Unity - Onhold - Lewd by Daylight [v0.29b] [SpicySauceLord]

I was reading the reviews which are pretty negative and had to see it to believe it.

Pros:

Cons:
First off, hiding the half of multiple Scenes behind a paywall is an absolute disgrace and deserves the worst rating. Period!
Maybe concentrate on making a good game instead of trying to implement a pointless DRM that will discourage people to check out your game, because it´s a shitty move and also lazy. If you truly want to give your paying customers something exclusive, then you should have created something new and not just give them the game and say the scenes in the free version are split.

Characters/Artwork:
The characters look lame, unattractive and don´t really fit together. Some look like anime characters and some look like drawings of "normal" people.
Also there is no real character development which doesn´t give me a reason to care for them.

Sex Scenes:
The Sex Scenes are few and far between and don´t feel rewarding or good enough. The rest was already explained at the beginning.

Gameplay:
The gameplay feels boring and grindy.
Basic options a game should have like save,load,settings are only accessible if you go to the main menu which is tedious.

Story/Writing feels flat and uninteresting.

Performance: The game feels laggy at times, but i guess these are growing pains.

Conclusion:
I really see nothing in this game that makes me want to come back and play the updates. It has deep issues that you can´t fix without starting from scratch and creating an interesting story,characters and fun gameplay that offers more variety and is much less grindy.
The DRM issue is an absolute no-go imo and leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me want to distance myself from that developer.

This game has bit of potential buthas a few GLARING issue.

This game is VERY grindy. It already feel s less lewd than the title implies but this spaces the lewd parts out even farther so this game is not really fapable and playable.

This game leaves something to be required as far as the rules and explaining what everything is and how it works

Most importanly of all, I am totally ok with patreon supports getting extra content but to lock half of the scenes behind a paytreon wall is unacceptable. Toi clarify i don't mean half of the scenes in the game I mean each scene you can only see half of it. if there are 4 cgs you will se 2 and then the other two will be just dialogue boxes but no image locked behind the patreon wall.

The battle mechanics are simple but the battle metrics were not explained although i was able to figure it out on my own

3 More of a 2 in it's current form, but there are things the dev could do to improve things immeasurably.

The core game loop of "play stripped down pokemon to find items that gate progression for taking pictures of (mostly) girls" is not on it's face terrible, but is in it's implementation. A combat loop alone in a Hgame is just grind and unengaging, unrewarding gameplay. IF the dev integrated some kind of "party" mechanic where you earned scenes and interactions with the characters in game that way, with those being the central throughthread of the sex CGs, it'd be improved. Even if at the end of the day it could still be reduced to "find X many items to progress" if it was a journey and not a destination it'd come off far better.

Everything done about monetization, in the face of iffy game mechanics and bugged game systems, just stop. There is far too much wrong to have this much effort put into useless DRM nonsense
You do not have click to forward, double click to skip dialogue, a basic feature of every VN system.
You do not have the menu accessible through escape or right click
You do not have a save-load mechanic. manual save, or access to some settings without going to main menu.
You do have noticeable load on button click lag in some places, even playing off an SSD
Clicking on Jane, who has no accessible arc, locks the whole game on black screen which with the lack of menu access buttons requires keyboard commands to escape the game.
Yet you had time to impose these inane backer codes to gate content as a "clever" way to not have to pack two releases.
Read the room, devs sell early access or just release their product. The average normies who are downloading your demo on patreons interface seeing "give me money to see the CGs with nudity" ingame will alt F4, delete, and be negatively predisposed to the game.
Everyone here may use cheatengine, Unity unpackers, scrape the gamefiles, or waits until someone does (like that handy cheat mod someone already made) but that isn't typical. Most won't put up with it. While the codes took seconds to find in thread, that's seconds too many. The game managed to make me irate about something I'd been given for free. Didn't have to do that.

Word of warning
The "premium scenes unlocked" code doesn't even work in all scenes. It only unlocks the images in the gallery but not in their scene call, which ruined the 4CG oneshot of "meg" for me after grinding for those 4 plague incense. Managed to summon the literal fucking sun just to see her naked as she'd say, but not in narrative. Borderline 1/5 on that alone because it's an anticonsumer practice that ruins the game for your backers.

But if dev eyes take anything from this, make it this.
Download something like Naninovel or Utage3 as a visual novel Unity addon immediately before making any more of the game with this lack of dialogue functionality. Simple, needed change to fix most of the clunkyness people are experiencing with text, dialogue, and other conventional interfaces in the game.

On writing. There isn't much and what is there doesn't come off as good.
If they added a companion system to your combat playloop, as I proffered or their own unique take, it'd go far towards fixing the "amount" of character writing and provide a proper feeling of progression while flushing out the worldspace of their game versus relying on peoples knowledge of another.
On the quality front, they're relying faaaaar too much on anyone knowing these characters. Parody has to stick to simple foundations and introduce the characters while retreading canon characterizations. Just plopping them into the gameworld and assuming everyone playing has the preexisiting knowledge of relationships is a misstep. And what is here probably doesn't do the characters justice, what with "I'm a (chemically addled) slut lol" being the summation of several, if not all, of these photo taking arcs. It needs another workover at the conceptual stage; how the scenes and character interaction is implemented. Then written from the perspective of selling these characters for the first time to the audience.

With some work in the right directions it could be a pretty fun game based on what is here. Where it will be in a few builds could be promising.