A Very Good Game Let Down by Some Technical Issues and Narrative Faux Pas
Reviewing v0.26.0. This is not a spoiler free review.
Once in a great while, a game comes with a captivating commitment to telling a story and weaving a setting. In a genre full of one-bit porn simulators, Now & Then is refreshing and interesting, balancing impressive character design and development with captivating world-building to weave a fun, entertaining series throughout.
The Story of Now & Then, while good and mostly written well, is not that unique. You play a male MC (name determinant), a widower living with his adopted teenage daughter, Carol. The setting is a typical zombie apocalypse. Sure, the narrator insists they aren't the brain eating zombies of George Romero, and there aren't shambling hordes of them, but for all practical and narrative means, the tropes of a zombie apocalypse and collapse of civilization all apply here. And the subtle differences between Infected and Zombies are negligible enough to simply view them as interchangeable.
What it does well is a commitment to telling human stories, with strong characterization and mostly satisfying story development. Most characters genuinely go through character arcs that seem real and believable. Their developments from mostly sheltered women into hardened survivors is done well—and happens at a pace that is believable and compelling.
For the most part, you get engrossed into the world. The author does a good job of mixing in suspense and survival elements into the story, throwing in a revolving door of issues and antagonists that keep the story mostly fresh as you progress through it. Reading through the VN is enjoyable. You can get invested into the characters and sunk into the world, which is generally the most you can ask for.
The story is ultimately divided into chapters (I think 25 in total), with roughly 3 equal length acts. The first involves scrounging and making a living at the MC's apartment, where he first forms a relationship with Carol and takes in Naomi. The second act is largely them hunkering down at the School, where Sydney is introduced and Naomi and Sydney become the MC's lovers. The third and final act involves them leaving the city altogether and trying to find a place to settle, where we're reunited with Alice and Julie from flashbacks and are introduced to Hana.
There are some technical dings though, and it's enough to knock a star off the rating. The renders ae often of questionable quality. Lighting is too frequently poor, so a lot of the renders look washed out. While the characters are drawn well for the most part, especially considering they're Honey Select, there's probably not enough focus paid to composition of shots (especially considering the great lengths the developer goes to covering the MC's face), shading (particularly skin texture), and lighting. So, you're too often looking at a grey, bleached out no man's land between realistic looking renders and anime-style cartoons.
Sex scenes are usually a couple of [often poorly lit] looping animations of fairly repetitive sex, where both cum at approximately the exact same time (nearly every time), complete with approximately 3 moaning sounds that aren't even unique to the characters. Every girl is immediately dickmatized into addiction and submission, because of course they are.
As mentioned, the MC's face is largely covered the entire time. And I'm not sure it pays off. This isn't one of those situations where you RP a self-insert. The character is established. You're a widower in his mid to late 30s, you have/had a marketing job, you drive a 1969 Charger (quite a rare and specific car), you listen to thrash metal, you sport long auburn hair and thick black rim glasses to go with your bottom heavy, cubism build.
In other words, the MC is so distinct and has a life of his own that you might as well just show his face. At least give some life and expression to the character who is narratively rich enough to deserve one, and at least let him react to the girls that seem so willing to throw themselves at him. Instead, we have a character who is pretty clearly a developer self-insert who you're ostensibly supposed to try to imagine is you, the reader... I guess?
One major criticism is the illusion of choice. There are multiple point systems: most characters have a love score and a nerve score. The goal being that you get their love score high and their nerve score low. But choice in this game often boils down to a correct way to play (e.g. +love and -nerve options) and a wrong way to play (+nerve and -love options), which essentially just punishes you for picking the wrong option while not really adding any nuance or incentive for picking the other option. If you're expecting some kind of moral dilemmas in making your choices, you won't find any here.
Finally, for a game billed to have "harem" options, there's very few harem elements. There's maybe two actual threesome scenes in the entire game, compared to the dozens of solo scenes. You are forced to romance Carol. She's endgame and #1 no matter what choices you pick. The favoritism MC shows towards her throughout the game is blatant and frankly disappointing, to the point where you wonder why the other girls would even bother with him if they had any semblance of other options (which the developer not-so-subtly avoids putting in the game, so the girls literally don't have any other options).
The MC is billed as a nice guy, but even outside of his blatant favoritism towards Carol, he doesn't show a fraction of a reason for why they view him in such regard. His primary points of attraction to most of the other girls is that he's willing to kill anyone who threatens their safety, doesn't yell at them, and is willing to dick them down for some sloppy seconds. Even outside of the blatant bias towards one character in general (unironically called the Queen Bee on more than one occasion), it's just a thin reason for people to actually fall in love with the MC. Even the fact that he's a good guy is more because everyone else around him says so. He's more of a caricature of a good guy, when in reality he's more of a white knight who subscribes to the old school beliefs that men can't show emotions and have to constantly comfort the womenfolk.
This is compounded by the fact that the queen here, Carol, is probably the least interesting and attractive of the selection of women who are willing to boink the MC. Her primary personality package includes a slavish devotion to the MC, her existence in a state of perpetual horniness, and a breeding/exhibition kink that serves as the spice to an otherwise vanilla sundae. She's not shown to be particularly funny, insightful, intelligent, or independent. Her being elevated to the top over more interesting, mature, or capable women really leaves a sour taste.
The storybeat, at least if you play this like I imagine most players are playing it (i.e. the "harem" storyline where you don't arbitrarily decide that you're going to start turning down all advances for sex) can get pretty repetitive. Something happens, sex. Something happens, sex. Rinse and repeat. You have a scene of them traveling or scouting and then a scene (usually poorly lit and with a couple of looping animations) of sex with the girl of the hour. It seems to the be MC and girls primary coping mechanism for everything. Upset? Sex. Angry? Sex. Almost died? Sex. For a game that otherwise seems to care about creating storybeats and character development, it's remarkably shallow and makes you wonder if the writer or MC knows how to comfort or resolve any concerns of the girls without sleeping with them.
The MC always takes the lead and volunteers for everything remotely dangerous, yet whenever something remotely exciting or traumatic happens, it's still the MC's duty to go and console the girls who took a backseat throughout the whole thing (usually ending in sex). Narratively, the story makes a big deal of the female characters developing and becoming more independent. But they always fall in line whenever the MC puts his foot down, and its just accepted that he takes on anything dangerous because, well duh, the man's gotta do it.
Arguably the two most interesting women (Hana and Sydney) are either introduced super late or fridged for half the storyline. One of them (Hana) doesn't even have a proper ending. Again, combined with the lack of anything other than a series of one-on-one scenes and the predominance of Carol, and it really doesn't feel like a harem game.
The strength of a good harem game lies in the caliber of the supporting characters, e.g. the harem members around the MC. These are the characters that carry the majority of the scenes. The developer seems to live in a state of perpetual flux, seemingly capable of writing developed and interesting women, but then being afraid to let them upstage the chosen one, which results in them either being marginalized in the background or turning into mewling lambs in the face of the MC's actions (and dick).
The lack of pregnant options is also disappointing. You get Sydney pregnant almost automatically (pretty sure unless you outright refuse to have sex with her), and you have an option to get Carol pregnant (of course you do). Everyone else you can apparently recklessly cum inside all you want with no protection, no matter how often they come to you for sex—and they come to you fairly often. They supposedly only let you cum inside on safe days, but I'm calling BS on that unless Naomi has the strangest menstrual cycle in human existence. In theory, you should at least have a primary ending to go with a general harem ending, along with a pregnancy option for every character you sleep with, but this wasn't done, in large part because the entire final third feels rushed, and the aforementioned Carol supremacy for no real reason.
None of these flaws make the game unplayable. Rather, the rushed ending and general marginalization of more interesting women make the story feel unsatisfying. You want more from the game because of how well they built the world and the commitment to showing how hard it is living in it.
Yet by towards the end of the game I find myself tabbing through the repetitive sex scenes and reading more for the story. The game is very much worth the play. But it has limited replay value simply because of how linear the story develops and how woefully underequipped the harem-simulator becomes.
