Version Reviewed: v0.33.3
Overview: A management sim/corruption game about a guy who runs a tiny pharmaceutical startup in a city populated by lots of beautiful women.
Story: You inherit a failed drug company and have to make money to keep it afloat. Luckily there is no FDA in this world to harsh your buzz. You literally only have to test it once on an employee and if they don't immediately drop dead you're good to start production and sales. As for the rest of the story, there is none. Some of the girls in your life kind of have story-like events that happen from time to time, but it's 99% managment sim.
Gameplay: Overwhelming. When you first start out you will be lost, even with the tutorial. Expect to fail your first business while you try to figure out the game mechanics. I've played for a few hours and still don't have a good solid business running. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that the mini-achievement thing is actually how you level up. And this isn't even touching the corruption stuff that unlocks the sex scenes (eventually). The interface is not great, and everything is just a hair too complicated or poorly documented IMHO.
Here's a quick checklist of what you need to do to sell your first pill:
1. Research some drug effect
2. Craft your pill recipe
3. Research the pill recipe (easy to miss)
4. Set the production schedule, including the weights for each production line. (different screen)
5. Buy raw ingredients (different screen)
6. Produce the pill, by repeatedly clicking the production button until some are created. You don't get feedback on how many pills were created in this step, you have to check in a different screen.
7. Divert some of the pills to sales (different screen, buried deep in a menu, if you forget to do this the sale will fail but not tell you why)
8. Sell the pills (different screen).
You can save yourself effort by setting thresholds where pills will automatically be diverted to sales, but that's far from obvious, and of course it is on a different screen.
Presumably you will eventually research some really profitable pills and be able to afford a full staff so the company basically runs itself, but early on it's a huge amount of grind just to keep the company above water while the research team grinds out more pill effects and you level up your research domains (another screen).
The UI for all of this involves loads of clicking between different areas a selecting from two or three deep submenus. This is one of the few porn games where I think Ren'Py may be the wrong choice. All of the drug production stuff should be in a single tabbed window with a clear workflow.
As for the corruption game mechanics, well, they're kinda terrible. Each girl has some usually randomized mechanics to make them unique, but it's basically "do they hate Mondays, Y/N?" and that seems to only matter early on when you're trying to grind up the love stat so you can use the easier complement/flirt options. It's really hard to read the feedback to figure out if you're wasting your time molesting them and to advance you need to use one of the date options or do something else. There is no in-game hint system as far as I can tell, except for a note at the end of the day that they're over-corrupted for their base corruption stat. It's very easy to spin your wheels forever because the game is telling you that you're plussing up stats that end up reverting every day. In order to satisfy girls you need to level up your sex skills which involves doing mini-achievement things every day, some of which are difficult or impossible without high sex skills. You can at least reroll each task once a day.
Artwork: It's kinda meh. The system for dressing up characters is super cool in concept, but is clunky in practice. The girls look ok, but it's not a visual treat. One impressive thing is that the city is populated by randomly generated characters that you can also seduce, however the amount of randomness is quite limited so it ends up feeling like more like you're grinding up the same characters over and over except this time they like research projects instead of hating them or something.
Bugs: I ran into quite a number of Ren'Py error screens. The "push clothes to the side" mechanic appears to be completely broken in this version. Also, the end of the day summary screen was always telling me that I'd made like 10-15 pills, but when I'd check there would only be like 5 new pills to sell on the next day.
Conclusion: This is an incredibly ambitious game with actual gameplay, but the horrendous UX compounds the grindy and poorly explained gameplay systems. The art is adequate but nothing to write home about. The sex scenes require a lot of grinding to unlock--the actual sex sim part is extremely menu focused, slow, grindy, and heavily gated as well. It's not that great for fapping. The business sim part could be good with a serious UI overhaul.
Overview: A management sim/corruption game about a guy who runs a tiny pharmaceutical startup in a city populated by lots of beautiful women.
Story: You inherit a failed drug company and have to make money to keep it afloat. Luckily there is no FDA in this world to harsh your buzz. You literally only have to test it once on an employee and if they don't immediately drop dead you're good to start production and sales. As for the rest of the story, there is none. Some of the girls in your life kind of have story-like events that happen from time to time, but it's 99% managment sim.
Gameplay: Overwhelming. When you first start out you will be lost, even with the tutorial. Expect to fail your first business while you try to figure out the game mechanics. I've played for a few hours and still don't have a good solid business running. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that the mini-achievement thing is actually how you level up. And this isn't even touching the corruption stuff that unlocks the sex scenes (eventually). The interface is not great, and everything is just a hair too complicated or poorly documented IMHO.
Here's a quick checklist of what you need to do to sell your first pill:
1. Research some drug effect
2. Craft your pill recipe
3. Research the pill recipe (easy to miss)
4. Set the production schedule, including the weights for each production line. (different screen)
5. Buy raw ingredients (different screen)
6. Produce the pill, by repeatedly clicking the production button until some are created. You don't get feedback on how many pills were created in this step, you have to check in a different screen.
7. Divert some of the pills to sales (different screen, buried deep in a menu, if you forget to do this the sale will fail but not tell you why)
8. Sell the pills (different screen).
You can save yourself effort by setting thresholds where pills will automatically be diverted to sales, but that's far from obvious, and of course it is on a different screen.
Presumably you will eventually research some really profitable pills and be able to afford a full staff so the company basically runs itself, but early on it's a huge amount of grind just to keep the company above water while the research team grinds out more pill effects and you level up your research domains (another screen).
The UI for all of this involves loads of clicking between different areas a selecting from two or three deep submenus. This is one of the few porn games where I think Ren'Py may be the wrong choice. All of the drug production stuff should be in a single tabbed window with a clear workflow.
As for the corruption game mechanics, well, they're kinda terrible. Each girl has some usually randomized mechanics to make them unique, but it's basically "do they hate Mondays, Y/N?" and that seems to only matter early on when you're trying to grind up the love stat so you can use the easier complement/flirt options. It's really hard to read the feedback to figure out if you're wasting your time molesting them and to advance you need to use one of the date options or do something else. There is no in-game hint system as far as I can tell, except for a note at the end of the day that they're over-corrupted for their base corruption stat. It's very easy to spin your wheels forever because the game is telling you that you're plussing up stats that end up reverting every day. In order to satisfy girls you need to level up your sex skills which involves doing mini-achievement things every day, some of which are difficult or impossible without high sex skills. You can at least reroll each task once a day.
Artwork: It's kinda meh. The system for dressing up characters is super cool in concept, but is clunky in practice. The girls look ok, but it's not a visual treat. One impressive thing is that the city is populated by randomly generated characters that you can also seduce, however the amount of randomness is quite limited so it ends up feeling like more like you're grinding up the same characters over and over except this time they like research projects instead of hating them or something.
Bugs: I ran into quite a number of Ren'Py error screens. The "push clothes to the side" mechanic appears to be completely broken in this version. Also, the end of the day summary screen was always telling me that I'd made like 10-15 pills, but when I'd check there would only be like 5 new pills to sell on the next day.
Conclusion: This is an incredibly ambitious game with actual gameplay, but the horrendous UX compounds the grindy and poorly explained gameplay systems. The art is adequate but nothing to write home about. The sex scenes require a lot of grinding to unlock--the actual sex sim part is extremely menu focused, slow, grindy, and heavily gated as well. It's not that great for fapping. The business sim part could be good with a serious UI overhaul.