This is the first in a trilogy of games, I've reviewed each of them, and a fair bit of my review will be copied from the other two reviews given the games share similar art, story elements, and gameplay. I'd probably give this game 2.5 if I could, but given the overarching narrative between the games is a total waste of time, and the series never gained a proper ending I've leaned towards the 2 stars.
TLDR A game with potential that is squandered in an attempt to pad the length of the game with arbitrary difficulty and where's wally-esque gameplay. Find the CGs, dont bother with the game. If you really need to play it, get the walkthrough.
Review:
This game has some aspects that I like, some I really don't, it has some good ideas - but most of them are executed really poorly. It's like when a amateur artist does a painting, gets it to a good place, but then keeps slapping more and more unnecessary paint on, they start making mistakes, things get confused, and any chance of a quality work is lost.
First, lets talk about the art. Nikraria's art is obviously an acquired taste. I, for the most part, really like it. I find the stylization pretty sensuous and erotic. But. This game, this series, and Nikraria's work in general has the issue that all of the characters look pretty similar. Almost all of them have unrealistically large breasts, even on characters that dont really have them in their original media. If this were occasional, or even on half the characters lets say, it would be fine. But it is every singe character. The other commonality is almost all of Nikraria's characters are redheads with bobcuts. He loves Leliana from Dragon Age (who is one of my favorite characters) for instance, and this game series features the protagonist, her mother, and her aunt as the three main sexual characters. All of them look almost identical.
The other issue with the series' art is that all the sexual situations are very samey, its either vanilla or tentacles. Thats really it.
So basically I like the art style, and think it can do a lot to improve characterization, but its really kinda boring after a while. Which leads us to the writing and story.
The whole series is lovecraftian horror-y stuff. It's a decent setting for a porn game, and for a while it's effective, but the series just repeats the same story beats over and over and over again until it's just dull as hell. Most lovecraftian stuff has elements of growing madness, of an unreliable narrator, of questioning reality. the madness is never expounded upon meaningfully. It just shes spooked and horny, and then in sex scenes shes spooked and horny, and in game over sex scenes shes spooked and horny and then loses herself to being spooked or horny. It's the same every fucking time.
The narrator is hinted at being unreliable briefly in the second game in the series, but that gets blown away like 10 minutes into the game and never really comes back. Reality itself is never really questioned. Everyone sees the same stuff and perceives it in the same way, its just how batshit nuts they go that changes.
So yeah, another good idea thats just squandered through constant, unending repetition.
I should also mention that the English is understandable, but has frequent spelling, grammar, and word choice mistakes.
Then we get to the downright awful stuff. The fucking gameplay. The idea again has some promise. Making you go to different places and find shit to advance the story is a perfectly acceptable way to give a narrative context. But the tiny size, and limited visual markers make this a massive chore in this game. It is nowhere near as bad as it is in the third game, but it's still a pain. If the items were highlighted it'd take nothing away from the story or experience. It'd make it a much less frustrating game.
The other issue is the button to explore rooms doesnt appear the first time you enter a room, so if like me you just go through each room until you find things, then you'll have to go back and go through everything again. ALSO if you go to each room once the game doesnt give you bullets for a gun you find AND locks you out of getting the bullets. THEN it lets you play for another 20 minutes finding everything only to game over you. WHICH IS FUCKED. You have to enter a room upstairs twice in order to get bullets BEFORE entering the kitchen. The game doesnt tell you the gun doesnt have bullets, and it doesnt give you any hint that you should go back to the room. Its just there to fuck with you and lengthen the game.
So much of this game just has a black background. Its so fucking lazy and immersion breaking. Many of the items you click will just give you the same black screen gameover for no reason. Its just trial and error. Its just shit design.
All in all. It had potential, but there is so much there to intentionally stop you from progressing that it isnt worth playing. Find the CGs, otherwise take a pass.
