I've been playing this game for the first time, and overall I think it's fantastic. I generally dislike Ren'Py games because they feel so on the rails, but this has the right combination of sandboxy life sim mechanics, player autonomy, variety, and good writing with interesting characters. Some constructive criticism, sorry if some of it seems harsh:
- I'm sure this has been mentioned endlessly, but performance is abysmal. It's so confusing too. I just don't understand why this game feels so sluggish when I can play something like RDR2 and not have problems. I've tried playing around with all the Shift-G options and nothing really helps. I can see my framerate dropping even when I hover over parts of the UI. It's just bizarre, and it really detracts from the overall experience. Playing this game feels like wading through molasses.
- I spend so much time searching this thread trying to figure out how to trigger things. I constantly fear that I'm missing NPC quests and character development. And the guide is extremely barebones and out of date. The game should do a better job of indicating when NPCs have reached a new interaction tier, like with exclamation marks or something, and maybe hinting more strongly at where things can potentially go and providing running updates on the NPC info pages. Between the lack of both in-game information and community information, it's hard to figure out what I can do now, what I can eventually do if I meet certain mysterious requirements, and what I'm potentially missing out on at any given moment.
- This one might not be popular, and I get that it's almost certainly too late to do anything about it anyway (it's even the title of the game). But I find the whole "fixer" backstory to be by far the weakest part of the game's narrative, and it feels at odds with everything else. It feels like the game was originally supposed to be centered around this espionage-related storyline, and then went off on this lewd life sim tangent (which it really succeeded at), and now the original story feels pretty tacked-on, jarring and unnatural, like two separate games squished together. I basically just do my best to ignore it and pretend it isn't "real" (i.e. "it was all a dream..."), because honestly, the whole "new body" thing actually detracts from my character's plausibility and makes what she goes through feel less important and real. If there needs to be this other story thread running through the game where she does jobs for a secretive government agency, there are less farfetched ways to set that up than "you basically died in a car crash and we miraculously put your brain in brand-new body, which we can subsequently customise at our whim to make you the perfect undercover agent". I guess what I'm trying to say is that it makes the MC feel inhuman. Which, to me, is a shame. Because a narrative-driven game like this in part succeeds based on its ability to make the MC feel human.
