tl;dr charming but flawed game is a vehicle for a foolish writer to preach about contemporary world issues and nutjob conspiracies.
I want to like this game. I really do. There's a lot that ticks my boxes - easy sex on demand any time or place with virtually everyone you interact with, a huge cast of characters, some really good and interesting world building and a neat little mystery tied into it that works well enough to pull you through the world.
Navigation and the gameplay loop are just as engaging as they need to be - it's man of the house with simpler options and goals are generally obvious, clearly defined, and seem to trigger appropriately and quickly. dealing with the large cast can be annoying because everyone barely looks different and there's like 50+ names to keep track of, but the phone having a directory and location for all the characters makes that easy enough to deal with.
I really enjoyed the first 70% of the game. The story was engaging, winning over the ladies was fun, and constantly unlocking new areas/characters is a good pull. except...
the sex system, which apparently has been rebuilt recently, is extremely limited. This is understandable for such a large cast, but it's a little disappointing when the majority of characters have 2 options which both have near identical animation loops to each other, and every character has identical sex animations. There's a fair amount that have 3 options, and maybe 10 have 4! as far as i can tell, only 4 have 5 options. Again, with the scope of the game, I get that this isn't where the creator wants to invest time, but when you finally get tired of the same tiny animation on every character of every shape and size, you realize something else.
the pacing and economy kinda sucks. The game has you running around to chat with 2-3 characters at a given point in time (which is great), but there's little thought given to which characters are where and when. Critical characters will disappear for an entire weekend with no way to access them. Ok, well there's a time/money dump to build up and that's neat and engaging, except there's nowhere to work on weekends. the job givers at the town hall don't show up and the school, in spite of literally sucking your dick to have you work there, won't let you in to grind work/money after hours. The amount of money you get made sense at the beginning of the game, but when you've passed that point and you're only really dealing with the money dump (building your own house), your earning potential is extremely small in comparison. A typical workday, maximized, will still yield less than $100, with individual purchases for the house averaging $800. You do get $1000/wk to help with the time sink, but there's no reasonable way to earn the necessary amount for 4-5 purchases for 5 rooms with a rather large time and stat cost built into each instance.
My point with that is when you tire of the sexytimes, you're left with the storyline and the gameplay. The gameplay is frustrating because you're gated with money to do one thing per week, and on weekends it's often the only thing to do. So what about the storyline?
The main storyline and mystery is intresting and engaging. the characters are kinda flat, but the worldbuilding is really cool and everything that got revealed made me want to learn more. and then...
then the creator decided that a porn game was a great place to soapbox about conspiracy theories. the last 20% of the game is supposed to be an intense race between mobilizing a rebel faction vs. a powerful established order of enemies, but what actually ends up happening is you run around back and forth between doctors and teachers while the creator rants about how lockdowns and masks shouldn't be used, and copy-pasting in a shitload of medical and biological terminology and concepts that he clearly doesn't have the overall context in the field to understand.
The dialogue was always poorly written, but when the poorly written dialogue is a mary-sue preach session about public health in a pandemic, i just cringe until i quit the game. I guess the saving grace is that, because it's a porn game with demonstrated shitty dialogue, people will likely skip over most of the writing.
and that's it. A charming game that needed a few tweaks to be quite good, and some investment into the sex to be legitimately great is instead ruined by an insane creator ranting about having to wear a mask to keep immunocompromised people safe in a pandemic. If I stopped halfway through my run, I'd recommend to all my degenerate friends.
I want to like this game. I really do. There's a lot that ticks my boxes - easy sex on demand any time or place with virtually everyone you interact with, a huge cast of characters, some really good and interesting world building and a neat little mystery tied into it that works well enough to pull you through the world.
Navigation and the gameplay loop are just as engaging as they need to be - it's man of the house with simpler options and goals are generally obvious, clearly defined, and seem to trigger appropriately and quickly. dealing with the large cast can be annoying because everyone barely looks different and there's like 50+ names to keep track of, but the phone having a directory and location for all the characters makes that easy enough to deal with.
I really enjoyed the first 70% of the game. The story was engaging, winning over the ladies was fun, and constantly unlocking new areas/characters is a good pull. except...
the sex system, which apparently has been rebuilt recently, is extremely limited. This is understandable for such a large cast, but it's a little disappointing when the majority of characters have 2 options which both have near identical animation loops to each other, and every character has identical sex animations. There's a fair amount that have 3 options, and maybe 10 have 4! as far as i can tell, only 4 have 5 options. Again, with the scope of the game, I get that this isn't where the creator wants to invest time, but when you finally get tired of the same tiny animation on every character of every shape and size, you realize something else.
the pacing and economy kinda sucks. The game has you running around to chat with 2-3 characters at a given point in time (which is great), but there's little thought given to which characters are where and when. Critical characters will disappear for an entire weekend with no way to access them. Ok, well there's a time/money dump to build up and that's neat and engaging, except there's nowhere to work on weekends. the job givers at the town hall don't show up and the school, in spite of literally sucking your dick to have you work there, won't let you in to grind work/money after hours. The amount of money you get made sense at the beginning of the game, but when you've passed that point and you're only really dealing with the money dump (building your own house), your earning potential is extremely small in comparison. A typical workday, maximized, will still yield less than $100, with individual purchases for the house averaging $800. You do get $1000/wk to help with the time sink, but there's no reasonable way to earn the necessary amount for 4-5 purchases for 5 rooms with a rather large time and stat cost built into each instance.
My point with that is when you tire of the sexytimes, you're left with the storyline and the gameplay. The gameplay is frustrating because you're gated with money to do one thing per week, and on weekends it's often the only thing to do. So what about the storyline?
The main storyline and mystery is intresting and engaging. the characters are kinda flat, but the worldbuilding is really cool and everything that got revealed made me want to learn more. and then...
then the creator decided that a porn game was a great place to soapbox about conspiracy theories. the last 20% of the game is supposed to be an intense race between mobilizing a rebel faction vs. a powerful established order of enemies, but what actually ends up happening is you run around back and forth between doctors and teachers while the creator rants about how lockdowns and masks shouldn't be used, and copy-pasting in a shitload of medical and biological terminology and concepts that he clearly doesn't have the overall context in the field to understand.
The dialogue was always poorly written, but when the poorly written dialogue is a mary-sue preach session about public health in a pandemic, i just cringe until i quit the game. I guess the saving grace is that, because it's a porn game with demonstrated shitty dialogue, people will likely skip over most of the writing.
and that's it. A charming game that needed a few tweaks to be quite good, and some investment into the sex to be legitimately great is instead ruined by an insane creator ranting about having to wear a mask to keep immunocompromised people safe in a pandemic. If I stopped halfway through my run, I'd recommend to all my degenerate friends.
