A game with great promise that is bogged down by its bugs and release schedule.
The art for this game is great, especially as a 2d animated game that (I'm pretty sure) has no AI generated images. The characters look great, the animations, for the most part is great, just A+ to the artistic talent behind this game. If you like this style of kinda-cartoony non-anime art, definitely good.
The problem is that this game is so hard to play in the state that it's in now. There are game crashing bugs (the ones I encountered were all around Joy) that just don't get fixed, at least for non-patrons. Looking through their releases here at least, there aren't any hotfixes or anything -- just the next major update a month after the subscribers get it. I mean, patrons getting updates earlier is fine -- people gotta make money, but the bugs left in the game are not so fine, especially because it has me wondering whether these are even fixed in the paid version.
Speaking of bugs, it's not just the game crashing ones which curb the experience, there seem to be all sorts of issues triggering events in the game too. I couldn't get any events with Molly to trigger whatsoever even after looking up the guide. The later Morgan events I couldn't get to trigger, even though both the guide and the ingame character say 'Be here at this time'. I've already mentioned Joy's events crashing the game (I assume that's been fixed...? More on why I don't know in the next paragraph). And I'm not even sure Asha is meant to be interactable for non-patrons because it says she's patron exclusive but you can still talk to her and she acts like you've met even though there are no events for those.
The grind in the game is fine -- it's a sandbox game and the expectation for sandbox games is for there to be at least a little grind because that's the build up to the events. I think the grind in this game is acceptable BUT saves are not compatible with later updates. Which means this very reasonable grind is now something you have to do over and over every time the game is updated. It goes from being reasonable to making me not really want to have to go through it again and again just to get to the new content.
I want this game to be better, I really do, because the parts that I like I really like, but the parts that don't work really, really make it hard to justify my time with it. If this game does end up living up to its potential, honestly 4-5/5 depending on story and character development, but until then a 3 is all I can give it.