Let me just start with the point that I love the concept of this game. Not enough games follow this very realistic situation of "the one that got away". I kinda wish a bit more was done in the game to help the girl mirror the girl the player is really thinking of, but that would be pretty hard to pull off anyway.
Some more pros
-Good photos
-The writing itself isn't bad.
That's pretty much it.
But ohhhhh boy the cons.
A lot of quick cons:
- The brown text of the girlfriend is unreadable, I have to highlight all of it to read it
- The girlfriends name likes to randomly revert to "Suzy" in certain scenes which kind of hurts immersion a lot
- It's sooooo grindy. Why do so many game makers think its fun to just click click click the same stuff over and over for story progression?
- One of those games I'm beginning to dread where story only occurs once a week, because obviously all players want to do nothing but click meaningless buttons for an entire week to keep their stats up between actually /playing the game/.
This is a long con so I have to explain it in detail. The fitness stat. For some reason this this stat seems to think you can't work at an office job without being 'properly in shape' (As a long time computer nerd that is definitely not true) and that 'not being in shape' somehow makes you exhuasted, tired, and unable to function (Also definitely not true.) This dude's fitness bar acts like he's 60+ years old and if he goes a few days without working out he becomes exhausted and can't function, which is pretty hilarious because I always found working out to be something that made me more exhausted. Somehow in this game the cure to being tired is to work harder.
Okay so ignoring the lack of logic here, let's focus on the real problem, because this is a erotic game and we can't expect perfect logic.
The real problem is the game expects you to go to the gym every day or nearly every day- yet it's about 6 clicks to do so. There's a shortcut for going to the freaking park- which there's no point to do except to buy drugs like a freaking criminal- but there is no shortcut for the gym.
The process is
>Click go outside, wait for new page to load.
>Click go to gym, wait for new page to load.
>Click work out, and the text moves around again. (Or click 3 action workout, which its nice this is there though logically makes very little sense.)
>Click go back outside, wait for new page to load.
>You thought it was over? Haha think again now you have to click Go back home in order to finally get back to square 1.
This is five full clicks, on different areas of the screen, done daily. Every week means doing this 35 times. 35 freaking clicks just for 1 tiny and annoying facet of the game, every single week. Which, if you try to ignore, makes it so you cant work anymore, so when the weekend comes you have no money and can't progress the actual story of the game.
On the subject of excessive and boringly wasteful clicking, you can also work every day (Except weekends because every game designer wants to annoy us with those lol) which again is three clicks. I don't understand why clicking "Go to work" isn't enough to tell my character to make money. Apparently I have to "Go to work" and then also "Start working" once I get there, cause everybody goes to work only to hang out or something lol. Then I also have to click again to come home, so there's another annoyance but at least "leave" is a reasonable thing to have a click. Oh yeah sometimes you get to work overtime apparently completely at random and that's an extra click but I can forgive that but it gives bonus cash.
Even further, after a certain number of days you also have to deal with a basically unstoppable perversion meter which you have to spam using the computer every single day, as if working and gym wasn't already incredibly annoying enough, but really doesn't work anyway and makes you a pervert which for some reason makes it okay for them to legally dock your pay and waste your work time so it forces you into even more meaningless clicks.
I can already say 1 change that would immensely make this game more fun for everyone who played- condense the entire work week into one single event. You pick your actions for the whole week, and done. Then instead of clicking 35 times for gym, 14 times for your computer, and about 16 times for work- a total of 65 wastes of time- you can just do it once and then the week is over and you can go back to story.
Unfortunately, that's when we hit the story.
Is the writing for the story good? Not really sure, maybe. It seems alright. The problem is I really can't get to any of it. The way the system is set up is that I have to see a collection of random events- the SAME random events- over and over and over and over in an incredibly unrealistic and immersion breaking way, in order to gain an incredibly minuscule amount of stat points so that you can do the whole week all over again and try again and hope you've either made enough stat points for something to change, or you won't just get the same dang random event again. Which, every random event always happens the same way, the author doesn't even seem to pretend these are just 'similar' events, it's the exact same script, basically replaying what you already saw. Remember when that only happened in games when we did the same action because we /wanted/ to see the same scene twice? Not anymore!
It kind of feels like the author just actually wants his players to suffer in order to gain progress.
But to be honest, I did find a loophole early on in the game, which is the only reason I got as far as I did. Early on you can avoid all 3 'actions per day' and just click sleep every single day until the actual story scene, so you can actually watch story in a row like how story is meant to be shown in every non grind twine game.
Even though she says you need 100$ every time you see her, for some reason that isn't actually true until you reach the point of the game where you can do "Dates" or have her "Come over", both of which are incredibly disappointing for how much effort it actually takes to reach that level. Most of them are 1 picture if you're lucky and some surprisingly vanilla text most of the time about pretty common date-type stuff.
Here's another thing that's painful- the submissive stat system. I mean what is even going on with this system? Now I'm no expert- well, I mean I have played thousands of games- but generally speaking when a game introduces a 'stat' it explains this stat to you at some point, or it's self explanatory/mysterious. I didn't really get any of those vibes.
You start at like 120 submissiveness or something along those lines and I honestly have no idea if the goal was to make the number go higher or go lower. The 'help' section which wasn't very helpful made it seem like the goal was to make it go down. Also the help section mentions another hidden stat about her happiness meter or something which I never saw. Perhaps that's later in the game, but who knows, I never saw it have an effect either way.
My point on this, is we as the players have to suffer through endless amounts of pointless clicking, and why do we do this? Because we have a goal we are trying to reach. But in this game the goal isn't even clear. I have no idea if I'm working towards my goal, or making the wrong choices and thus working farther away from it.
I suppose, lastly I should mention one more small complaint, which would be a combination of lack of content. Not having a lot of content just means an early stage of a game, fine, but this game teases you with all these different places you can go and all these things you can do. But none of them work. Literally everywhere you can visit is pointless except work. Maybe later in the game there are purposes for some of these places but considering even leaving your house steals another action from you, I feel like the existence of all these places without events just hurts the game even more. Shouldn't these places be introduced once they become relevant, or once events have actually been written for them in the game, rather than thrown in early as a placeholder? As someone who plays a lot of unfinished games, it's very frustrating to constantly be faced with things saying "No content here yet", or even worse, some placeholder text that makes it seem like events might happen there if we just keep visiting but in reality nothnig will ever happen. Or maybe it will eventually on some 1% chance? Who knows.
I tried really hard to like this game and I still want to. But in it's current state it's honestly torture and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody unless it gets cleaned up.
When my arm hurt from all the excessive clicking and I finally gave up on this game I think I was reaching near day 100 and my character still hadn't even experienced an orgasm, nor was there any indication or hinting that he would ever get one. In fact I feel like the game had completely forgotten about the blue balling of my main character. Not that I suppose it mattered, since I never got one either.
