Ok, after reaching day 230ish, not being able to complete the events for several girls, and finding myself seemingly stonewalled on further progression i've given up. Overall, this was not an enjoyable experience, based on version 0.6.0.
I liked the renders and art-style used by this game, the girls are fairly well-written with each feeling unique, and they're cute too and I really do wish you'd take this in a more H direction but understand that you have a different vision for the finished product.
The internal-monologing is intensely boring for me, I stopped actively paying attention to what the main character was drivelling about before the end of day 1. It comes on thick and heavy, and doesn't seem to let up much as the game goes on.
It's far better from a story-telling perspective to let us learn about the characters' multiple layers of neuroris slowly as the story progresses, predominately from how they act/interact with each other (body language, speech patterns, choice of words, decisions, etc), rather than just dumping it on us awkardly at semi-random intervals.
Reading back through some of the discussion pages it seems that there are a number of people who find the games lack of player direction to be a problem. I agree with them. If the Pacman devs took away all the information needed for a player to make reasonable decisions that allow them to clear dots and earn points (read: to progress in the game) on a particular level, for example by making all the sprites and text in that level invisible, would it be the players fault for getting stuck or the developers?
I get it, you want this to be a story-heavy mystery VN (with a very scarce dusting of H) and as such you're against the idea of "go to x location with y girl at z time" style explicit hints, and honestly I agree to an extent, but we need SOMETHING to go on, anything. Good mystery novels drop little breadcrumbs of information that allow the reader to piece things together along side or just ahead of the protagonists. This game, in it's current state, is almost completely devoid of breadcrumbs when we need them, and we do NEED them when the event triggers are outside of the girls normal schedule, like needing to talk to an entirely different girl, or needing to spend time at home with the bird, or needing to take a nap, to name a few. Without any useful leads to follow the player is left blindly guessing, or brute-forcing every possible combination of xyz in order to progress. We're not lazy, we're not dumb, it's not a case of us just not getting it or that we're not cultured enough to understand the type of game this is and to enjoy it for what it is, no.
We're just not interested in playing Combo-Lock Simulator: Sexy Doki Doki Lit Club Edition, and were expecting a more enjoyable type of game, like a well designed and thought out mystery VN, or, yes, for some, a school-setting sandbox porn game about figuratively nailing your students to the nearest flat surface.
Now, to add something constructive to this criticism, how to fix it?
I'm not saying it'll be easy, but I'd suggest changing up the girls journal screen, add a list where breadcrumbs the player has found for a girl can be viewed. As a developer it'll let you visualize what the players know about the girl at that point in her events chain, so build your event triggers off of that list of information which will make it easier for you to design triggers that involve less blind guess-work by the player. The breadcrumbs themselves would be little facts about the girl, topics she's interested in, what she likes to do and when, what she thinks about other girls, and these crumbs would be sprinkled into previous dialogue/events in a natural and innocuous way. As for the hints screen, a hint for each girl, consisting of the most recent breadcrumb that's a major part of the next event trigger, or a "???" to indicate to the player that they haven't found the next big crumb yet and to keep stalking her schedule or focus on someone else for a while.
So to tie it all together by way of an example, a girl might have the following in her breadcrumb list: Has never tried French food, is jealous of girl B's boobs, has been feeling bored and lonely on weekends lately, is a virgin, a new French cafe opened in town recently. With "a new French cafe opened in town" being the highlighted big crumb on her hints page, and the event trigger being to call and ask her on a date to the new french cafe. In this way you're not explicitly spelling it out xyz fashion as some of the crumbs aren't relevant to the current event trigger (there will be a larger number of irrelevant crumbs as the game progresses), players that want to figure it out on thier own can do just that without looking at the hints, and players who want to look at the hints are given a starting point from which to connect the dots by themselves.
Of course this is just a suggestion, and doesn't resolve all of the issues around the hint system, but I feel like it would at least be a step in the right direction.
