Others - Completed - Living Together [v1.26] [PicoPicoSoft]

Living Together (futarigurashi) excels in giving a paradise-like home life with a schoolgirl-wife indulging you in various ways. Mio, the love interest, is a sweet and naive girl who can be trained to accept more sexual advances, some soft corruption, in a sense. If you like playing as a self-insert protagonist, there's a very wholesome dating sim/visual novel mix to be enjoyed here. Bonus points if you play games where girls refer to you as 'Sensei', if you catch my drift.

CONS
Despite how much I liked this game, there are still some glaring flaws that are made pretty obvious quite early. Other reviews also mention this, but you are allowed the option to immediately rape Mio in her sleep on day 1, which does nothing except an awkward conversation where she just accepts it as inevitable in this cohabitation situation, and maybe lowered mood and likeability stats. Absolutely weird, even if you assume she previously already was interested in our protagonist. Some of the progression may also become jumbled up depending on what events you manage to fulfill requirements for, and the order feels a bit confusing.

The biggest flaw that stood out to me was the night time molestation/rape minigame. The minigame is a bit of a hassle to progress, and you quickly realize its very stiff, and unreactive. A well made minigame of this genre would have a lot of movable parts, and some animations to convey things. Those are mostly absent, and you'll be interacting with a cardboard cutout with some extra images of specific body parts you selected in speech bubbles. There's just very little of intrigue in this minigame.

PROS
Outside of those nitpicks, this was a really enjoyable game to play through, and it plays the fantasy of living with an obedient schoolgirl-wife extremely well. You get affectionate with Mio, she welcomes you home, you can headpat her, have lap pillows, she cooks all your meals, and go out on dates with her. Of course, you can acclimate her sexually and make her lewd as well. But your enjoyment of this game will largely depend on how much you like Mio, and whether this fantasy of living with a cute girlfriend is your cup of tea.

Art is very well made, although the deeply 'moe' style in some closeups may not be for everyone. Sex scenes offer a variety of different scenarios, but are unfortunately not animated, even if they look very good. They will satisfy quite a lot of basic kinks and maybe a bit more outside of pure vanilla, so that's a plus.

Personally, none of the flaws I noticed affected my enjoyment for this game, I'd really recommend it if this was a genre you enjoy. I rarely stick with eroges long enough to essentially do a playthrough, but here I am.

Quick review for yet another cohabitation game.

Take a guess at the premise, chances are alot of this will seem familiar. You play as a random unimportant japanese protag. You meet a girl one day as youre returning from home, and you not very creepily allow her to live with you, because of course you do. Her reason for living with you? Her school dorm burned down, her family is overseas, her family cant rent a room or take her away and youre the closest living relative she has. Yes the cohabitation context is as contrived as it is pathetic.

So your daily life proceeds as normal, you balance your day between gaining affection and working, and over time you will insert your sausage into her donut and there's the game. Nothing particularly different or exceptional about the gameplay, its kinda just the normal stuff youd expect from games like these.

H gameplay is fairly good. Youre allowed to do quite a lot with Mio, use just about every appendage and device around, and practically fuck her anyway you like. The one problem though; no matter how much she moans as you play with her stuff, she will icely stare at you like a corpse. Its not that she doesnt react to what youre doing, its just that what shes experiencing is at odds with her expressions, making it look at lot cheaper than it should be.

But here's the kicker, and one of which I cannot overlook; the writing is dumb as fuck. At nearly every corner just when you think youve gotten into a decent rthymn, the writing will ensure that the girl youre living and fucking with feels like nothing more than an inflatable fucktoy. You can literally rape the shit out of her, tears streaming like a river, and the very next day she'll be all smiles cooking your breakfast. There's even cutscenes where she'll basically acknowledge what youve done but brushes it off like it meant nothing. Take her out on a date, she refuses to kiss you but will happily accept going to a love hotel (like why? You literally live alone with her, whats the point of a love hotel?) where you're allowed to spam kisses. At the end, whether or not youve chosen the lover or fucktoy route, it all means very little when youre fucking her sideways with toys spewing from every orifice.


Conclusion...

Its not that its a bad game, its just that its not doing anything particularly good, and there are just better cohabitation games out there ranging from sis-con imouto monochromes, to lovey-dovey waifu konko, to well written bottle biosphere. What's the niche that makes this game stand out? I suppose being able to rape the girl without a fail state at day 1, which admitably is a rarity, but then you might as well load up a gif if youre that desperate to bust a nut.

Recommended only if you can overlook the writing and you have a thing for unrealistically saccarine girls.

Looking at the preview images, i thought it would be a nightcrawler game.

It's not.

A girl comes living into your house, you rape her during the first night, and then you grind your daily life too have happy sex.

Most of the scenes are just still CG, the art looks good, but there is almost no real gameplay, you just push buttons and things happen. It's not very engaging.

This review is for v1.26

TLDR: the best part of the game is the H content, the worst part is the writing.

So the story starts off as usual for these incest sleep sex games where some sort of event forces a relative (in this case a distant cousin) to move in with a horny male relative (the PC) with things being fairly platonic at first...that is until the very first night where you get to choose if you want to mess with her while she sleeps, which will result in you raping her repeatedly on the very first night if you do anything beyond just looking at her.
You would think this would result in her calling the cops on you or running away resulting in an immediate (and annoying) game over, but nope, she literally just ignores it and forgives you, letting you progress as if nothing had happened with only one or two mentions of the event ever coming up, but feeling wholly irrelevant since by the end of the first week she will likely be coming to you for sex without any kind of provocation, so clearly she just liked it or something and wasn't actually upset because she wanted it all along...which is a pretty twisted take on the whole thing, but okay I guess if it means I don't have to start over three minutes into the game.

So the writing is pretty garbage, but where the game makes up for it is in the H content, which has mostly just still images with the exception of one or two short gifs during some H events, but it has these H events aplenty with some of them being so outlandishly perverse for being available after only one week that it really just makes the whole relationship stat feel like an afterthought since after only a week you will be able to tie her up in the bathroom with a vibrator taped to her clit...so yeah, really not a lot of meaningful progression or corruption going on since it just seems like she's willing to do anything from the get go as long as you pet her enough.

As for the gameplay loop, it's your normal wake up and grind type game where your character goes to work, you can buy things (one item from a store, one from online shopping per day), and you can use these things to unlock new events and grinding options. Not very grindy outside of just buying things so the main thing you will be grinding is head pats, at least until she is willing to sleep with you on demand, because then you just have to fuck her brains out to make her love you.

So overall, it's not bad, but it's not great, but the artwork is definitely fapable, although maybe not for the 3.8GB folder size.