Hard, unfair, difficult, complex. To understand the problem with Lona, A Masochism Simulator, you need to differentiate between these.
Imagine you're tasked with creating a game derived from chess. What will you do? You can make the AI really good, like Deep Blue good. That's hard. You can make an extra rule stipulating that every time a player makes a move, they roll d6. If they roll one their opponent gains an extra move. But that opponent doesn't have to roll. That's an unfair advantage. You can make an extra rule that in order to take an enemy piece, you have to log into your old World of Warcraft account and slay 1000 boars. That's difficult or grindy. Or you can simply make the physical pieces tiny and very slippery. That's another kind of difficult. Finally, you can make each piece have dozens unique abilities, governed by different resources, level ups, situational rules and the like. That's complex.
Now, the problem. LonaRPG is maybe 10% hard, 30% unfair, 5% complex and the rest is just a mix of difficulty and grindiness. Its combat system is made intentionally sluggish and punishing at every opportunity, same with trade system, sex system... Every system. I understand that the intention was to sell the players the feeling of grittiness and unfairness of the world of LonaRPG, but in my opinion the authors failed, because they relied more on crippling UX than on the intra-world elements, and often at the expense of them. For instance the game's currency system is broken. But if you think whether the game universe can function like depicted, you realize it can't, it doesn't make sense for an establishment to rob its customers of any and all change. This system is designed this way because screw you, dear player, in particular. And so we have a major worldbuilding flaw invented just to cheat you out of petty change. Likewise, some devs take RPGM and make an effort to make it better—not all of them succeed but that's not the point. This dev clearly went ahead and made it worse, sluggish, and they did it on purpose. A good game should be easy to play, hard to master. LonaRPG is hard to play.
And for all that trouble... the rewards are kinda shit. Unskipable and monotonous sex scenes, with little variety, and low resolution art. An extra pet peeve of mine is that sex scenes decrease Lona's tidiness pretty drastically, so basically all sex you're about to see is sex while wallowing in filth. If that's your thing, okay, but personally, it got old pretty fast. My feeling was that LonaRPG has porn more for the edginess factor, and not for the love of porn itself. Since I'm reviewing this as a porn game, it's a clear downside. This makes it not worth to master.
Hard to play, not worth to master. Two stars, Poor. Add another star if you think edginess by itself deserves it, I won't judge you. Lies, I so much will!