It's still early days, but has the potential to become one of the very best.
The presentation, including the UI, renders, music and animation, all have a next gen feel to them. Story and setting are interesting and are brimming with future narrative potential. Female models are universally outstanding with good variety in appearance and body shape. No generic models lifted straight out of other games here.
Niggles:
- (minor) There is little in the way of choice at this stage. Not surprising for something which is largely an extended demo currently, but to truly strive for GOAT status I'll be looking for more of this in future updates.
- It is very click heavy at this point. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with transition scenes in AVNs but the developer should consider the use of these in future updates (ideally with some sort of indication that a transition scene is in progress) as a strategy to reduce the amount of clicking needed in to advance through some non-dialogue scenes.
- The load times are significant and the load progress bar is not synched very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one who shut down the game thinking it has frozen after the load bar reached 100% and nothing happened for a while, when it actually still had 90 seconds of loading to do in the background.
- Notwithstanding the generally positive comments I've made about the story above, the dialogue and some specific story elements do suffer negatively from what I call 'our amps go to 11' syndrome. As those who have read my other reviews would know, this is a bit of a bugbear of mine. Essentially it describes an approach where a developer is trying so hard for drama and emotional depth that they end up overreaching and risk making things game breakingly farcical. Your typical AVN that basically just wants to duplicate a porno - no worries, be as a ridiculous and over the top as you like. That smaller group of AVNs like this one that want (and deserve) to be taken more seriously - then the assessment criteria are a bit more stringent. The prime example of what I'm talking about here are the early scenes with Anderson. Sure, it's important to the story that he is a bit of a prick. But this big a prick? The kind of pantomime villain who calls the girls c**ts in every second sentence? It's just too much and spoils player immersion. Another example is a scene later involving one of the characters and a gun. I'm going to partially defer full judgement on this for a bit longer, but as things stand it smacks again of 'this needs to be dramatic, so let's make it REALLY dramatic'. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for extremes in a story when appropriate but when you've gone extreme multiple times before (at times when you probably didn't need to) then you've got nothing in reserve to make a genuine dramatic statement later. In short, sometimes less is more, and subtlety is an art form.
Bugs:
- In the dress trying scene with Lindsay, only the first dress unlocked for me despite Lindsay in dialogue referring to other special\boxed dresses that Natalie could try.
But overall this is a very impressive piece of work. Only giving it 4 rather than 5 at this point because it feels a little like rating a cake while it's still in the oven. But geez, it's a very nice looking cake.
The presentation, including the UI, renders, music and animation, all have a next gen feel to them. Story and setting are interesting and are brimming with future narrative potential. Female models are universally outstanding with good variety in appearance and body shape. No generic models lifted straight out of other games here.
Niggles:
- (minor) There is little in the way of choice at this stage. Not surprising for something which is largely an extended demo currently, but to truly strive for GOAT status I'll be looking for more of this in future updates.
- It is very click heavy at this point. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with transition scenes in AVNs but the developer should consider the use of these in future updates (ideally with some sort of indication that a transition scene is in progress) as a strategy to reduce the amount of clicking needed in to advance through some non-dialogue scenes.
- The load times are significant and the load progress bar is not synched very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one who shut down the game thinking it has frozen after the load bar reached 100% and nothing happened for a while, when it actually still had 90 seconds of loading to do in the background.
- Notwithstanding the generally positive comments I've made about the story above, the dialogue and some specific story elements do suffer negatively from what I call 'our amps go to 11' syndrome. As those who have read my other reviews would know, this is a bit of a bugbear of mine. Essentially it describes an approach where a developer is trying so hard for drama and emotional depth that they end up overreaching and risk making things game breakingly farcical. Your typical AVN that basically just wants to duplicate a porno - no worries, be as a ridiculous and over the top as you like. That smaller group of AVNs like this one that want (and deserve) to be taken more seriously - then the assessment criteria are a bit more stringent. The prime example of what I'm talking about here are the early scenes with Anderson. Sure, it's important to the story that he is a bit of a prick. But this big a prick? The kind of pantomime villain who calls the girls c**ts in every second sentence? It's just too much and spoils player immersion. Another example is a scene later involving one of the characters and a gun. I'm going to partially defer full judgement on this for a bit longer, but as things stand it smacks again of 'this needs to be dramatic, so let's make it REALLY dramatic'. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for extremes in a story when appropriate but when you've gone extreme multiple times before (at times when you probably didn't need to) then you've got nothing in reserve to make a genuine dramatic statement later. In short, sometimes less is more, and subtlety is an art form.
Bugs:
- In the dress trying scene with Lindsay, only the first dress unlocked for me despite Lindsay in dialogue referring to other special\boxed dresses that Natalie could try.
But overall this is a very impressive piece of work. Only giving it 4 rather than 5 at this point because it feels a little like rating a cake while it's still in the oven. But geez, it's a very nice looking cake.
). Perfectly conveyed facial expressions.