Why the hell would Vivian act like this? So it's NOT a "normal" scene. This way we are showing scenes which would not happen at that point during a normal story arc playthrough.
Respectfully, while that seems a fairly reasonable response, you have to create the groundwork for those types of scenes - ie. creating a dream sequence/unreliable narrator scenario. They didn't really do that here. Just kludging them together seems a failure of plotting, and kind of disrespectful of the players who spend money on the game [like I did as a Patreon until very recently].
And while we're on the subject of game construction, I should point out that I recently got an email from Patreon asking me if I was interested in resuming my recently-ended patronage. For reasons detailed below, I am not planning on doing that anytime soon. So, if anyone reading this is going to simply dismiss my comments as part of the pirate crowd, please recall that I - much like everyone else here, was at one time inspired to become a patron after seeing/playing the game here.
I recall several conversations with at least two of Dots' previous games regarding having something other than white women being possible love interests and Final Girls. While baby steps were taken in this regard with Yuki, there remained a bunch of cringey stereotypes that increased the 'ick' factor. The same applies to Victoria in that same game, full of Latina stereotypes; she runs a f--king taco truck, and her dad is a thinly veiled interpretation of Danny Trejo's 'angry, violent Mexican'. Ugh.
Mr. Dots' portrayal of people of color has been and continues to be dreadful, for the most part. Putting your Asian characters in a kimono and stuffing that kimono with as many Asian stereotypes as possible, as you did with Yuki in Sunshine Love, and making a secondary Asian character in that same game some big-chested version of a geisha-type Yuki was, quite simply, cringe-worthy and offensive, especially if one considers that historical animosity between Chinese and Japanese peoples which endures even today. I wish it ended there, but there are a lot of other issues in Dots' games where anyone of color is there as a side-chick distraction, not a potential love interest.
Only white women were potential long-term love interests. This has been true in *all* of Dots' games, allowing for interracial sexual relationships only as pointedly short-term.
As noted, I had pointed out these deficiencies several times.Each time, I was told by someone representing Dots that you were simply 'catering to what your players wanted', to what Dots himself "preferred"; that the next game would have more inclusion, more diversity. This claim of insisting that only white women is what your players want is in itself offensive, painting them as various shades of racist. Admitting that Dots prefers only white women as Final Girls in his games only increases the cringeworthy aspect of this.
And, despite the ongoing claims and promises of future diversity, Thief of Hearts appears to carry on that apparent tradition of 'whites-only' preference from as recently as the second update for ToH in that there continues to be no potential Long-Term-Interests with a woman of color. Indeed, there appear to be approximately zero people of color darker than white in the game at all.
The accumulated evidence that your dev team presents in the form of your games suggests that - when asked hard questions about diversity - offer only those soft, market-friendly doublespeak answers which champion diversity while having no real intention of offering women of color as valid love interests in your games..
So, when someone asks me if I chose to end my patronage of Dots' games over the lack of diversity, I'd have to say yes, but it's coupled with the fact that they promised to provide it before to keep their market while knowing full well that the game they promised diversity in had no actual diversity.
In short, they lied.
