TLDR: Good, slow-paced game with a lot of potential and a fantastic female protagonist. If that's your thing, this one is a must play!
First, I really wanted to give this game 5 ★'s but then that would mean this game is near perfect, which it is not. Having said that I really like this game, and rooting for it to take seriously some of the feedback, and of course keep developing it.
Pros:
- Fantastic female protagonist -- believable, sexy and charismatic. Noemi is amazing!
- The dialogue is pretty good. Characters have their own unique personalities.
- The story is interesting and believable.
- There's just enough characters to have variety and to reasonably develop everyone's story.
- Potential for elements of incest between Frankie and her son (my personal kink
)
Cons:
- The lack of renders. I'd love to see a wider variety of what's going on in a scene. As it is, the creator resolves to using gratuitous narrative to tell the player what we don't see. The principle of "show, don't tell" is really powerful in VNs.
- Sometimes the narrative for a given render will describe people (or actions) that are never shown to us. Like at the poker table, only Noe, Brad and Beck are ever show, but narration tells us of other people present. This just feels... cheap.
- Given the disparity between the renders and the lenghty narrative, one might assume the renders and the text were developed separately -- first someone does the renders, then creator wrote the story to fit (and describe) the renders (and what's missing).
- I'll mention this again: let the renders speak for themselves. A picture is worth a 1000 words, and all. As others have recommended, don't describe what we already can see from the render.
- The writing takes itself too serious, trying to be a romantic novel, yet there are obvious spelling mistakes and grammar. Recommendation: try to reduce the number of words, straight up cut out some sentences, and avoid juggling uncommon synonyms.
- The early scene with Noe getting changed for work... that was some kind of a test-drive, right? It was painfully slow and unnecessarily over-descriptive.
- Roy -- he looks like an Asian teenager who put on an old-man mask. His wrinkly face and his physique don't seem to match.
- The pace is quite slow. Yes, I can understand games with slow-pace, and prefer them. But, we don't see any erotic scenes with nudity for a long time! After a few hours of reading and clicking, I literally had to start skipping through everything just to see if there will ever be anything pornographic going on and what that would look like.
- Quality of renders can be improved. Some renders look great, but majority look subpar, and strangely blurred.
Now, even though I outlined more cons, that's not to say there isn't much to be enjoyed in the game. The cons are more things I'd love to see changed/improved, to make this game really shine. With better and more renders, and taking out the text that describes what the player can see on the screen, this can rival Jessica O'Neil's Hard News!