Before I get into this, I just need to say one thing: I wrote an entire ten paragraph review of this game about two hours into it. I'll admit, I was a bit hard on the game. In truth, what I had seen didn't really constitute the amount of vitriol that the game created within me. So, in the interest of being fair and thorough, I spent another four hours completing the rest of the content currently available in the game. In truth, I was wrong, I had judged it too quickly.
Well, I guess, I was technically right. My mistake had nothing to due with my perspective, but instead, its magnitude.
Let's get through this as quickly as I can now. You looked at the first post, you know what this game is. You play as "Guy". All women can be forcibly made into slaves at any time, Guy must buy these women consensually to save them from invisible ugly bastards you will never see, starting with his mother and sister. Who is Guy? I would love to tell you, but the developer couldn't be assed to give him a third personality trait beyond "loser" or "pervert". If you're a fan of copy and paste humor based around this incredibly rare and original combination of character traits, you're in luck! That's about 60% of the writing! Why only 60%? Well because apparently the developer started to suddenly remember that characters aren't characters when they're just skin-deep combinations of anime tropes slapped together and decided to start writing incredibly long and drawn out backstories for the four newest characters. This wouldn't be a problem (it would actually be praiseworthy) if it weren't for the fact that the four hours of inane bullshit that preceded this change will have already conditioned you as a player to not give a shit by that point. Hell, if you're like me and don't take five full seconds to read seven words, you probably already started skipping most of the dialogue already, given that the developer programmed in a pause that prevents the player from progressing dialogue at their own pace unless you override it with Ren'Py's built-in skip system. And before you read this and think I'm some sort of child with no attention span, understand that I've taken my time with books and games that display a level of thought and care put into the writing. I just don't have patience for reading yet another empty conversation the developer thinks passes for an event, but really is just filler to put you back into the cash/relationship grind for as long as possible to attempt to trick you into thinking you're playing a real game.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Truly, anyone can open up this site, click on a game, and say "game is bad". People who like the game will ignore the review, people who hate the game will "like" the review. What do you, potential time waster/patreon supporter, need to know before deciding if this is worth your time?
Let's jump back a bit to the characters I briefly mentioned. Protagonist Guy has zero redeeming qualities. You may think that him working hard to purchase the slave contracts of all of these women means he's kind, motivated, or resourceful. The truth is, none of this would happen unless someone told him specifically what to do. I don't mean once at the beginning, I mean literally every single fucking time he meets a girl and learns of a potential solution to their problem is related to this whole "Scarlet Contract" system, the girl needs to be basically begging him to do this thing he's already done ten times. So how about the girls themselves? I mean, really, that's what you're here for. It's a harem game! Yeah, no, they are all complete shit. Well, some of the ones near the end seem like they might've been less shit, but fuck if I'm bothering with fifty paragraphs of backstory the developer suddenly decided the world needed. For starters, Estelle, the little sister, the girl on the banners, the main menu, even the tik tok account the developer made to advertise the game? Yeah, there's almost nothing there. The developer has so little confidence in the game they've made that they seemingly think the moment they do something other than the most generic 200% anime tsundere character, the patreon will drain and the good times will all be over. At the end of the current content, she is still making the same hilarious jokes about "waiting until marriage", calling Guy a virgin (despite watching him fuck at least two of the girls right in front of her), and having the greatest catchphrase known to mankind where she just calls him the same three insults. The game apparently rebooted two years ago and this is the furthest this happens. But hey, if you're just here for sex, don't you worry, Silvia, the mom, has got you covered! Apparently she was just looking for an excuse to seduce Guy because she blows him the moment he walks across town and has a single conversation. I thought I accidentally sequence broke the game the first time Guy had sex, but it turns out there's just an event where they unceremoniously fuck in the kitchen. The kicker is that it only triggers if you lie to her by throwing the sister under the bus for something you were supposed to do, and the game acknowledges that she's completely aware Guy is lying.
I'm not done with characters. Selena, the girl-next-door/childhood friend has apparently been salivating about Guy for half a decade, despite having not seen him for several years due to him being such a loser that he literally never leaves the house. This girl has gone through some moderately crappy things in her life, including the death of her last relative and the subsequent mountain of debt she is being crushed under, all while living next door. Guy walks out the front door for the first time in forever, blows her off so he can go buy his mother and sister, then comes back asking for a job. Selena somehow loves him so much that she hires him, pays him a wage that nets him more than $5000 in a few weeks, shortly before begging him to buy her own contract with money she is paying him for working at her own store. I'm getting tired of recounting this, so here's some other summaries: Makoto begs Guy to purchase and fuck her within a few hours of knowing him, mostly spent with him berating her for being shit at her job. Celestia is a fox girl who appears from nowhere, attempts to purchase room and board with explosives disguised as a children's toy meant to be gifted to a foe as a means of disposing of them. Guy later is shocked at the prospect that she would murder someone. Altina is a nun who appears early in the game as an accomplice to Guy being mugged, vanishes for several hours, then reemerges as a character who is apparently central to the plot and inexplicably prevents progress with any other girl past a certain point until dealt with. Actually, that's a great place to change topics.
There's nothing inherently wrong with harem games. It's a solid way to provide a cast of characters your potential playerbase can get into, with each girl appealing to a different subset of players. Many signatures on this forum have banners featuring specific characters from games that players like. The winning formula for these is relatively simple. You segregate your content between either individual characters or closely related characters, and the overall plot. Generally speaking, you want to avoid making these things tangle unnecessarily so that players can find the content they want and avoid what they aren't interested in. If your story absolutely demands that events be locked off due to needing another character to be in a certain status, tell the player how to get to that content so they can get it done and continue on with their experience, while doing your best to make this overlapping content as low-impact as possible.
Scarlet Law's approach to this is to tangle up every character's plotline into every other character's plot, hide events for characters in events labeled for other characters, and have times when you cannot progress with any characters until you've finished progressing all of them to a certain point. In short, the absolute worst way you can go about this. Take Estelle for instance. If you're like me, you came to this page because you saw her on the banner in the "Latest Updates" section. My initial thoughts after about ten minutes were, "hey, this writing's kinda shit, but this chick's kinda cute, let's see how far I can get." This, potential player, is the trap. After two events with Estelle (during which nothing happened and which required some light grinding for relationship points), the game no longer presented clues for her next event. I did a little bit of research, as I knew the game had rebooted at some point and I wasn't certain if this was all there was. I ended up finding the in-game gallery and confirmed I had yet to unlock 4/6 events (with a conveniently placed ad for the developer's patreon, which offers to immediately unlock all scenes for $10/month). This was, naturally, offputting, but my ability to survive bullshit is inordinarily high and I had no plans for a few hours, so I soldiered on. Perhaps this other girl who was kinda cute would unlock the continuation I was looking for. No dice. I continued until the last two characters remaining were ones I wasn't particularly interested in. A bunch of random bullshit sped up using the skip button later, and more characters and events had been unlocked, but still no continuation of Estelle. As the number of girls rose, the amount of content for the earlier girls dropped significantly. Suddenly, an event being listed for a character didn't even mean the character would be involved. Most of the events became structured in such a way that they would intentionally end in such a way that you would need to sleep until the next day and advance to a certain time slot, despite the writing indicating the events were supposed to happen on the same day. Finally, the game completely broke down in structure with the introduction of Rita. She's not a particularly bad character from what little I saw, but that's also what was most confusing. The game suddenly decided that the overarching plot and backstory of the world needed to be delivered to me in giant dumps, but it was done under the label of being a "Rita" event. Imagine a game where you have to raise relationship points with a girl in order to unlock events in which she is not even mentioned. Progressing through Rita's story was actually the way to unlock a completely unrelated pair of girls, one of which would eventually circle back to involving Rita. And here's the most ridiculous part: You raise relationship points in these grindfest sandbox games by doing repetitive events with the girls that imply you're hanging out and getting closer, but Rita's entire character is that she (completely understandably) hates the protagonist.
I don't know what else there's left to say. I guess I should mention the ever-increasing grind for money that makes grinding relationship points take even longer, the fact that the game doesn't really account for new girls living with you in any meaningful way, the basic rollback feature that exists in every Ren'Py game that the developer intentionally tried to disable for seemingly no other reason than to make the game a little more annoying, the fact that, even ignoring the character writing, the overall setting and plot makes absolutely no sense if you think about it for more than thirty seconds. The summary is that there's really nothing here worth wasting the time for. You can find plenty of other games that do some or all of what this game does dramatically better. This game plays like it was made to stretch out very little content for as long as possible in order to milk money out of folks supporting the developer.
Best of luck on your continued search for something to kill time with.
