The limo driver has a gun?
Bang. You're dead. I take it that you never attempted to resist cooperation with the limo driver. She pulls a gun on you if you refuse to wear the mask. She pulls a gun with you if you go to bed and ignore her when she flashes the lights at you to indicate for you to come out to her.
I personally don't like the mean old lady, but the game wasn't made just for me. If you can, just ignore those characters, if you can't, the game is just not for you.
The game is presently setup such that you literally can not ignore any of the characters. I tested specifically for those routes. You can not avoid attempting to use your power on or otherwise interacting with Sharon following the first crystal vision. You can not leave the house and continue the day without having her make you coffee (MC eats spit, I am almost certain of it.)
You can not avoid the limo driver. You can not avoid Alex. You can not avoid the modeling agency. You can not avoid creeping on targets for the modeling agency. You can not avoid using the mind control at the direction of the plot.
At current, there is no options as is standard in many of the better designed eroge to tell the game "I never want to see this character again."
Best you can do is pretend like the character doesn't exist and skip as fast as possible over all their scenes.
This is in part due to the choice-centric non-game-mechanized design of the prototype at current. Because all the actions that are being coded in are all about leading you to viewing all the hard-produced-and-time-consuming renders, there are no options for simply not activating content. Comments by the devs themselves that I made sure to collect from across the history of the thread here show that as far as the devs are concerned they're being benevolent by subjecting us to all this.
And about the mc being a pushover, i personaly prefer the slow increase in power story rather than him being near omnipotent from day 1.
I ain't asking for the MC to be an overpowered god. I have noted that the logical conclusion of the premises as written is that the MC is an annoying little bug that is going to get dominated by the big bad mind controlling alpha males or he's going to get squashed. Deviations from that would be bad writing in general and inconsistent with the premises. Or they would take master work writers--more than a few--to convincingly sell.
No. My criticism at core is far more about the basic premises of the MC's personality and variations of how the player can or can not chose how they act. IE how they reflect the promise "On your birthday, you find out that you have the power to control other people's minds.
How will you use this newfound power is up to you."
Note the pronouns used there. It isn't "On the Mcfuckin's birthday, he finds out that he has the power to control other people's minds. How he will use this newfound power is up to him." Dev made a promise to the players.
At best, the dev is profoundly fucking up on the delivery of that promise. At worst, this is crypto-sissification or crypto-femdom or crypto-maledom-on-maledom game where a bait and switch is being pulled on the player base in the interest of J.J. Abrams or M. Night Shyamalan style narrative.
At current, objectively how the mind control is used is entirely up to the dev.
Regarding all the criticism, I'm honestly curious what game with Mind Control as main theme would be considered good. I'm mostly referring to DaClown's points, since they seems to be rated best among critics. If there are games that are far superior to this one, I'd like to check them as well.
Overwhored, Harem Collector, VILLAGE of NIGHTMARES (queer content but top notch corruption), the Company, Lab Rats 2 (not great, but at least it has more freedom of choice how you use mind control and who you use it on and what kinds of mind control you use), Ravager, Deviant Discoveries is better in the BDSM department by a lot but could use vast improvements to the actual mind control mechanics, Wife Trainer, Book of Lust, Unholy Arts, Spiral Clicker, Whoremaker, and Anomaly Vault (I think).
For straight up BDSM without mind control, there's a lot of examples that do it better and hotter.
Admittedly most of the "you have an innate mind control power that allows control over subjects by voice or eye contact" is a relatively badly developed genre. Most can't hack the balance between overpowered non-sense and escalations to world domination vs underpowered barely useful powers that hardly are distinguishable from non-mind-control NLP/PUA techniques. Which is like I said a hard genre to write convincingly. There's whole libraries of examples though on places like the MC archives on ASSTR, so these people could learn to depict this stuff better by actually reading the works of better writers in this specific genre.
Apart from that I do agree that creators concentrated mostly on presentation, because this update is woefully lacking in plot development. I do not know process, but I would expect such length in monthly release not quarterly.
The dev is very obviously trained in some older rendering pipeline method. They can produce pretty good 3D models and animation. The vast majority of the "game" is basically just a scaffolding holding together their animations. The programming is unsophisticated and the game design is pretty much non-existent; it is clear that the background of the dev is as an aspiring animator and render tech rather than from the game industry.
What is going on is that it takes them probably about a week to produce a couple minutes of animation. Then they have to go through an editing process that often means making new scenes or re-rendering. Best practice for game design and VN development would be to not worry about getting the final renders in upfront but to slap in fast and dirty place holder art and replace that as the renders finish, so you can focus on the core game design and narrative and getting that out as fast as possible.
The rendering process itself basically progresses as fast as the hardware allows. If the dev is running a single computer for development of all this then their computer may sit there running for days to render a few minutes of animation during which the dev can't use the computer or will at the least suffer performance losses in jointly running tasks.
The dev is making some of the choices that they're making because they want the ending to be a surprise to everyone as it happens. The prudent thing developmentally would be to write backwards. Start with the ending or endings of the game/story and the beginning and just connect those together with nothing fancy just brief sketches and filler text about how it starts and how it ends. Then start adding what they have in sequence between those scenes moving the linking devices to connect the whole graph of the story/game together. Fill it all in as the product is finished rather than making everyone wait until the finished art is ready for an unfinished and untested prototype.
The issue about that approach for the dev is that they're trying to generate interest in their project by frontloading the animation and high detail models which is their strong point and the main selling point. They're making consumable media. Once you know how it ends and you know all the surprises there isn't anything left to read or play. It's one and done. They don't have a replayable game design and don't have intentions as far as I can tell to make and test proper game mechanics for game play.
The whole project then is very fragile because it is destroyed by spoilers. If I sit here and pontificate about the implications of all the details presented so far I can probably work out whatever story it is that they have written and allegedly storyboarded; worse if someone hacked them and leaked their storyboard and spoiled the whole thing. Which would force them either to redo portions of their storyboard to throw off the trail or for them to simply continue as they are with diminishing surprise as time goes by. As more details become unveiled, the player base can work out the endings or ending singular. It's all in all a bad way to develop a living project with crowd funding and crowdsourcing.
If the dev is canny then they will take the mass wild guessing and use that to fill in the gaps or even radically alter their storyboard and make a better product by crowdfunding design and writing work.
My overall criticism is that for interactive fiction it is not interactive whether in the game or in the metagame between the dev and the community.
