The East Block started brilliantly. The first couple updates were fun and had some great scenes that were exactly what you want to show for the potential of your game. Making me a patreon member instantly. From then on it really went downhill. The Dev changed his outlook on the game, got greedy and it went from a fun, sexy romp to a shallow, contrived story. Theres still plenty of great moments in there but overall the tone of the game had a major swing.
He retroactively changed parts of the story to fit the new narrative, along with the couples past. Some were done because of fan backlash. So now the so called corruption of Kathryn, is just a reawakening of a complete slut. Which makes no sense by the way she acts in the present time. Some characters were changed to be more sympathetic as every single character in the game was a complete asshole and rapist. The problem is once they've already done the bad things, you can't turn them around to have them act all innocent, as if it never happened. The lewd and tease scenes also went backwards once he gained a lot of support on Patreon.
So Luke and Kathryn move to New York. He has a fetish for seeing her with other men and doing sexual things in public. She seems to be fine with whatever Luke says and if he really wants her to do it, she's like a mindless bimbo that will go along with it. It seems she gets turned on by making him happy but her facial expressions say otherwise. She is so naive about men and what to do in any situation, as if dicks are new to her lol. Yet later we see that she was already a turbo whore in her teens, so this makes no sense in the present day.
It started with some normal everyday moments that turn sexual. Really fun and well done, where Kathryn asks Lukes advice and he can tell her to be slutty. To some outlandish situations where she has to text him to ask if she can be a slut. It all became very forced and the dev seemed to run out of ideas, so kept reverting back to the same thing, even when it doesn't work for certain situations.
The dialogue between the couple started off well and believable, then became a bit ham fisted and simple. He's not a great writer, so he went to the usual trope of having them speak their feelings constantly. Whether it be their internal thoughts or actual dialogue. Sometimes both at the same time, which gets frustrating. This doesn't happen that often but creeps in more and more each update.
The dev uses dreams and flashbacks constantly. The only reason is to show sex scenes, that he refuses to do in the main story and its irrelevant to the plot. The story has got lost over the updates. It was intriguing initially but has lost all sense and meaning now. With Lukes boss and the dreaded basement. As he keeps delaying showing certain things and adding other scenes and new characters which are superfluous. I can now see that he never had much of a plot, and certain things were alluded to but never fleshed out. So it becomes a jumbled mess. It needed a stricter narrative but he got greedy and tried to add too many extra characters. Now he's stuck himself in a hole where he's only got a very short time to finish off the story, the characters arc, all the fetishes promised, the side characters stories, in a handful of updates. Unless he will again, go against his word and prolong it until he sees fit.
Even though most don't play the faithful path between Luke and Kat, these are the only choices that is supposed to make this VN be called a game. Yet it's irrelevant. You either have Kathryn do sexual things with other guys or say no. That's not a game. It's a Kinetic VN with the illusion of choice. Only twice is there an alternate scene. The first it has the guy in the background instead of joining in,
the second its just a face swap, as the legs and dick is the same shown from the waist down, if you choose either guy to play with Kathryn. Theres only a couple lines of dialogue each update that will change with different choices. The story and dialogue is purposefully done vague so choices don't make a difference and the dev doesn't need to alter things much at all, if you picked yes or no for a scene.
Dev can easily add a quick scene of the couple together or doing something else instead of Kathryn being a slut with other guys. Its laziness and no understanding of why you have choices in the first place. Something that is all too common in VNs today.
This game is mainly involving either old men or hobos as the male counterparts for Kathryn's lewd scenes. I think its great that there is this beauty and the beast style dynamic. The game does lack better writing to setup these scenes but they are still quite good and if you dont mind the old man stuff, it can be pretty fun. If you like exhibitionism then you will love the scenes. Almost every lewd act is in public and/or in front of other people in some form. The problem with these tease scenes is they are so short. I don't think the dev realises that he can extend them without showing sex or anything to extreme, since obviously hes turned it into a slow burn. Players shouldn't expect any sex for quite a while into the game though. This game while at first had fantastic but short tease scenes, then went to cliched quickly. It became expected that it would always cut off abruptly with silly coincidences. Thats fine to withhold sex but you still need to make some long and better teasing scenes, otherwise your main audience doesn't get to do what they are here for lol.
The character models and environments are well rendered for the most part but are just standard Daz figures without any changes. Only a couple characters (Luke and Rebecca) are morphed into more unique models. Kathryn is quite pretty but to me theres something generic about her that I find not as appealing. Her sister Rebecca is more sexy to me. The women overall are not that great looking in here. The detail in faces isn't great and the bodies are even worse, plastic looking dicks and cartoon nipples. The extra props, backgrounds, people, crowds, cars etc are quite poor. As theres hardly any of that. Scenes feel empty and lack realism. You never see an empty cup or dirty clothes. The billboards (crowd extras) used for people are usually the same ones and constantly are going into the ground or not sitting right on chairs etc. If you look at scenes properly, the detail and care just isn't there, even with the main characters, always issues that are left untouched. Hes making thousands per month from this VN but doesn't use any music or proper sound effects. Which is easily obtained for cheap. Hopefully his eye for detail and being more creative will improve. Hes not a pro with Renpy coding, as the variables are still a problem. Sometimes theres major issues with choices that he didn't write the code correctly for, so the player sees or reads the wrong scene or dialogue. His grammar is usually fine but there's still fundamental issues with his phrasing and sentence structure. He's not a writer, so must have an editor. Otherwise he'll never make that next step.
There were characters that were promised to be in the game and have many scenes. This also turned out to be another lie by the dev. Whether he did it on purpose or changed his mind who knows. I found him to be trustworthy and diligent initially. After seeing so many issues with update timing, his ethics and quite a few other things on here and patreon. I feel he was being underhanded the whole time. He loves to play the victim but says so many contradictory things. To the point where I cannot believe anything he says anymore to be truthful. After all the praise I gave to him on here and defending him against others. I feel a complete 180 swing.
The East Block should have been one of the best new games out right now but it has turned into another average VN with a few fun scenes. What a shame.
