Updated review for v0.47:
I'm done with this game. Playing an update to this game is like going back to work after a long vacation. The combination of randomization and needle-in-a-haystack event discovery is just too much work for not enough reward. The dev discovered a gold mine and intentionally flooded it with water. He could easily triple his patronage by fixing a few things. A "story mode" would be a what most developers would add to give the game mass appeal, but this game was designed in a way that makes it impractical. What a waste. The average rating has been declining over the past couple years and it would be really low if people didn't cheat. I feel sorry for players hoping to ease their frustrations by expecting a decent in-game hint system or a decent third- party walkthrough. Neither are ever likely.
Previous review:
I started playing Straitened Times at version 0.16 and I've now played through version 0.46. I generally don't like sandbox games because they tend to be coupled with mindless or frustrating "grind" which is intentional on the part of the developers because they think it heightens the experience for players. Straitened Times is designed in a way that makes sense for a sandbox: It has many simultaneous and independent quest paths open and allows the player to choose which one(s) to pursue; however, it does also have grind and usually way too much.
Pros: The game has many hot girls and animated sex scenes. The characters/models are beautiful/sexy (mostly). The grinding necessary to progress usually have a small but noticeable progression during each event so players can actually get some feedback that they are doing the right thing.
If you're into incest, it's here: Mother, two sisters, stepmother, two half-sisters, aunt, and two grandmothers. It has the school fetish with teacher, coach, principal, and cheerleader. It has the MILF fetish with mother, aunt, stepmother, motel manager, principal, bank manager, and neighbor. It has GILF fetish with grandmothers and judge.
Cons: The main con people will point out is the grind. I don't like grindy games at all, but strangely, I didn't find this one to be very bad at first. However, my feelings have changed since I started playing at v0.16. The main con with the grind is the randomization. There is an element of randomness for some events to trigger, but the game has so many places and times, a player can be in the right place at the right time, but an event still will not trigger and sometimes the player can miss an event multiple times just being unlucky with randomization. This can be extremely frustrating. What makes this even worse is that there have been occasional coding bugs that prevent events from triggering, so players don't know whether they are encountering a bug or if they are just unlucky. Some events have been insanely grindy. One example was the XShop photoshoots that could only be done once per week, but there are two models and each model has multiple events with multiple stages of progression, so it took over 20 weeks of in-game time with only a few renders as a reward. Such a disappointment. The game mechanics are constantly being tweaked, so it's possible that new players will experience less frustration with the grind and randomizations, but going from the discussion, there are still a lot of issues. Another con is the complexity. For some events, the player needs to set up multiple things in advance to get the event to trigger. Forget one thing, and you've wasted your time, but worse, the event might not even trigger because some other random repeating event triggers and blocks the event you want to occur.
Additionally, the game has grown and now has so many characters, locations, and time slots, having grind is simply no longer necessary (if it ever was) to add play time or make gameplay more enjoyable.
Thankfully, there isn't a lot of story/plot to this game, because the writing is garbage and the English translation is poor. Normally, players can determine the meaning of the dialogue and other in-game information, but occasionally, it's very difficult to understand and I think it's one of the reasons that many players have trouble figuring out what to do next. The poor translation also kills the mood during the sex scenes.
The game has an overly complex, yet incomplete and intentionally vague in-game help/walkthrough system. It has the "Tasks", which tell the player about the story quests and has a calendar for things that are scheduled at a specific place and time. Then there is the "Progress" for each girl which tells the player about the progression of lewd events/scenes with the girl. This is the actual in-game quest/hint system. The Progress also alerts the player that there are more events that the player has not yet encountered. However, the progress descriptions are both vague and poorly translated, so players don't really know what to do next. The Progress pages also occasionally have bugs such as telling the player there is more content available even when there isn't, telling the player there is no more content available when there is, and not tracking events at all. You only need to read a few posts in the discussion thread to see that people get stuck all the time and the reason is that both the game and the hint system are non-intuitive.
The user interface to navigate the sandbox is OK. It would be better if it was completely consistent. Backing out of an area should be easy (i.e., leave the bathroom, leave the motel room, leave the building, and open the map should all be in the same place on the screen). Same for the controls on the phone where exiting the phone is in a different place than exiting phone apps. Why? Also, there are many occasions where the player can accidentally click on something, but there's no way to undo the decision because rollback is sometimes disabled [Edit: this seems to be improving over time, but is still an issue]. The icons for map and skip time aren't consistent with what players expect. It's a case of re-inventing the wheel for no reason.
The unnecessary parts of the grind are just boring. The principal calling the MC out of class 3 days/week [Edit: this was reduced to 1 day/week in v0.21], the bank manager forcing the MC to choose some sexual reward every time he launders money (why not have an option of "Not this time, thanks."), the MC having an erection every night when sleeping with mother, the middle-of-the-night interruptions when sleeping with the mother/sisters/neighbor, the motel manager that always has a vibrator running [Edit: this was reduced to once per day in v0.25], the random events when entering a motel room, etc. These are events are automatic and become tiresome after a few times and some of them no longer make sense with the current progression of the character. They need to be disabled or have a substantially reduced frequency when they no longer serve a purpose for gameplay. There's also the management aspect with the MC needing to maintain an attendance in school, work a specific number of shifts per week in the restaurant, and keep Lisa and Anna sexually satisfied. All of these only serve to make the grind even longer and more boring. Most of us already have boring lives, we play games to escape our boring lives. The games we play shouldn't be boring, too.
There's a lot going on in the game and it's sometimes too much to manage, especially given that some of the tasks aren't tracked in a way the player can understand, which adds to the player's frustration. The quest/hint system is garbage and needs to be completely reworked. There are games that have mastered this type of quest/hint system, but for whatever reason, the developer chose to do his own overly-complicated thing. Again, reinventing the wheel for no reason.
Overall:
I really want to love this game, but there's just as much to dislike in the game as there is to like. Playing from one update to the next was sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating, but always tedious and boring. Most recently, updates have become so tedious that I don't even want to play them anymore. It is clear that the developer is having trouble balancing the game mechanics as well as balancing time spent on new content with time spent on fixing bugs. It's only getting harder to manage as the game becomes more complex and it's evident by the number of new bugs introduced into old content while new content was being developed.
For this to be 5-star game, the game needs the following improvements:
1. Improve the "Progress" system to include hints on what the player can do next to actually make progress.
2. Improve the terrible English translation.
3. Simplify the GUI and make it consistent.
4. Eliminate all random triggers.
5. Eliminate all grinding for lewd events. Daily grind like going to school, work, etc. is fine because it has a "management" aspect, but for the lewd content, there's no need to force players to repeat the exact same things over and over because there's enough content that it's not necessary.
Unfortunately, the developer has doubled down on continuing to move in the same direction, and as a result, players have expressed that they've reached their breaking point and stopped playing. I'm not far behind. Just look at the number of reviews that mention cheat mods and cheating with console commands. This game just isn't fun for most players in its out-of-the box state and the only way many players can enjoy it is to cheat.
