This is a tough one to review. I first started reading it a couple years ago when I first started getting into AVNs. I remember enjoying the story and the taboo relationship building while also noting that most of the love interests weren’t particularly attractive to me and the story occasionally got bogged down in scenes that repeated a bit too often. Now that I’m playing the recent update… I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’ve played so many other games that I feel do what Light of my Life does but better that I, sadly, found myself using the skip button.
The renders are both a blessing and a curse. There’s often a different render for each line of dialogue, and each chapter has thousands of lines of dialogue. However, with the text speed, you end up doing a lot of double clicking to get the dialogue out faster which not only gets tedious but results in you missing a lot of the renders because you’re busy focusing on the dialogue, and in most scenes there’s nothing of interest going on anyway. Having to load a different render for each scene makes the game more sluggish than I’d have preferred.
The story does a reasonable job of trying to make the central taboo relationship building believable, and that requires a great deal of time. Can’t just start the game with, “Oh, I’ve always secretly loved you come here.”. In the early chapters this moved along at a slow but steady pace, but around Chapter 5 it seemed to go from slow and steady to tedious. I’m of the opinion that if you feel compelled to skip dialogue, something has gone terribly wrong, and unfortunately, I reached that point somewhere soon after the end of the camping trip.
Part of this is due to the realization that 99% of my dialogue choices are meaningless. This is basically a kinetic novel, and at some point (my memory is a bit fuzzy after more than a year of not playing) choices devolved into “Say something/Don’t say anything” which made my input feel pointless. Kinetic novels work better in third person. When you have no control over the first-person MC’s actions, it's hard to get invested, especially when the MC doesn’t seem to have much personality in the first place. He misses his wife, loves his children, and when they start getting more intimate, he rolls with it. The character development is left to the daughters as their taboo relationship with their father and each other slowly grows.
Renders. I understand this is pretty controversial in the comments section to the point where there’s warnings about discussing it. I found Macy reasonably attractive and unique. The others, on the other hand I would most charitably say are not really my cup of tea. In some of the latest chapters, I actually reached a foursome scene that, to my surprise, did nothing for me. I don’t need rendered models to look like super models, but the style is just… you know what? Just going to stop there. Just not my preference. I suspect that maybe I’m not the target audience for this AVN, and that’s okay. I suspect the taboo elements were what made the scenes attractive to me early on, but the side-characters don’t seem to have a reason for existing.
I’ve often argued that good renders and good dialogue are superior to animations. I still hold to this; however, dialogue can still get in the way of a good scene. In one pivotal scene with Macy I was in a sense cockblocked by what read like really poor dialogue with Macy saying “dad dad dad dad dad dad” over and over again until the word lost meaning. This scene needs some cleaning up. Real people don’t dump paragraphs on their intimate partners when they’re in the midst of intimate activities. Brevity is the soul of wit, as they say.
Despite all the negative comments, it’s not a bad game. There are good things going on here, but something in the last few chapters has gone wrong. Perhaps part of it just the long update time where it’s hard to keep track of what I originally liked about the game and it’s being overshadowed by the issues I’m having with the new content.
One last pet peeve: Way too many dream sequences. One is fine. Two is often too many. There are a lot more than two, and they’re a slog to go through. Who here cares about dialogue between the MC and his memory of his wife? It sounds interesting, but unless you’re going to add a supernatural component to the story, it gets tedious very quickly having a lengthy dream sequence whenever the MC sleeps.
