Unity - Path to Ascension [v3.7] [Shark Bit Games]

This game has a plenty of content, an interesting story/plot, and I'm glad the writer doesn't shy away from less conventional things like gnolls having pseudopenises. I haven't explored the full width of it yet, and I can't explore the files to make a judgement on that. Sometimes the prose gets a bit too excessive, and I feel like reading the description of every non-descript room gets boring and repetitive fast.

One of my gripes with that is the fact you ask/respond with a 1 liner, and then get 5-10 paragraphs of response. Which makes it much less engaging for something styled into a CYOA store + gameplay. It is a flaw that many similar games suffer from, and provides very limited interaction as a player with the world around you.

My biggest gripe however is the amount of bugs I encountered, and this is one of those scenarios where I wish the source code was publicly available in some way so I could submit some pull requests to fix some of these.

Now in the grand scheme of things I've seen people give 5 star votes to low effort RPG maker art theft games and Daz3D trash with a lot less content, less game mechanics and worse art (writing), so I feel inclined to give this only 5 stars in comparison to those.
It does not deserve the rating it currently has at the time of writing (2.5 stars). People voting this 2 or even 1 star don't vote from an objective point of view. Which forces me to also not vote objectively.

In a vacuum of my own ratings I'd give it a 7/10, minus a point from all the bugs, with a net of 6/10. That would still be above average, despite it's unfinished nature and all the bugs.

v3.7
+dev finally fixed the constant crashes so I am able to actually play it
+seems interesting enough premise
-extreme lack of focus. everything is full of WIP signs.
-Why are there 4 worlds to start with when not a single world is even close to finished?
-I go to the most complete world... pick class between fighter/thief/mage... fighter/theif are complete but 3 out of 8 mage skills says WIP.
-I get my first companion... her skills are WIP signs
-I try to interact with her... I get a "placeholder" blowjob scene which is not bad. but is is explicitly a placeholder.
-I encountered a bunch of bugs in a relatively short playthrough.
-decent amount of NPCs but all lacking in content
-interaction with NPCs feels off. They are very thirsty yet lacking in depth. Leading to what feels like sexdolls rather than people.
-extreme customization looks like it might contribute to lack of content. You can be man/woman/futa. you can be human/dozen other races. you can then fuck any NPC you come across. this means tons of combinations. Which would explain why so many NPCs are WIP.
-everyone has pronouns, but the game keeps on mixing them up. So almost every conversation will keep on falling back to "they" for someone that should be a "he" or a "she"
-Map itself is actually a maze. Grey featureles boxes you need to enter to read a text description. So better memorize what is where. Looks like they stole this right out of TiTs... but this is literally the worst feature in TiTs.

I just want to start off by saying I really want to give 5 stars I love the Concept, I love the writing, and I love the mechanics for this game but there are certain things detailed below that makes this impossible for me to do.

So my biggest issue is that every 5 minutes the game freezes on me making exploration impossible. After reading some of the changelog you mentioned there was a web version of the game. Why not post it with the other download links? Is it Patreon only? Only reason I tried this game was because I saw the last review was for version 1.5 and made back in June 2021 so with this being v2.3 I would assume all the game breaking bugs would be fixed. I am going to try other screen resolutions (don't think it will fix the issues) because it seems like people have issues with different resolutions.

Some recommendations I have would be content that is not available just take out completely, the checkboxes should have an "X" or checkmark not a slightly different shade of brown (kinda hard to notice sometimes), and make the "Show Map" button more obvious I couldn't find it for like 5-10 minutes when building the Save Room at the start of the game. Also one last thing some of some of the text for subtitles overlaps with the Title of the page you are on (Noticed this when talking to the Angel). Speaking of the Angel it won't let me rename him/her.

Anyways I will update my review if I am able to find a work around for the freezing issue

Good concept, I like the way zones are split, and I also like the main hub being something you can build up.

However, the game is not even close to being done, idk what "v1.5" is supposed to mean here, but seeing "This option will be implemented later" multiple times is pretty tilting. I've also encountered a number of bugs during my playthrough.

Overall, I'd wait until the devs have put more work in before trying it, still too early, despite the version number.

Right now its pretty much a series of signs saying ''we'll do this later''.
The very small amount o f content available is well written which is where the 2 stars come from but there's really just not much here. Most of your choices feel meaningless as a result

Not a lot of content but I really like the concept. Think it can become a great game that can rival Champions of Corruption with some time and even Trials in tainted space if they add some good artwork to it.
Gonna give it 4 stars as I don't think it deserves 3 but I would advise to wait with playing it till a few more updates.

Too buggy. In the 0.45 version, before hardly getting anywhere, I encountered a corrupt save bug and a HP-zero-ing bug. The concept is decent and it's worth coming back to for people who can stand text based games.