Overall 2.5/5, but if you care for good writing and dialogue or are not a sucker for hot sexy scenarios or hot FMCs like I am, I may not recommend this game (or at least would dock it to 1/5 or 1.5/5). Ultimately, with the whole-star rating system, I went with 2/5 instead of 3/5 because I think the writing and dialogue just detract from the game too much.
The premise is basically exactly as the title implies. You move back in with your brother and his wife as someone fresh out of school and the story goes from there.
Pros
- very attractive and hot FMC, which I am a sucker for (have played numerous bad games just because I though FMC was super hot)
- Sexy scenarios, granted, with a decent amount of porn logic (but there's not many gooner games that don't employ this)
- Decent renders, but quality can vary, especially with environmental detail. I'd say the main characters, esp the FMC, have goodmodels and renders though.
Cons:
- no sound
- animations are no the most fluid
- random sandbox free-roam event half-way through the game without a good reason. It serves largely no purpose and all events in the free-roam are mandatory anyway. I see no reason
- the game is bloated and excessive, that's the best way to characterize it, especially in regards to writing and story. The story itself is alright. I can see overarching plot point happening but also we aren't that far into the drama yet to get that much going. It is at the end of the day more slice-of-lifey than anything else. In addition, I think there are too many female LIs or other options in the game. Regarding writing, I think this is the absolute weakest part of the game and need to expand on it below in its dedicated section.
Writing
If writing matters to you and the positives I listed above are not as important, I cannot recommend this game. I have not played many other games that fail to embrace "show, don't tell" as much as this game. Almost every scene is just excessive, both in description and dialogue.
There is just way too much description or narration. Often, prior to a conversation, the author will write out the inner thoughts of the character (often in a extremely verbose manner) and then right after that the dialogue from the character will reveal the exact same thoughts as described by the narrator, rendering much of the narrator's dialogue/description useless.
For example, a scene might have an old man who is a charmer wooing a secretary with cheeky compliments. Unless you have a sub-fifth grading reading level, it should be obvious to the player that the old man is a charmer, especially with the secretary responds in kind or playfully teases him about his attempts to charm her. Then, the narrator adds on additional lines about this old man being a charmer. Why is this necessary? It's not. And if it is one line, maybe that can be overlooked, but it's often 2-3 additional lines that add zero value to the scene. And this is not an isolated occurrence; it honestly happens in almost every scene, at least in the recent updates (I haven't played through the earlier parts of the game in a while).
In addition, there is a lot of useless description too. This is a visual novel. If I see a character turn off the car, grab groceries, and walk into the house, I do not need the narrator to literally describe that. If you show me visually what is happening and ALSO describe it in text, then this better be an important detail, but often this is applied to throw-away details or scenes. Either cut the scene entirely or cut the narration and fill it out with actual details or thoughts or dialogue that move the game forward.
The dialogue also suffers from the same bloat issue. It feels like the characters are talking as if they knew they were in a game, as if they had to provide extra details and information to fill in the reader (and on top of that, they assume the reader is a dumbass who can't infer anything at all). In a real conversation, no one talks like that, but instead we end up with lines and lines of dialogue that could be substituted with much shorter lines and much closer to how people actually speak.
The pacing is bad. I will say this game is slow-burn, I liked this game in the same away that I like AWAM (A wife and mother) or APM (A perfect marriage), but it seems to not have much direction or build-up. As a comparison, for AWAM and APM, at the time of this review, I can at least see how the tension and buildup has amounted over time. For this game, the most recent updates' scene may have escalated sexually but in terms of the tension, buildup, and relationship dynamics, it is largely the same as previous updates. I fear that either this game will be ultra-slow in terms of pacing and a wildly long game (5-10 hours of playtime to arrive at the point we're currently at) or the mismatch in sexual/h-scene escalation and actual character/plot/relationship escalation and tension buildup will lead to an abrupt and dissatisfying ending (which is not to say that the game's sex scenes escalate super fast; they are also pretty slow-burn).
Overall the writing causes it to be a bit of a slog to get through. I am sucker for hot FMCs and sexy scenarios, which this game delivers on (though I will say what you consider hot and sexy is obviously very subjective) and probably will continue to do so. However, while it is bearable in the early stages and when I was first playing this game, later on the writing really drags it down and makes it a bit of a chore to get through.
EDIT: I wrote this review in one go and was going to take second pass through and edit it down. But I want to leave it as is, especially my thoughts on the writing. I was verbose and restated points more times than needed. If that bothered you, imagine playing the game because it does it even worse. There's a reason I'm not writing AVNs (or at the least not using my first draft and publishing it).
