This is on version 0.05.00.
For clarity, I played on the "female cousin" route.
Starting with the positive, I greatly appreciate the gender selection and, to a lesser extent, the attempt at providing various starting relationships.
Another nicety are the selections found in the "Settings" menu:
"Li with Li"
"Li with Li Autonomy"
"Li with Others"
"Interest in Others"
Which are meant to guard the player from sharing content if they don't wish to engage with it. Always nice to see player choice in this aspect. There are a couple issues with it, though:
- It is not in the "Settings" menu on the title screen, only in the menu found in-game though the phone. This led to me opening the game, going to settings to adjust volume and text speed as I do with every Ren'py game, then only discovering the existence of these settings late in the game.
- They tend not to work, there are a lot of oversights in dialogue and interactions with it.
Aside from that, the models generally look quite good, with the possible exceptions of Dakota and Ava (Dakota's proportions look ridiculous and Ava's stomach seems to change size based on angle).
With those two things out of the way, my experience with "Thirty Days" at this point in time was poor, and I'm mostly going to cover it in a chronological order. Spoilers will be properly marked, but are present to explain incidents in greater depth primarily to provide specfic feedback to the developer. However, as a tl;dr: Clicking "About" on the main menu will crash the game. Yes, this is indicative of the overall quality.
Starting the game, the first thing I noticed were the intro animations, as well as the main menu looping animation. These animations are all very, very low framerate, to an extent that they made me feel sick and I would have vastly preferred still images. In particular, the main menu's background is rather exceptionally poor in this regard due to the massive number of leaves blowing around at a catatonic pace. I'm also generally just not a fan of the breast exposure on the title screen, as it tends to define the tone and characters prior to the player meeting them.
Upon starting the game, I noticed an immediate issue due to my intent to play as female: There is a very awkward introduction to the game where you speak with an "alternate version", as the game puts it, of Kayla. This is where you select your gender and role prior to starting the game. The issue is that your model in these first few renders is very obviously the male, making the jump to female sudden. Here were the clues to this that stuck out to me:
- Initial view of your legs which appear very, very masculine.
- That same render shows male boxer briefs.
- Masculine hand shown shading your eyes from the light.
- Upon selecting female, your nails are suddenly painted red and your undergarments change, making the previous points stick out sorely.
The MC's model should simply not be shown at all prior to gender selection if you intend to have this.
As a whole, this introduction is a poor aspect of the game as it begins the story by taking you out of the story. I would greatly prefer a simple menu upon hitting "Start". Additionally, the dialogue here is extremely overacted, feeling almost child-like. Options for initial definition of your character are either perverted or dumb. Of course, the game's dialogue as a whole carries this issue, always feeling like a parody of sorts. In part this is due to the poor English and plentiful typos, but it's mainly a matter of absurdity and awkward word choice.
The next thing I noticed was the menu background upon right-clicking, which opens the save menu and...nothing else, curiously enough. I'll get to that later, but the issue with this background is that it is a collage of scenes of the characters having intimate relations with...some random guy. Now, the issue here is twofold:
- When playing as a female, it's rather rude to have the player right-click and see the characters with some random guy.
- The guy in this collage does not even appear to be the male protagonist based on the CGs of him, so when playing as a male you're
still right-clicking just to see the girls having sex with some random guy.
Regardless of the intent here, the background should be change to solo images of the girls, or even just use the comic-book like faux load screen sometimes used between scenes.
Speaking of the right-click menu, typically in Ren'Py games you can right-click to open the "Save" menu, which will then have additional tabs on the left for loading, settings, quitting the game, etc. For some reason, the developer decided to remove these options, deciding the phone GUI would be a better place for them. I disagree for four reasons:
- The phone GUI is not initially visible, meaning that during the introduction you are left reloading new games to see the stat effects of different options.
- Those used to Ren'Py games will naturally right-click to look for options, saves, and loads, especially when
- you didn't stop right-clicking from opening the save menu, meaning you just end up having an incomplete menu in your game.
- The phone GUI is just far, far clunkier to quickly save and load with.
Speaking of the phone GUI, its implementation is questionable as it actually interferes with Ren'Py's rollback system. I have never seen this in a game menu before. It's also worth noting the "Inventory" option in the phone has multiple layers of text overlapping and is completely unreadable.
On the topic of the rollback system, the game kindly offers status update messages just above the text box. However, if you miss what it said or couldn't quite read it due to the coloring, don't worry, rolling the text back to view it will in most circumstances
not play the notification again, so get stuffed.
All of those complaints out of the way, let's get into the story. It begins with
It's completely nonsensical and an early example of the game's inability to handle anything remotely resembling foreshadowing.
The next mentionable bit was after reaching the house, you're led up the stairs by Alexis. Here I noticed something very peculiar: The barren backyard. Most areas in the setting are reasonably well-decorated, so this area, which resembles a Roblox landscape from 2009, stood out like a sore thumb. It's an oddity because it is the only area in the game that looked distinctly unbelievable.
Shortly, I encountered another oddity: A player decision leading to the game outcome. Now, that's pretty typical, but it's the details here that make it strange.
It was at this point that I noticed just how
intense the music was despite the conversations being very casual. This turns out to be a repeated issue throughout the game, music is both poorly selected and poorly mixed. I found myself regularly going into the options screen to turn the music volume down or up as tracks changed, because the developer seemingly did not realize they should go through and equalize the volume on them.
My next story issue is after the MC
This poor attempt at foreshadowing carries an issue with Dakota's dialogue.
Dakota's role in the story is a very, very poor one. She is protrayed as an extremely slutty character with not so much as a shred of an attempt to hide that. So if the sister's mom is so strict, in what world would Alexis be allowed to hang out with her? In fact, why has she not tried to sleep with Alexis? In fact, this a key problem with all the characters in the game, even the sisters: Every single one is extremely slutty from the get-go. Mei probably has the best introduction, but of course it turns out she's
The player actually has no real impact on the personalities of the characters, near as I can tell. There's actually a direct contradiction in dialogue regarding Dakota,
It's straight up unbelievable.
Since we're here, let's talk about that
Assuming you don't
, the MC believes that if they fall asleep then
Of course, this is exactly what happens, and then...there's no consequence. The game completely drops this line of logic. No reason even given, it's just gone.
The next big story incident involves Ava, and as you likely expect at this point, it comes with its own host of issues. Following
This is a minor issue, but after
A slightly larger issue,
A similar issue, as a female cousin you refer to Alexis as your "niece" when
When Ava is speaking with Alexis at the table, she tells Alexis that
Ava should not offer to
if "Li with Li" is turned off.
Errors "Image 'DEECm001' not found.", "Image 'DEECm002' not found." when
, followed by "Image 'DEECm009' not found."
My single biggest problem with "Thirty Days" is that it completely lacks any player definition. In fact, at this point, I would state that "Thirty Days" is for all intents and purposes an almost entirely a kinetic novel. What I would like would be for each character to begin distinctly different from each other, and to be molded by the player's choices, but instead the MC is just being dragged around from scene to scene with no actual player input. Every girl is a slut, even those stated to be "innocent", and no choice you make defines anything.
As a direct example of this,
As a whole, "Thirty Days" is just a problematic experience. It is riddled with technical issues, poor storytelling, and an almost complete absence of player input. It is my belief that "Thirty Days" is in need of a complete rework prior to any continuation of content.
