VN - Unity - Abandoned - Slutholm: Dream Town [September 2021] [Darot Games]

I played many games but this is the most unintuitive and confusing game ever.
The help tab is totally useless and shows task that are finished as new.
All clues and hints are totally vague and you end up learning the obvious choice is not correct. The combat is totally useless and time wasting as it adds nothing to the game and has nothing interesting to offer ( just point and click that too with so much delay).

September '21 Build: Played a little over an hour; this game is basically only grinding. There's a plot about how you're returning to your childhood home incognito after 20 years and seeking to ingratiate yourself among the locals before confronting your most-likely murderous father. Then you spend the week washing dishes at his estate and maybe stacking boxes at the store. You get paid pennies, spend one of those pennies to sleep at the tavern, and repeat. Gold gain is slow and everything is expensive, not that you have any real reason to want to buy a pumpkin. The jobs do gain you relationship points with the woman who gave you it, but there's no indication of how many points you need to get a reward or what that reward may even be; you basically just do it because there's nothing else to really do. The English translation is also really rough in places. I'd give the game at least another year to figure itself out.

This is one of those games that I would desperately like to like, the art is good, the game looks like it is going to be fun, and it has a genuine sandbox feel.

BUT

The flaws at the moment simply outweigh the good aspects of it.
1. The entire game is grinding, and not an enjoyable way, you do menial tasks over and over completing minigames that would be fun in a limited capacity too many times for them to be enjoyable anymore. There is no clear objective for how many times you should do these games either, so you just end up doing the same thing over and over hoping that it does something.

2. There is not enough possibility to advance the character forcing you into situations where certain stats are needed to continue to story and if you built your character wrong, there is pretty much no way to get them.

3. I never even go to the fighting, which I was pretty excited to try, but after grinding the same 3 characters for 2 hours I ended up giving up.

I think this game has a ton of potential, and as someone who follows these kinds of games pretty religiously, I really hope that the grinding issue is resolved, since it is the root of the problem. A game does not need to be made artificially long to be enjoyable, and I feel like the content that is there is trapped behind this barrier of entry a lot like some kind of MMO or mobile game, where the only way to get far is to dedicate an unrealistic amount of time to it. If you solve to grinding issue, I think this game could be a true gem.

One these game breaking issues are resolved I will revise this post and give you the 5 stars you can clearly achieve. I respect your passion and dedication and what you have made here is truly fantastic, but in its current state it is pretty much unplayable.

As a side note, the quest with the bartender is broken, when you attempt to drink with here it says that you need 5 reputation, but even if you have that reputation it still says that and you never get to drink with her.

Avoid at all cost.
Gameplay is just a terrible infantile grind.
I also wonder why mix mobile minigames with a typegame that would be rather painful or impossible on a mobile to play.

Art is nice and all but life is really to short to go through hours of stupid unfun grind to get to a handful of 2d pornpics.
Things like death or losing all money and skill blockade arent making this better at all.

Combat, if one can call it that, is probably the worst i ever encountered in any game ever.

Graphically, the game is superb. Very nice drawings! Music and ambient sounds are excellent. Especially the ones in the church Characters are interesting, GUI is nice and easy. There is very thing film of humor in the wording. Too bad translation to English ruins it.
What can be improved to make it playable:
Reduce grinding by at least 1000%. Create more clear goals than the ones in the quest log. They are quite obscure. I spent 6 hours of grinding and saw 1 tit and 1 ass. This is unacceptable! English translation is excelent at times and terrible at others. Sometimes I cannot even grasp the idea authors put in the text. The current killer for this game is the unbearably slow grind and the grind itself. Either remove it completely or reduce it drastically.

for now it's quite barebone, you need *a lot* of money to progress in game yet yet each tedious job gives you just few coins, grinded for a while, then used cheat engine but seems those boring jobs are also needed to progress your relationship. Moreover you are gated by stats requirements that I have no idea how to improve.

Also friendly warning: black nun has a dick, avoid at all cost

Theoretically there's a game to play here, but the game doesn't let you find a place to sleep to progress at the end of the first day. I assume this is just the start of the framework for now, as it has a bit to go beyond 3 brief conversations.

These guys have proven they can do good games. I believe this could be one, too. Feels like a medieval SummerTime Saga with interesting RPG mechanics already started to be implemented. Also, I like the animations - something Brothel City was lacking.