[v0.9.17]
This should be a 5-star game. The art and animation are excellent and the sex scenes are plentiful. The gameplay mix of point-and-click adventure with RPG sandbox/life-sim and card battles is essentially solid, though excessively grindy. The story is basic but fun.
However, it's held back by three things.
First, the UI is terrible. The action button you need to use to proceed or to do something varies between Enter, Space, Mouse-click, and E (and occasionally others), when it could all be done in one button. A lot of the time you have to try them all until you find one that works. You hold Shift to run, but it has to be the left Shift; the right one—which would be more convenient for pressing along with the arrow keys—doesn't work. You can't click to walk, except to skip directly to a destination, but for other parts of the game you need to use the mouse cursor, so you need to switch back and forth between mouse and keyboard control.
Dialog shows up painfully slowly, and there's a huge lag if you try to skip it. Since conversations are padded with characters saying ". . ." every other line, this soon gets almost unbearably tiresome, and it's very easy to accidentally skip when you finally get to an actually important line of dialog.
This all may not sound like a huge problem, but it makes the game slow, uncomfortable, and irritating to play.
The second issue is that a bunch of the content, and progress in various parts of the game, is capped and gated behind level and storyline checks in ways that are not communicated at all. You can waste hours trying to progress to more explicit scenes in the massage parlor or when camming, only to find that the only way to get to that content was to level up in the fighting part of the game. (While at other times, you do just need to grind, without any feedback along the way.) Or you might try to level up, only to find that you first need to proceed in some storyline. When there are multiple current quests in the quest log, it might be that one has to be done before the others, but you just have to guess at the order.
The final and the biggest issue is that the game is shockingly buggy, and has been for the whole length of development. This ranges from cosmetic bugs (faces that suddenly disappear from bodies, splash screens that don't fully disappear when fading out, multiple music tracks playing simultaneously), to missing translations from Russian, to major bugs in the story logic that can lead to dead ends, lock you out of most of the content, or just make the game freeze if you do things the developers didn't think of or in the "wrong" order. You need to save often, and consult the game thread to avoid the most common bugs. (In the current version, v0.9, for example, you need to not fight the Catwoman burglar a second time until you've completed everything else, because it triggers the end of the game.)
So it's a game that's often painful and frustrating to play. Still gets three stars from me because the sex scenes really are good, and because it can be fairly fun once you learn how to avoid or tolerate the bugs.
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