Shambling through smut alley I happen upon a tale as old as time, hoping that it may have some meaningful end, I instead find that it still goes on and on and on. Much like my reviews.
Speaking of, I've been wanting to touch up on this title ever since I've been writing these reviews out, oh, nearly five years ago? It was one of the first games that popped into my mind all those years ago, and at the time it felt like it was really coming into form. This game has a reputation of being one of the ancients, and in being the ancients it’s something you expect to pop up on the feed every now and then. Since then I’ve seen maybe close to five real-porn smut games come and even sometimes actually release to the holy 1.0 that feel leagues ahead of the era the game’s stuck in. And that will essentially be my bias throughout the review that you can keep in mind, as I pretty much share it with the many other reviews realizing that this game hasn't changed all that much, in as much as it wants to change constantly.
So what is the Company? This in itself is one of the major contentions that comes with the game, as the Company itself had started out as an idea springing up from an older title that went by the wayside. Taking their very very similar premise they ran wild with it before, well, eventually coming to the same point that killed their predecessor. It's going nowhere, or more so it's going as fast as a car spinning it's own tires while the brake handle's cranked all the way back family-style.
The Company started out, and still somewhat adheres to their premise of being a corruption game. You start out as a self insert he/she/trans character that invents the golden formula of a hypno sex drug for your senior year project at Uni before being noticed by corpos wanting a piece of the creampie. Going by the titular name The Company you are soon recruited by them to run wild at their personal labs in further upgrading, refining and specializing your golden serum, while spreading out said love to your coworkers, household and at times quest-specific characters all by your own means in figuring out which direction you want to steer them to.
What that essentially steers itself towards is that the further you progress through the main story the more you get to further refine your original serum (if you’re running w/o cheats that you’ll eventually default to on top of utilizing the freeplay mode). You can then dose all those around you (namely in secret) in pushing them to be more openly sexual, and also influencing them to either be more dominant, submissive or loving depending on what route you have available to them. This in itself diverges in allowing a multitude of paths for certain characters that go beyond just the latter, such as suggestive actions they can do daily, what they want to do with you and what they can potentially do with other characters. It's not just be more dom/sub as by looking at the pathways available on the main f95 page, you can see that with Ava alone (actually just Ava hint hint) there's a lot of flavor. Mostly. Well get to this later on in the review.
The above in itself has gone through multiple variations throughout the near decade this game is climbing towards. The above should've been the golden goose formula of where the Company started, ended and at the very least boiled down to as a focus.
But that's just not the case, being here for so many years shows that both the premise and the promise of this game, corruption, is really not there. At least not in the capacity many thought it would be. The Company seems to be joining the many where it just loses focus on what you remember it being the further the version numbers tick, considering that despite me originally stating that I wanted to write a review on this years ago, the game development time has stretched far beyond that in itself. This game has been spinning it's tires since 2017 (patreon-wise that is), and it is now the year of our lord 2023. A whole six years of this somehow still feeling as though it's stuck somewhere in the middle of what it wants to be.
The problem with the Company (in me also joining the many other reviews here) is that, systems come in, systems get taken out, code gets written, rewritten, reworked, and/or tossed out. This game feels like scope bloat constantly that can hide itself real well to many newcomers. Going through blurred memories, this game at one point had a sex "battle" system in which choices in banging would up a pleasure bar for both parties, there used to be actions that pushed the envelope beyond what your serum did (ie sexual actions you can force before you dosed appropriately, not my type of thing but it was around), and of course the ever-ethereal debate on 2d artwork vs real porn that never seems to come around (until now, I guess maybe, they've aborted it once before). That's just a little taste and ultimately, that's what happens when you have your first game as a testbed for various ideas despite it affecting the main product, rather than being separate projects in of themselves.
And now for example? Slave management, which may or may not stay, get reworked, or add more dev time to something that neglects the other aspects of this game that years later are barely getting touched up on. Only now are we getting further refinements to serum routes that delve into characters left in the weeds after years of no touch ups, but just barely. And only now, on it's second try that is, are we getting the 2d art that they kept wanting to implement, in spite of it not really fixing the bareness that this game sometimes invites.
Such as that Ava serum route I mentioned, you think maybe, with the formula of the game inviting that much creativity in how you can, I don't know, USE your formula to corrupt people to your whimsies that maybe that is the premise of the game, or at least the core. And yet, Ava is still the only character that got that treatment. The rest of the cast by a far majority is still largely linear in going down the sub/dom paths as to what they are to serve as, with content smelling rather old and stale after all these updates in comparison. Which isn't much of a good thing considering that every new update feels like it's spreading itself further thin.
And again all of this is just happening now, who knows with them implementing 2d art whether a lot of this can even be changed anymore, on top of maybe the devs once more hopping on another new thing they want to implement more fiercely as a mechanic that again repeats the cycle of where the fuck are we going?
And that's pretty much it. That's the feeling as there is so much more I can write, but again a lot of it is what the Company used to be. With it going on it's sixth year of dev time, and with no end in sight I can rightfully say that this game is never going to be anything really. Maybe one day it's that game I remember from all those years ago, another day it's trying something new, and another it's rewriting something old that feels as though adds nothing. There's no identity anymore on the amount of bloat this keeps intaking and shedding.
That’s why it’s hard to ultimately recommend this title beyond a newcummer’s perspective. For a new player, this is a lot of bang for your (free) buck, however to actually stick to this title and support it is too then tie yourself to 6~ years of devtime that has evolved into the doughnut they keep spinning on which they've been trying to shake up ever since 2017/18. Just know you'll never see an end version nor feel as though that that favorite thing/character/element you love about the game is ever going to be worked on until (maybe) years later.
Ultimately, like the many, it should've been done years ago yet here I am still reading changelogs that give me deja vu. 3/5 maybe a 4 if it ever comes to a head.