Review for
Our Home v2.12.0:
Overall: 2.5/5 - Some of the preview renders look good and overview seemed really interesting. Unfortunately, the game doesn't even come close to living up to the overview's hype.
Story: 2/5 - It seems OK, but there are so many gaping holes and complete WTFs that it ruins the experience. The author is trying to put several elements of mystery into the story, but isn't doing a good job of pulling the reader in, which is a problem with writing. There are also a lot of cliches.
Writing: 1/5 - The dialogue and narration feel like they were written by an adolescent. It's sometimes so cringy that you'll want to stop playing. The translation into English is frequently awkward. The humor is completely lost. The developer knows the translations are bad because they have an in-game feature to report translation issues. Unfortunately, that will cause other problems: first, there are translations that can't be reported, like the names of locations on the map (e.g. "rent house"), but there are many others; second, if different parts are translated by different people, the writing just won't be coherent.
Renders: 3/5 - There are some aspects of the renders that are really good and some that are really bad. The eyes and upper face usually look good, but the lower face, mouth, neck and shoulders look off. Skin very frequently looks weird. In most renders, skin doesn't look smooth. Intentional wrinkles look overdone and unnatural. Wet skin looks ridiculous. The female models are fairly unique to me, which is good. I don't find most of them particularly beautiful, but that's not actually a bad thing, either. The MC was ugly-looking in the beginning, but his transformation is supposed to be part of the story, although the renders from when he was younger are not proportional. They look like a shrunken adult instead of a child and they look, again, weird.
Animations: 3.5/5 - Again, some things about the animations are good and some aren't. Some very unrealistic movements (or lack of movement), and some very-impressive realistic movement.
Sound: 2.5/5 - The music is better than average and most of the sound effects are good, but the menu sounds are loud and harsh and can't be adjusted separately from the other sounds. It ruins the experience to get loud pops/clicks every time you hover over a button with the mouse.
Content: 2/5 - There's not much content or lewd content in the game. I just discovered the game. The game is about 2.5 years old according to the discussion thread date, but there's maybe 4 to 6 months' worth of content. The quality of the lewd content is better than average, but there's not enough of it.
Gameplay: 2/5 - The game strongly encourages players to play the sandbox mode, so I did. Unfortunately, it wasn't a good experience.
Good:
- The sandbox has a nice-looking modern user interface.
- Sandbox allows the player to choose tasks/quests without just being linear with a bunch of unnecessary interdependencies.
Bad:
- All of the horizontal and vertical scroll bars in the user interface are difficult to manipulate.
- The character/relationship screens are tedious. Don't put a list of tasks and make the player click on the task to pull up another screen with the hint, then have to click it again to make it go away, just put the hint right under the task.
- The list of hints for each characters shows multiple hints that are dependent on each other. Why show hints for tasks that you can't even start until a previous task is completed? Space is very limited in that small area of the screen, why waste it with things players don't need to see, yet?
- Needs an option to hide completed tasks (not necessary yet, but it will be an issue if not implemented soon).
- The inventory/bag/backpack constantly gives notifications for nothing with no way to acknowledge them.
- The sandbox has continuity errors due to the player being able to choose the order of events. For example, the MC can have sex with Mirella and later get a blowjob from Marta. During the blowjob, the MC says it feels like something is going to happen. It's like he's never had an orgasm before. Aside from how ridiculous it would be that a normal 18-year-old man has never masturbated, he just had sex the previous day with another woman.
- The sandbox is too empty.
- Some transitions are ridiculously long.