This game has me feeling confused. As I write this, I'm feeling relatively conflicted. It's rare that I find a game like this, which has me feeling like I'm watching a battle between the people doing the dialogue/narrative and the people doing everything else.
I rated this a 3, but it's more like a 3.5. There are some seriously good ideas, and legitimately good art in this game, but it's all downplayed immensely by the terrible writing.
WRITING
As said prior, it's bad. In fact, it's so bad that the story would legitimately be better off without it. I know this game's in alpha, but when you have a narrative in your game, that quite literally is worse off than having no writing at all, that's how you know something's gone awry.
And that sort of bothers me, because the other parts of the game feel like they're made by someone far more competent. For example, the artwork:
The sex scenes are erotic and well done, the framing, the development from one scene to another, it all blends in well-.. and then
.. the writing spits on all of that effort, and makes you wish you could've just turned off the dialogue box.
I am confident, that you, the reader, would be able to come up with a more compelling narrative for whatever is happening in the game if you just removed the subtitles and ad-libbed your way through the game. It really is that rough.
ARTWORK AND VA
Other than some consistency issues (which are infrequent, this isn't really a genuine fault), the game just looks good. I'll tie up the UI and the artwork together because I do think a good UI is just as much art as the character images and scenes. And this game has ALL of those baked and caked very well. The UI feels good to move through, the artwork feels like it ties in with the game. I especially like the side-scroller map design, it felt novel and fit in perfectly with the game.
The voice acting..
..It's not very good. I'm not a big fan of the "say one random, somewhat vaguely related word to whatever is being shown on the screen" style in voiced dialogue. Either do the whole thing, or don't do it at all. It makes it feel half-assed and the game would likely be better off with proper, but infrequent fully voiced lines instead of random blotches of words in every single sentence. Perhaps by the end of a date there could be a final line that was fully voiced acted? I feel like it wouldn't be a difficult change to make, and it'd be one for the better. At least, that's what I think.
Furthermore, I don't believe the voice actors had great direction, as their "performances" (If you can really call singular words and grunts performances) leave you with a lot to be desired.
GAMEPLAY
If the writing is a 0, and the artwork is a steady 4.5, then the gameplay is somewhere around a 2.5-3.
It's okay. Fundamentally, it's there as a vehicle for you getting to the scenes to beat your meat to. It's nothing outstanding. There's quite a bit of effort put into a few of the minigames, but they get repetitive after the second or third run through.
To sum it all up:
UI is great. 4.5/5
Artwork is great. 4/5
Gameplay is fine. 2.5/5
Voice acting needs a redesign. 1.5/5
Story is terrible. 0/5
Overall, the game is.. fine. I can't stress enough how poorly written the characters are, and how much that impacts the ENTIRETY of the game.
Please have your writer re-do the dialogue, or hire a new writer. It'd be a waste, because there's some actual heart in this game, deep inside. It's just being held back by poor decisions.
Thanks for reading.