Discovered this little gem a couple days ago and had the opportunity to play it out for a few hours yesterday. I managed to get to, roughly, the festival event. So I still have quite a bit of material to play through and characters to meet.
But I'm really enjoying it so far. I'll be honest, I almost skipped over it. Not being familiar with a lot of the development process, I recognized the Koikatsu renders, and immediately has some traumatic flashbacks for reasons that have already been discussed ad nauseum. But I'm very pleased I gave it a shot. It has a pretty lighthearted feel to it so you don't feel scummy, like a lot of games out there might. I mean, given the premise of the game, you don't feel TOO scummy.
I enjoy the sandbox... eroge (is that the right word) feel. I'm not too familiar with the VN scene, or what all the personality types are referred to as. Most of what I know is based off of context clues from the handful of VN renpy games I've played through. The H scenes are great, and I like that players have to put in a little effort to unlock them. There are already plenty of bone-simulators-loosely-refered-to-as-games out there, so it's nice to have some developers doing the legwork to provide variety.
I'm not a huge fan of the way the event guide is implemented. Not in that it needs to be more helpful, I think it's good to make people figure a little bit out. But it feels clunky when jumping from character events to main events. One of the main events I just did had five characters event requirements. Some of those character requirements had other character requirements. So I found myself doing a lot of menu navigation that didn't feel particularly intuitive. I don't know if it's possible, but maybe if an event isn't complete, and has other event requirements, it might save some clicking if you could click on the required event and it'll take you to that characters event page? If that makes sense? It feels difficult to articulate now that I'm writing it all out.
I saw through the forums here that the dev took some time off. I'm glad to see that they're back and hopefully things have leveled out for them a bit.
All in all I'm looking forward to getting a chance to play through this some more, and I'm excited to seeing the dev execute their vision with it.