The Solarion Project [v0.22 Public]
Okay, I'm definitely going to be a little bit biased in this review just because I love WitchKing00. Eons ago, when I was a younger individual, and he was regularly putting out work, he was one of my favorite artists. To this day, seeing his dumb little noses in side profile fills my heart with absolute joy. I have also heard some not-so-great things about the developer and his tendency to abandon/take forever on games. I will not be considering that in the review; I will write about it as if it is a game that will still receive many updates in the future and hopefully get much better.
Story
It's really a tale as old as time. Your porn father has died and left you his ship filled with sexy women he was not having sex with. Interestingly enough, there is no mystery behind how he died, and outside of the characters bringing it up and mentioning how sad they are that he died, there isn't a deeper rabbit hole to go down there. You are just the new captain of the ship. There's not really an overarching plot or mystery to solve or war to stop. The main character is also a very well-meaning and sweet shota with a big penis, which is again par for the course. You can do things with each of the girls on the ship in whatever order you want, or you can take on random missions. I will say that each of the girls are quite well written and have their own distinct personality. You get to uncover more about each of them as you talk to them. It did make me wish the small talk options changed as you learned more, but alas, they do not. It's much harder to talk about positives than negatives, but there's a lot to love here. There was the ship mom who feels guilty after the death of her sibling, the angry and aggressive gal with a husband who no longer loves her, the awkward geeky teenager that was also an ex Child Soldier, the big mysterious muscled green one, the big friendly elf, and the anti-geneva convention scientist. My only complaint is that a lot of it felt unfinished. I loved the random events and one-off girls, but it did feel like a lot of them introduced plot threads that were immediately dropped. In the future, I hope to see more overarching plot and more dumb little plot threads that solve themselves by the end of the quest. I would be happy meeting a character, helping them out, having sex, and then they're gone forever.
The Structure
Now we get into the actual meat and potatoes of the game. (To warn you this is where I have the most thoughts, and it's where I get the most nitpicky.)
Because I'm not a little bitch, I didn't pick VN mode, but it really didn't matter because almost none of the actual non-VN things were finished. It made me question why there were two modes if the modes were almost identical until some hypothetical later point in the game.
For the character naming section, the kerning is absolutely terrible, and it feels like they imported a stock screen and called it a day. I do not think that you are supposed to have a custom name, as there were several errors associated with giving yourself or the ship a custom name. Often, it will either ignore your custom name and use the default name, or you'll just get garbage text. The menuing is also a little bit convoluted and cluttered, and it feels like the type of thing that could be streamlined for easier access.
Additionally, there's no rollback, and you cannot save while having a conversation which makes trying to see all of the text very difficult. Compounding this, the skip text isn't very fast, so often I would accidentally skip a line of dialogue trying to get it to go quicker. Then if I wanted to read it, I would have to reload a save from before the start of the conversation and then sit through all of the dialogue to get back to the same point. You would think that this is something that you could change in options, and there is an options menu, but even though there were visual and control options in the settings, you couldn't actually change anything. You can click on them, which would take you to a blank screen for either. It's a minor nitpick, but it will bother you while you're playing.
The best and most creative part about the whole game would have to be the setting. You're in space, and space is massive. I really loved how big the Galaxy was and how you could click on basically any solar system and look at all of the planets there. A tracking system shows you exactly where you need to go and for what character, and it is one of the best additions to the game. However, I did also notice that many of the planets had no description and seemingly random names, such as my favorite planet, Mexico. I feel like there's quite a bit of opportunity there. Why not have a Patreon reward where patrons get a planet named after them or get to name a planet? And as cool as it would be to have something to do on all of these planets, I know that that isn't realistic with the amount of art that would go into it, but I do think that each planet could be given a little blurb of text. I know that people would be more than willing to write it. Heck, even I would write little blurbs of text for planets. It would be nice to see more optional planets to travel to, even if there's no sexual content. If not more art, there could be maybe a space smuggler system. Stop at a planet, and each planet has unique buying and selling prices for goods. It would incentivize exploration and give the game a solid money system.
Glitches
Okay, I feel I should specify that this is a glitchy game. I did encounter quite a few glitches. Throughout my time playing the game, it soft-locked or crashed four times. Not a terrible amount, but enough that I was paranoid about it throughout my entire playthrough. I will arrange the glitches in order of most devastating to least devastating.
When you receive risque photos from each of the girls, if you go to the messages and press the download button, you will get soft-locked most of the time because there is no way to leave that image. You can't click out of it; you can't press keys to escape; you are trapped there forever. So if you want to see the full-sized risque images, you have to save the game and then look at the image. You will get soft-locked. Then you close and reopen the game and load your previous save.
While you're with Shuma, you have the option to cuck her and sleep with the Red Queen to help out Shuma. If you do choose to do so, there's a crash where the image size decreases significantly to the upper left corner. It would only crash two out of every three times, and when it didn't crash, you would have to finagle a little bit to not get soft-locked there.
Quite a few times, the developers forgot to remove a model after you finished talking to them. Normally this isn't harmful at all, and it just means that you'll get a character's model stuck on screen no matter where you go, but you can normally get rid of it by activating a different character model (Character stuck on screen until you talk to a different one). If you'd like to see this glitch, talk to Kittenna about her species or ask Malaena anything at all. Normally this isn't bad, and it is funny, but it can occasionally cause soft locks. This is the only one that I haven't totally figured out what causes it, but it does happen sometimes. I've had it happen with Kittenna and with Mia when talking about her freedom.
Occasionally the name you choose won't appear, such as Shelly's first event where she will address you as [var:4?]. It also happens during Malena's first scene, occasionally when Naetu talks, and during the Catherine-Malena threesome, to name a few times.
Usually, there are interactive alerts on the screen, signifying what you can interact with. However, bringing up your phone on any of these screens eliminates all of the interactive alerts. You can still click them; there are just no alerts.
The Content
The sexual content it has is great. It is extremely vanilla, though, mostly blowjobs, boobjobs, sex, and sometimes threesomes. It's not too bad; despite the slower setup, you can progress each character pretty quickly if you want. There is a single character that hints at anal and lets you barely finger her ass, but that is the spiciest that it gets so far. This isn't to say that the vanilla is bad, and I think it suffers from what a lot of earlier development games suffer from, which is that half or more of the sex scene are build up to the sex, and then once you have sex once or maybe twice it's already over. It just leaves you wanting more. The threesomes are all very fun, and whenever you get to have sex with a random side character, it's very well done. There is also a singular voice scene, and it is voiced excellently. The scene was voiced as a test to see how people would react, and I would say that it's pretty great. It made me wish that the rest of the game was voiced, especially since there's no way to increase text speed, so you'll either have to hold space and risk skipping some words or sit there for half of it. The sex scenes are good, but they do feel very starter-level. There are also different outfits that you can make the girls wear, but it does feel like a feature that is still in development.
The TLDR
I love the artwork and concept, but when you promise the sky, I get disappointed. I do think that some quick tweaks will make the game way more enjoyable, and I have to hope that the game keeps growing because it has so much potential. Very fun, would recommend it to other people. Probably between a 4 or 5, but I'm generous I guess.