Generic feedback from someone who has taken up the game again after a while and has gotten almost on par with content: my only kinda-complaint is that in a 'balanced' run on Hard mode in which I tried to do corrupt stuff only when particularly advantegeous I ended up soft-locking myself at 15 ~ Lewdness and my only way to advance corruption was the Hedonism orb that requires 20. I slowly accrued corruption day by day reaching the 40s and I had to prostitute Aura not because it felt like it made sense within the game systems and narrative, like in most cases, but to avoid game over.
It felt a bit out of sync, and I wonder if there could be some merit in implementing something of a "corruption sink", where you could spend big amounts of corruption to force Aura to do a lewd act on the following day.
Another thing that has me a bit confused is the Alicia side balance of things. There are a couple perks that come to mind (the ones that basically remove reading as an option for Aura and the one that make corruption gain a +1 per day, which alone must have produced some 40-50 corruption on its own) that are quite crippling. Are they, in the mind of the author
aura-dev, something that players usually pick first, because it makes sense for RP-ing Alicia and/or for speeding up the unlock of cutscenes, or something that players pick as a last resort when there's no other option to avoid game over?
Last but not least the rest of the game is still after all these years fresh, interesting, super entertaining, rich with incredible game design ideas that elegantly mesh with each other while spanning over multiple complex interconnected systems, most of which are made and thought by a single person, all with incredible writing for the #AdultGames genre.
Yeah game mechanically, going fully forced to 20 is still a bit of an issue,
depending on the player skill. The theory is:
Womb of Lust: Takes you to 10 Lewdness by itself
Masturbation is not enough: Takes you to 20+ lewdness
Of course you can dodge these using Blessed Waters, but Blessed Water increases in price and eventually this becomes difficult.
That's the theory, but in practice of course you can play around that by being fast, earning lots of money, etc.
I definitely don't want to add a true forced corruption sink for lewdness. It's important to me that there is counterplay in the Roya part, and having an Alicia action that says that 100% Aura has to perform a lewd action, is kind of counter to Aura's agency part. But having counterplay always adds a skill element. Imo the best way for a skilled player to get into more forced situations is to play on Nightmare, there this kind of works.
I'm not sure what the right course of action is, but the direction I see would be more along the lines of giving Alicia somehow a way to further pressure/faster trigger the day stay start lewd events, although that then worries me about getting Aura caught up too hard in lewd loops when you go full into the lewd direction. x_X
For the reading removal, those are mechanisms to force Aura to engage with the more expensive forms of powerups, and therefore trigger more lewd events, so I would say if anything it's possible that there might be a need to teleport some more of them from Chapter 3 into Chapter 2, but I'm not sure.
For the +1, it's supposed to represent the curse becoming stronger and give players who are not producing corruption fast enough or need to artifically use SK on targets that don't need it, to gain the necessary corruption increase speed to progress at a nice pace. I would argue that in your case there is a good roleplay reason to no use it. Alicia could open the rooms, see the 20 Lewdness Hedonism orb, observe that she's quite far from reaching that and therefore avoid increasing corruption gain speed since she's informed from the start that this can be a two-sided sword, leading to soul break. That's just how I would roleplay justify not taking it early. It's possible that maybe it should be locked after a later mental change, but then again I also don't want to to take it away from people who need corruption to speed up.
We are definitely getting into the region where it becomes pretty tough balance everything since the states of the players combined with their playing intentions and skill levels form a very wide spread. The addition of Masturbation Is Not Enough quite some time ago was supposed improve the specific case you are finding yourself in, and in Nightmare I would say it's good enough, but on lower difficulties paired with higher skilled players, there's still some improvement that needs to be done.