It brings me no joy to rate this game so low given the great ideas it shows in its premise and mechanics.
The first hour or so makes a promise that the game doesn't keep as you progress because that's when the porn content is the most concentrated in the first 10h. Those first hours were great however ! I felt the slow simmer of the corruption and the act the MC was forced into and how awful it was for her. But after that intro where there are plenty of little scenes to discover in the city, the world is practically devoid of scenes to punctuate the adventure.
Some will say "well that's a slow burn !", and to that I would answer: No. This game is not a slow burn. If a slow burn is slowly building up heat to boil a pot of water, here it's more like a the cook started with a slow burn, but cut off the heat for the remaining 10h while sometimes putting it back on at max power for a couple minutes here and there. In the end you end up with a pot of lukewarm water.
There is no build up of heat, only flash releases dispatched in a sea of classic RPGM content without proper pacing.
What's a slow burn though is the corruption of the main protagonist, which is well done overall.
But the delivery of the scenes also lacks pacing and it sometimes feel like the two parts of the game (RPG and corruption VN) fight each other for the spotlight while rarely being aligned in their intent.
For example I had a couple hours where practivally nothing happend in the VN part while I was going through quests and neat dialogues in the RPG part. Then I had practically nothing left to do in the RPG part except the tiresome (and yet way too common...) RPGM stats grinding, and that's when everything started chaining together in the VN part. So I was left basically skipping days in the RPG, reading books for stats, just so I could progress in the corruption arc.
That's not a place you want a player to be.
This latter issue is compounded by the fact that the game gives you tons of areas where you can influence the MC, but it all feels pointless because I never felt like my choices mattered in the end.
For example you can choose to give the MC sensitivity to some fetishes and actions, but it never once became relevant for me in the time I played.
I guess the choices are there so people can optimise their paths on NG+ and unlock all the content. But on a first playthrough, the system is confusing and disappointing.
In the end I reached 10h of playtime, and finally gave up when the game teased me with a porn scene but locked it up behind even more exploration and stat checks.
This is fine on its own, but after nearly 10h of having seen only 2 scenes, it felt like the game was actively trying to waste my time (the one at the end of the refugee camp quest). And I think I might know why... I think that's a scene that was added in an update, and it was tested within the update, taking into account only the people that would catch up with it, and not the entire experience. I might be wrong, but it really felt like that was the rationale behind it, because otherwise it doesn't make sense to have people starved for scenes, and blue balling them even more when they're so close to one.
Honestly, this game has the potential to be great but at the moment it's held back by a couple core design choices that are honestly incomprehensible to me:
1- Pacing of the porn content
SOLUTION: Tightenening the overall pacing by adding small scenes like the ones at the beginning throughout the experience will already do wonders for the game's digestability
2- Real world and RPG plot feel disconnected
SOLUTION: Make the choices players do in the MCs psyche matter. Or, if that's too work intensive, make the delivery of this content line up better with what's happening in the RPG world isntead of having it delivered in blocks.
There's a reason a lot of adult games go with a "route" design where some actions have the potential to locking you into a set route for characters: it makes delivering content at a proper pacing easier, and it assures the writers and designers have more control on how the story is delivered to the player.
Here it felt like there were 5 starts to "routes" the game could take, but since it doesn't commit to the route design philosophy, it ends up diluting the way content is spread out (for example when I saw the NPCs at the start try to get the MC to undress, even one landing a kiss on her crotch, I thought "oh ! I can't wait to see how that's going to evolve afterwards", but 10h later, this is all the content I saw for those NPCs.
3- Stat checks and grinding
SOLUTION: Seriously, whoever first declared 15 years ago that RPGM games had to have repetitive actions to grind stats to progress through stat checks needs to never touch a game engine ever again.
There should be variety in the way players engage with the progression systems if the game isn't sophisticated enough to have a loop that's fun to play on its own. Grinding a stat progressively throuhout the game to get bonus content is fine, but if we are starved for content and the only thing we can access in hours of gameplay is locked behind the stat grind, players will want to access it, making the experience tedious (example of the painter scenes)
Anyway, that's a long review, I hope it didn't come out too harshly.
This game has a lot of potential, but I think a step back needs to be taken to refocus the way the progression is designed throughout the experience.
People are here for the scenes first and foremost, the rest is the cherry on top. So the goal here is to make sure players have access to scenes at a reasonable pace and avoid getting caught up in the trap so many porn games fall into: forgetting that they are porn.
The first hour or so makes a promise that the game doesn't keep as you progress because that's when the porn content is the most concentrated in the first 10h. Those first hours were great however ! I felt the slow simmer of the corruption and the act the MC was forced into and how awful it was for her. But after that intro where there are plenty of little scenes to discover in the city, the world is practically devoid of scenes to punctuate the adventure.
Some will say "well that's a slow burn !", and to that I would answer: No. This game is not a slow burn. If a slow burn is slowly building up heat to boil a pot of water, here it's more like a the cook started with a slow burn, but cut off the heat for the remaining 10h while sometimes putting it back on at max power for a couple minutes here and there. In the end you end up with a pot of lukewarm water.
There is no build up of heat, only flash releases dispatched in a sea of classic RPGM content without proper pacing.
What's a slow burn though is the corruption of the main protagonist, which is well done overall.
But the delivery of the scenes also lacks pacing and it sometimes feel like the two parts of the game (RPG and corruption VN) fight each other for the spotlight while rarely being aligned in their intent.
For example I had a couple hours where practivally nothing happend in the VN part while I was going through quests and neat dialogues in the RPG part. Then I had practically nothing left to do in the RPG part except the tiresome (and yet way too common...) RPGM stats grinding, and that's when everything started chaining together in the VN part. So I was left basically skipping days in the RPG, reading books for stats, just so I could progress in the corruption arc.
That's not a place you want a player to be.
This latter issue is compounded by the fact that the game gives you tons of areas where you can influence the MC, but it all feels pointless because I never felt like my choices mattered in the end.
For example you can choose to give the MC sensitivity to some fetishes and actions, but it never once became relevant for me in the time I played.
I guess the choices are there so people can optimise their paths on NG+ and unlock all the content. But on a first playthrough, the system is confusing and disappointing.
In the end I reached 10h of playtime, and finally gave up when the game teased me with a porn scene but locked it up behind even more exploration and stat checks.
This is fine on its own, but after nearly 10h of having seen only 2 scenes, it felt like the game was actively trying to waste my time (the one at the end of the refugee camp quest). And I think I might know why... I think that's a scene that was added in an update, and it was tested within the update, taking into account only the people that would catch up with it, and not the entire experience. I might be wrong, but it really felt like that was the rationale behind it, because otherwise it doesn't make sense to have people starved for scenes, and blue balling them even more when they're so close to one.
Honestly, this game has the potential to be great but at the moment it's held back by a couple core design choices that are honestly incomprehensible to me:
1- Pacing of the porn content
SOLUTION: Tightenening the overall pacing by adding small scenes like the ones at the beginning throughout the experience will already do wonders for the game's digestability
2- Real world and RPG plot feel disconnected
SOLUTION: Make the choices players do in the MCs psyche matter. Or, if that's too work intensive, make the delivery of this content line up better with what's happening in the RPG world isntead of having it delivered in blocks.
There's a reason a lot of adult games go with a "route" design where some actions have the potential to locking you into a set route for characters: it makes delivering content at a proper pacing easier, and it assures the writers and designers have more control on how the story is delivered to the player.
Here it felt like there were 5 starts to "routes" the game could take, but since it doesn't commit to the route design philosophy, it ends up diluting the way content is spread out (for example when I saw the NPCs at the start try to get the MC to undress, even one landing a kiss on her crotch, I thought "oh ! I can't wait to see how that's going to evolve afterwards", but 10h later, this is all the content I saw for those NPCs.
3- Stat checks and grinding
SOLUTION: Seriously, whoever first declared 15 years ago that RPGM games had to have repetitive actions to grind stats to progress through stat checks needs to never touch a game engine ever again.
There should be variety in the way players engage with the progression systems if the game isn't sophisticated enough to have a loop that's fun to play on its own. Grinding a stat progressively throuhout the game to get bonus content is fine, but if we are starved for content and the only thing we can access in hours of gameplay is locked behind the stat grind, players will want to access it, making the experience tedious (example of the painter scenes)
Anyway, that's a long review, I hope it didn't come out too harshly.
This game has a lot of potential, but I think a step back needs to be taken to refocus the way the progression is designed throughout the experience.
People are here for the scenes first and foremost, the rest is the cherry on top. So the goal here is to make sure players have access to scenes at a reasonable pace and avoid getting caught up in the trap so many porn games fall into: forgetting that they are porn.
