10 Pro 22H2. If you're on a different OS the above locations will be different. Also, if you use CCleaner like I do, you can add those two files to the "exclude" list so that way they never get deleted and will always be there for future playthroughs. Worth doing if you play the game alot and don't want to lose your girl preferences, etc.
Anyways that's it. Kudos to anyone who read this entire wall of text. I'm more of a lurker than a poster, so when I do post it ends up being a novel. I rarely post on any games here, but this one I like and had a lot to say on, so apologies if I rambled on too long. Keep up the great work, dev. Love the game as is!
Cheers all, have a good day.
