Shambling through the streets of smut alley sometimes you happen upon those dull gems that you think nothing of, but sometimes something curious catches your attention. Maybe the way it reflected? Maybe the old adage to not judge ever book by it's cover, or every relationship by your ex.
Well this certainly caught my attention in a way I thought it wouldn't, which ties into my main biases you can keep in mind before going forward. This game in a lot of ways reminds me of sandbox sims that plague many a 2 to 3 star title that I tend to avoid. Not a lot of character at first, slight grinding to a jarring snowball effect of lewd that feels disproportionately paced, and an utter vanilla veneer to top it off. Except, the more you play the more it really isn't sickingly sweet vanilla, there's a couple nuts in there, and the more you play the more you feel as though the dev started to have way more fun than the original premise.
That was my initial expectations, and with that in mind I'll try and say why I gave it five stars.
MWNeus, which in it's strange almost media-like titlings, is a game about your mom calling and stating that you're needing grandchildren. You internalize that immediately and luckily, in a perfect world, you've been living with your childhood friend for quite some time, which seems like the perfect way to start a family.
You try and convince her and she says no, you randomly find a book of spells that can help your tactics of pursasion and go from there. Except is it really your tactics? Or is there maybe more at hand that's guiding your actions? Without spoiling too much sometimes magic goes both ways. Anywho, a lot of these workarounds are occurring due to your friend being a tsundere, but one that is bested by the D you have packing as is the callings of true love.
Now, for the gameplay, it is pretty cookie cutter. It's your stereotypical renpy sandbox game (damn near mythical to get right); there's very little amount of grind that almost gets forgotten about the more you progress and the game more so turns into a scene grabber alongside personality simulator, as it lends itself to mechanics such as how do you want your childhood friend to be? And this includes the aforementioned power of said spells that almost reminds me of potion game sims where you can have fantastical scenarios suddenly introduced that completely changes the nature of the game. This, even though at first feels like your standard vanilla grind experience that's reminiscent of 2016-18 sandbox sims (sans the grind) has that type of structure. Do this get sex, have repeatables to up variables and unlock further story. What the game does different is the aforementioned spells and changing the entire dynamic of how the sandbox even presents itself, as scenes will get shifted, the home situation as to what locations you have available and it's once repeatable scenes completely changes, and you even have a level up or down spell as to what tier of corruption tier you wanted your friend to be at.
Not that the corruption in itself feels very well paced, but it's there and has a wide view of where to take it. It's strange, this game at times feels as though it wants you to get past it's boring presentation of progressing through early tier corruption so that you can hit the end tier corruption while basically stretching said end tier a game's worth, as most of the best and longest arcs are basically past all that early tier grinding. And perhaps that's my only quip with this game.
It's almost like it's trying to trick you in how generic it comes off in the first quarter of the game until you finally unlock the true potential of spells and suddenly it changes drastically in introducing some true esoteric debauchery. You just have to make it past that to actually get what the game is going for, if you end up hating the latter half then you might a well chaulk it. It's hard to explain more without spoiling what is to come and how this game opens up, but think of a very very interactive VN scene grabber. Something I almost shun playing but damn does this game make it work.
So in that, I feel as though it deserves it a five. It's simple in it's premise but it works so well in exploring where you can take it. So many times many of those long arcs can just end where they are but it really is just stating that yeah, you did it, you made it to the final corruption tier but lets make that corruption ending that actual game now. Hence, the plot justifying all of this serves its purpose, the characters involved are rather endearing, the scenarios hot and somewhat well thought out, and this game truly surprised me in what it's capable of providing.
5/5, sometimes simple but entertaining is what a evening needs.
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