V 1.0
Story 4/5
Characters 5/5
Writing 5/5
Graphics 2/5
Music 2/5
Gameplay 3/5
On Distant Shores is an oscillating story about a) how life sucks when you are depressed and riddled with survivor's guilt and b) rawdogging moist pusspuss.
It starts with the MC battling his inner demons and trying to get out of bed for once. Unlike the usual setup, MC is not an isekai Adonis with broccoli hair, but a 50 year old widower of limited physical and intellectual appeal. Fortunately, MC quickly acquires the power of rawdogging and becomes a man of great physical (but not intellectual) appeal. Eventually he becomes more extroverted, and starts gathering a harem of young nubile women upon whom he can test his newfound pusspuss-mashing skills. Over time the story develops and MC has to interweave demon fighting and world-saving into his busy rawdog schedule. Unfortunately MC does not understand the concept of time and gathers a massive harem, leading to a maximum of 14 minutes per week for each woman. To alleviate this, MC acquires a new woman for his harem specializing in quickies, reducing the timer per woman to 12.4 minutes.
Story
The story is great to start. The depiction of depression and guilt is quite genuine and heartfelt, leading to an interesting and dark premise. The slow decline and relapses of this background are also felt throughout the game. The development of other story elements, such as the world-saving, is gradual and initially well weighted against the constant hunting for new puss to smash. It's only in the last third of the game or so that elements start to fall apart, with too many threads and plans disappearing without reason. Perhaps that is because the harem got too big and unmanageable timewise, or perhaps it's because the dev got bored and simply rushed to finish the game. Either way, up to this point the story is magnificent, well paced, and interesting.
In particular, the idea of a depressed man barely able to speak immediately falling for a woman that can sense his innermost feelings is a beautiful topic, and would be worthy of a VN by itself. It's a shame this woman, Breanna, gets so little screen time.
The story slowly builds up towards a lumbering beast with plenty of threads to follow and multiple mysteries to unravel, most of them quite interesting to the imagination. If only MC had a lighter front-butt-moistening schedule it might have been possible to follow them all.
In the end the story falters, and the final rush towards the conclusion is sadly below expectations in many ways given how tantalizing it gets before that point.
Characters
This is the foundation of the VN, as all the characters provide a lot of story and most of the hot puss. The women are different enough that everyone will find at least one intriguing. That alas also means that several of them will not be intriguing (specifically librarian with bad haircut and tattoed balloon boobie mom). The initial set of women are the best and most interesting, and they are all broken in different ways, a setting where MC with his life experience can shine. The start of the game is great in that MC gets to explore the various women and their lives from a position of life experience; for once justified, compared to the usual 20-year old broccoli head spouting fortune cookie wisdom. It would have been wonderful to have more time with these initial women and explore their needs in further detail, but that is skipped in favor of adding more and more women to the mix.
Eventually it gets a little heavy on the harem side and picking up additional women feels more like a chore instead of a fun activity slowly building to a crescendo.
MC starts off as a great character, quite believable and exactly the kind of downer you wouldn't invite to your birthday party. It's a pleasure watching MC slowly develop into someone more and more optimistic and extroverted, even though the ingrained self-loathing rears its head from time to time. MC remains a believable and genuine character for about 2/3 of the game, whereafter he turns into the more traditional VN spout of exposition, unreasonably aware and prepared for any scenario with an unceasing torrent of over-explanatory text in the usual VN way (along with some of the top hierarchy women).
Writing
This is the best part. Writing starts out top notch, with great pacing, a tight focus on the parts that matter, and appropriately eloquent. MC is written as a 50 year old, the younger women are written as mostly younger women, the older women are written as mostly older women, and so on. This is a rare feat, and one that the dev should be congratuled on. Towards the last third of the game this does not apply of course, but until then it's great. Spelling errors of various kinds also start appearing towards the later parts, but that's a minor issue at best as the text is still easily interpreted within the context provided.
Graphics
Graphics are bad. Slightly worse than average. The models work to convey what the dev wants, but that's all. The animations are simple and show utter contempt for gravity and any other physical law that may apply. If graphics is an important factor in your enjoyment of VNs, this will be a major issue for you. The assets used for backdrops are often poorly chosen and generic. If you have read many VNs on F95, you will recognize most of them.
Music
Music can be heard, but that's it. It rarely fits well with the scene, but does convey some general sense of the atmosphere the dev was going for.
Gameplay
Gameplay/UI is limited, but works well enough. No complaints, but no accolades either. The dev did not put much effort into this part.
Summary
If you like a well written and heavy story, you will adore the first two thirds of this game. Many characters are genuinely likeable and interesting (Breanna is excellent and could have been breathtaking in the context), and you will wish you had more time with them. If, like me, you consider graphics a secondary concern you will have no trouble filling out the vistas with your imagination to truly enjoy the vivid ups and downs of poor MC. Finally, if, like me, you are more interested in the journey than the destination, you will also be able to swallow the degradation in quality that occurs towards the end of the VN and enjoy the potential that was rather than the finale we got.
All in all I recommend this game as it offers something different, something extraordinarily well written (mostly), and something intriguing.
Best of luck to the dev on his next project.