Review for v0.99.0
Overall, really enjoyed it! This game by far has one of the most mature, grounded and pertinent story from any AVN i've played.
DISCLAIMER: I will try as much as i can to avoid spoilers, so you can really enjoy it on your own if you try it out. However, you should be warned that it may contain some minor spoilery stuff.
The story
This is by far the highlight of this game. It has an excellent design, with many story arcs that start and finish together extremely well, without feeling too long nor too short. The characters all feel so damn great, mostly because they act realistically to the ordeals, problems and fears that they encounter during their journey. The story doesn't pull punches as well, and doesn't shy away from presenting fucked-up situations and actually morally challenging decisions the MC or some of the other characters must make, which takes you to the edge of your seat since you don't know if the choices you will make net the character or story in a positive light.
There is also a lot of continuity for the main story. Choices you made early on may very well matter latter, or be remembered in some way.
Also, it feels so good to have an MC which isn't a huge raging asshole or hyper-horny guy (There is a little bit of the latter, but really not detrimental), but rather an actual intelligent being, trying to be careful, protect his loved ones and make due with what he has.
The story is pretty detailed, with firearms not being just "A pistol" or "a shotgun" (most of the time) but a USP, an Ithaca 37, a M1 Garand, a SCAR-H, etc... The car aren't just wrecked, they have a broken axle, or no battery, etc... All of this without going too much into it unnecessarily.
Finally, the game has plenty of content on it's own. With many different dialogues, a few branching points and a focus on a relatively small amount of characters, the story progression is definitely up my alley. You don't have 40 different romanceable girls to track, and you can mostly easily choose who exactly you want to romance. I say mostly because Carol (The "main" girl) is kinda maybe forced on you a bit, although i'm fairly sure the player can choose to ignore her if they want to, but i haven't tried it out.
With all of this, it's easily a 20-25+ hours for the main story.
Graphics:
This is where the game gets a bit more iffy.
While the visuals are certainly better than average, and it's clear that a lot of efforts has been put to avoid using (too much) generic environments, characters and such, at the end of the day, it's a HoneySelect level of visuals and animations. Which means there are a lot of limitations to the dev as to what they can animate, pose and integrate into a scene. This is inevitable and really not the fault of the dev, but rather a necessary decision which at the end of the day, doesn't really impact the game all that much as the visuals are mostly there to better convey the story, and not the reverse.
So if you don't mind seeing the same HoneySelect style in terms of characters and animations (As well as the PS2 level blood splatters and such), you can really easily look over that and enjoy the story anyway.
This choice also means you'll get much more story and content out of it usually, since the dev can re-use a lot of the stuff from HoneySelect and concentrate on actually adding content rather than creating new assets from scratch.
Characters:
This is where most of the minor spoiler stuff is. So i'll put a spoiler marker for it, but keep in mind i've kept relatively light.
Sex Stuff:
Again, this is where things may be a bit more on the downside, at least in my opinion. But i genuinely feel like this is much more related to the fact the game re-use sex animations from HoneySelect, which i've already seen plenty of times before, from other lewd games and HoneySelect itself. So take this with a grain of salt.
If you don't mind that, while there's actually plenty of sex scenes with a lot of different characters in the game. And i believe they are quite evenly distributed so you should be able to get plenty of good times if you decide to ignore some of the girls.
They are well animated, with the typical overexaggerated boob physics and wiggle you can expect from HoneySelect. You get different views, positions angles and whatnot. You often get to select an alternative position or camera angle.
However, they tended to be a bit repetitive to my liking and has a "more of the same" feel to them. Again, i feel like this is tied to HoneySelect animations.
Gameplay:
The gameplay in itself if very simple, and some would say (including me) that's typical from VN story-focused games like this one. You have a mix of unimportant, minor choices along with a few, critical ones that are all biased to gather relationships points or cater the nerve level of the girls. As usual, with this type of gameplay, you HAVE TO pick the right choices in order to progress the story or characters so you're never truly free to make the choices you want to make. If you want to actually see sex stuff and such, that is.
There is however a good care for the major, branching points in the game, which is mostly related to if you are interested in romancing the girls or not
Considering the game is actually complete, and was so in March 2022 (0.26), this means the dev was able to achieve a pretty long relatively linear story in only two years. The 0.99 version (that i played) is mostly a extended "Director's Cut" which adds a bunch of bonus scenes and other minor stuff and was added a year later while also working on a second game.
So the delivery schedule of Kinderfeld from ILSProductions is stellar for sure. This clearly indicate a good amount of pre-production work was made, with schedules and deadlines being handled professionally. This is extremely rare in the AVN genre and definitely worth mentioning and commending.
Overall, this is an excellent game for it's story, characters and twists. If you don't mind the somewhat lengthy dialogues and slow burn, you are in for a treat.