Been awhile. The new game starts with a bland character model with pink highlights and a school uniform. Anyone else find Savannah immediately off putting? It doesn't help that in some images she's cross-eyed and deadpan. I don't have a hate boner for AI art, but I'm rather disappointed by how generic it looks here. This isn't a limitation of the technology. Making a lora based on the previous assets or trying to match their aesthetic has been done by other indie devs, and I think it would get a lot of approval. In fact there are already multiple ModeSeven lora's available with several base model options. Even before ModeSeven joined, the game's art had a unique aesthetic with the limited color pallet, particularly in the original introduction on the alien spaceship which made me interested in the game in the first place. A few people mentioned the new art is stiff and AI art novices have a tendency to only use prompts which creates pin-up images instead of more dynamic ones. You can do a lot with controlnet and inpainting to resolve those problems, and there are loras for a lot of the niche fetishes this game has as well. The great thing about AI is that you don't need to start from scratch! You could reuse all of the current and old assets, and just tweak with them with the tools I mentioned.
The dev may have envisioned photorealism, but he actually stumbled onto something people liked with his old art. In general I recommend choosing simplified stylized art over high fidelity. It helps you stand out from the crowd, and sets a tone for your game. All of the big indie hits in the last couple years had unique, low detail art which was a boon, not a detriment. So while you can make photorealistic art, it really isn't the best choice. Particularly when it takes you out of the writing, speaking of.
The intro writing is so different. It doesn't feel like it came from the author of the original game, but someone without a great grasp of English on top of that. Starting the story off with relationship drama between 2 characters we know nothing about is jarring. There's some really clunky sentences like, "Hundreds of years old, and still they know how to brew the best coffee." Did he mean, after hundreds of years of service, no one has them beat? Does that sound anything like a twenty-something undergrad? And the next thing she does having gulped down her coffee is...head to bed early? Was she supposed to be completely distraught over the breakup? Neither the text nor art tell us that. At worst she's mildly frustrated from the slight pouting and glaring at her TA. Based on the text, the infestation scene that follows is supposed to be a dream-like lustful affair in the middle of night but the art is brightly lit.
Another really hard to parse scene: "A thought lanced through you as if you had been stabbed by a spear. You can see everything about Michael's past behavior laid out before you, and feel his selfish manipulative desires vaporize." It almost works, but the last part doesn't make sense. The violent analogy conveys that Savannah realized something very, very painful by sudden realization. This has something to do with Michael's behavior as her boyfriend. "feel his selfish manipulative desires vaporize" means Michael's intentions in the relationship ended. That makes no sense. What they meant was Savannah's doubts and insecurities vanished as she realized they were all created by Michael's manipulative actions as her boyfriend. She mentions her family's "greed and arrogance is on full display". I think we'd like to have seen that. We got normal introductions for Chet's family before he started complaining about them.
Some of the text just needs to be unpacked, "you feel smaller than you ever have before, and yet completely free. The world was a rich field of opportunity." I know it's just the domination fetish, but it should still fit the context of the scene. Why does Savannah feel smaller? Is it because she realized how little control she has over Michael and her family who have manipulated her in the past? Why does that make her feel free? That should make her feel helpless and deeply insecure if anything. It sounds like the author wanted to convey that in the past she felt helpless and weak, suddenly realized why, but rather than despairing or becoming enraged, the parasite soothed those feelings. It didn't empower her but cowed into thinking it will be ok.
We're told the character Diana is prim and proper without a hair out of place and the first image of her has her blouse open in public.
Instead of opening the game with a kick in the balls, show us a full day of Savannah's life before all this started so we have some grounding. Also a great chance for the AI art to shine is showing us how much Savannah's expression changes before and after infestation to match her state of mind. Maybe the author wanted to challenge himself by not writing another self-insert like Chet, the original games protagonist, but the cynic in me says he randomly generated some AI art and vaguely wrote to fit those images but didn't pay any attention to the details. Well the intro scene at least. After that a lot of my complaints seem to be addressed.
