Review on Ch. 7c
I'm pretty conflicted on this one.
Story (5/5)
My relatively high 3-star rating is basically due to the fact that I think this is a really important story for people to get into and that it is generally well told. I really like how the story goes out of its way to humanize drug addicts, they are not portrayed as just useless leeches on society whose own fault it is that they are on drugs, as is so often the case, but we really get into the mind of addicts; why trying out some drugs can seem harmless at first and why it can be so incredibly hard to quit. The tone of the story generally sounds very realistic, from the terminology around drugs to the physiological reactions both to the drugs and their withdrawal to the day-to-day life of drug addicts. So just props all around for writing such an empathetic and real story about drug addiction and the people suffering from it.
Writing (2/5)
For all the laurels this game deserves for its story in general, I think the writing can become pretty clumsy, inefficient and even annoying at times. Many conversations just drag on and on, you have tons of situations where characters say they need to go now or that they are in a rush or something, but saying goodbye takes like 20 more lines of dialogue. That just creates this weird break in tension where it seems that characters always have as much time as the dev wants them to have.
I'm also not a big fan of how characters are frequently citing pretty obscure movie quotes out of the blue, and it can seem very out of character for drug addicts who admit to not getting an education and spending all their time, money and effort on getting drugs, to suddenly discuss who their favourite Russian author is like they're some stuffy intellectuals. I get that this is again to humanize these people; to show that just because they use, they are not stupid people and have many interests just like the rest of us. But considering the circumstances, it still seems odd and out of place to me.
Most of all, by having basically every character be some sort of cinephile, I just notice that all of them are written by the same person.
I also generally dislike the never-ending banter between people, especially the MC and his girlfriend, Lydia. It's played off as a joke and as cute and endearing but it can get really long-winded and just drag the dialogue progression down so much.
And that ties in to another problem in the writing style, and that is the pacing of the game and the story. Because the story plays out in a day-by-day fashion that necessarily leads to some problems with the pacing, like so far, only 2 weeks in-game have passed but in comparison to that, the story has already progressed quite a bit, like the MC is in a loving relationship already with almost all of the characters despite only beginning the relationship with them like 2 weeks ago. The push towards sobriety, despite a lot of textual hemming and hawing, also seems kind of abrupt towards the end of the current game.
There were also a fair bit of typical grammar mistakes (confusion about who's/whose, it's/its, they're/their/there, and so on) and some spelling mistakes, so maybe go over the text with a fine-tooth comb again.
Sexual content (2/5)
All in all, I find the approach to the sexual content here pretty disappointing.
Most glaringly, for a supposed adult VN, I feel like the sex scenes are way too few and far between. I respect that the dev tends not to contrive sex scenes just for the sake of a sex scene but wants them to flow naturally from the context of the storyline which is in line with the realistic approach to this VN. But still, it often seems like the MC and other characters are deliberately avoiding sex even when there seem to be plenty opportunities, even if it were just for a quickie or a blowjob or something. Maybe the point is that drug use interferes with your libido, but still, there definitely could be a bit more on that front, even in a story-first, sex-second VN like this.
Furthermore, I don't really like that all of the women have pretty boring, standard skinny body types. Yeah, maybe one of the girls is a bit more petite, or one girl has slightly bigger boobs but they all fall into that fairly boring category of skinny and hot; and they are hot, they are attractive, but they are also all pretty much the same. That's also not helped by the fact that, except for one fairly minor character introduced towards the end of this build, all of the girls are white (which is especially weird and unrealistic considering the setting of the streets and hoods of San Francisco which should actually realistically be majority non-white) and the one other character of colour in here, Jose the drug dealer, is just a walking stereotype with a very awkwardly written accent.
The sex scenes are all in all extremely vanilla, I mean even the tag "anal sex" should be removed because as of this update, there isn't one anal scene. That's not to imply that every single woman should be into anal and that I demand anal scenes with all of them, that would actually break the realistic vibe the game is going for, but don't tag the game with it if you don't deliver. Other than that, most of the sex is just all very straightforward and boring, the most adventurous thing is an MFF threesome that's actually fairly early in the game and since then we haven't had another one of these (although more are certainly on the way in future updates).
I would just maybe have wished for more interesting sex scenes outside of the very safe, very non-offensive hetero sex although I get that that is to some degree personal preference.
The harem situation also seems a bit off in this game that tries to go so hard for realism. While a three-way relationship between the MC, Lydia and Mary doesn't seem too far off-base, relationships like that obviously exist in real life, and I'm fine with it here, and you could also imagine someone like Lydia being fine with the MC sleeping around outside of that relationship. But when you consider characters like innocent Audrey or down-to-earth Barb, it's sort of hard to suspend your disbelief that they would all be fine with this arrangement.
Visuals/Sound Design (3/5)
Other than that, the graphics in this game are... fine. They're just fine. Nothing too astounding for your typical DAZ works, but it's fine. Many of the characters wear the same thing every day and many of the environments seem very empty, where it just breaks the immersion a bit and you notice that this is the case because it would be a lot more work to fill up the environments but again, it's fine, it's nothing major. The animations in the sex scenes look a bit awkward at times, sometimes it looks like joints are bending in a way they shouldn't and stuff like that. They just seem a bit on the underdeveloped side of things.
The music throughout is pretty good although annoyingly repetitive.
Conclusion
All in all, even though I maybe tore the game apart a bit in this review I was still hooked to the story. The choices you made were maybe not quite impactful enough in my opinion (especially the Barb Sub/Dom route, as of yet, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever in her storyline which route you choose) but in general, I like the linear storytelling, I'm actually not a big fan of huge branching structures and the Audrey Love/Corruption choices or the Junkie/Sober choices do matter and affect some scenes later on. But like I said in the beginning, the most important thing about this game is its humanizing and realistic portrayal of drug addicts and their journey, giving us different characters who are at different points along their recovery, and making them all seem very realistic. Just because I liked that aspect of the game so much, I almost upped my rating to 4 stars just because of that. But in my opinion, it's just not quite there, so 3 stars it is with an endorsement saying that 3 stars in this case doesn't mean bad, it's just where I'm at at this point.