How is one scene a slow burn? Firstly I don’t even buy the first scene between Alexia and Andras, you’re going to tell me that Alexia is going to fuck Andras after just finding out he’s been lying to her over the course of several months? I can only suspend my disbelief so much. Regarding your holding CTRL point I’d say my point still stands, let’s say it takes 30 mins too get to that scene even then that’s pretty quick with the player being privy to only 3 convos over the course of months of in-game time. My point is that Alexia falls for Andras very quickly with very little downtime or build up. So one scene of her being regretful and guilty is enough to be regarded as a slow burn and all the other scenes work fine? I just don’t see Andras’s NTR route as a slow burn, just comparing it to Jez’s makes that clear to me. (Also I don’t think Andras NTR is bad there’s some things I don’t like about it, but I just don’t see it as a slow thing, more akin to other NTR you’d see)
I’m kinda forced to agree here. The older version of the prologue scene actually felt more in line with a slow burn—you can at least buy into the idea that Alexia has been lonely for months and her sexy red captor has been her only friend and he’s the only source of information about Rowan that this unworldly peasant woman has had, so when she falls for his tricks, even if it doesn’t display much agency, it makes sense. It would have been nice to see some more of that to fully establish a slow burn feeling, sure, but it’s a believable trope. The new scene, by contrast, only hints at a slow burn by effectively asking the player: is Alexia experiencing sexual tension with red boy during her months of solitude Y/N; and then, if yes: does she want to fuck red boy because she’s mad he lied to her Y/N. It’s so far from demonstrating the slow build up of tension it sets out to that not only does it prefer to tell the player rather than show him, it actually opts to have the player tell it rather than tell the player. I’m all for giving Alexia more agency, and especially for giving the player more control over the main characters’ motivations, but that scene still feels so off that it breaks any sense of immersion.
And the mid-corruption Andras route event pretty suddenly flips the entire dynamic of the Andras/Alexia relationship. There are certainly hints that Alexia enjoys being dominated by Andras in some of their scenes before that event, but mostly the relationship is defined by Alexia trying to look out for Rowan and Andras being a brute about it and forcing her to do crap, then suddenly she gets a scare and she’s 100% into Andras. And the biggest tells for her being into Andras’s dominance that I can recall offhand are scenes that someone going through the Andras NTR route might miss—the bath scene and the drider teasing scene aren’t mandatory parts of the route. Don’t get me wrong, the scenes after her “fall” are hot, but the change feels pretty abrupt, and Alexia after entering the mid-corruption Andras route feels very divorced from the Alexia before it. I feel like there needed to be more of a transition phase. Actually I’m kinda surprised that Alexia even gets to the stage we see her in that route in Act I at all, these scenes feel very mid-story to me.
