I liked the update for Lena's cheating progression, but I felt like the whole beach house shenanigans were very underwhelming.
Perhaps it was because of my route choices (Ian is dating Lena and completely faithful, Lena is cheating on him), but there just wasn't much going on. I'm not even talking about sexual or romantic pursuits. Obviously, I'm not on Emma or Holly's routes, and I'm not being a wingman for that autistic retard perry, so there won't be much sexy times happening. But there was also pretty much nothing happening outside of route specific interactions.
You'd expect a group of friends to have some shit to do together on a trip. All we got was an extremely mechanical round of "past relationships" talk as each person went around and shared their story. It felt forced and seemed like it was for the player's knowledge rather than any kind of real interaction between the characters on screen. There was zero emotion involved and no one gave a fuck about what anyone else was saying lol.
Granted, it's much harder to set the atmosphere and mood of a scene when all you have are floating sprites on a mundane background image. But the writing itself didn't do it any justice.
All the parts EK glossed over are what makes a trip like this with your close friends special. Messing around at the beach. Playing board/card/drinking games. Campfire/BBQ. Drinking into the night. Getting hammered and bonding with your homies. And then maybe at the end of the day, you get some sexy times with your girl.
I mean, yeah, this game is mostly about variations in relationship states and who the MCs are fucking, but damn.