I feel like this game just caught me in the wrong mood, since despite quite liking P&T I ended up pretty much hating this one. Is that despite they are pretty similar, or
because... ?
First, the story setup. Generic dude is contrived to become Captain of some ship, and I was already sitting there "so what'll be the stupid excuse that that cannot be reversed?" ...
aaaand there it is. He doesn't develop much personality afterwards (not much opportunity for that yet of course), but unnecessarily randomly commits some sex crime which as usual is completely disregarded. Hey, it's just being a piece of shit creep using cameras to look at somebody else, not even worth giving a choice or anything ...
... kinda extra frustrating since this is a scifi setting and the woman isn't even human. You can make up any sort of shit about social norms or whatever of that time to justify whatever you want. But, naw. Let's just have the guy be an asshole.
Gameplay also feels a lot like P&T. You grind favor by doing a mindlessly repetitive thing. Again. And then instead of the dungeon mini game you do the scrap collecting minigame. Which seemed to me just fundamentally much worse than playing a bit of Pacman every day.
I never really minded the grind in P&T too much, but possibly it was because I felt like I was exploring something new. Here it feels like I'm basically just continuing the grind from the previous game. ^^;
Lastly, the choice of the super-rational, uh, colleague. It's a scifi trope and makes sense, so not really specifically a complaint about that. And frankly, this really only occurred to me afterwards, regarding P&T, but as much as I enjoyed it it rarely got to be actually
erotic. Sexy stuff was happening but usually the characters involved weren't being very sexy about it - which makes sense given that the Princess was just such a weirdo; it was borderline more comedic than erotic.
I kinda get a similar impression with this one - like again she's just kinda going along with it, but it's not involving any sort of sexy dialogue or anything. Which, in what's still presumably fundamentally meant to be a porn game ...
Dunno, again, all feels very much like an issue in P&T too and never bothered me too much there. So really maybe just played this at the wrong moment or something. But, yeah, can't say it worked well for me.
... visuals are great again though