Another good game from this dev. He made it quite strong with "Now & Then", as a AVN heavy with story but no porn forgotten. Story comes first, as it always been with ILS Productions. And it was a good story of survival against all odds. And in the meantime, no survival comes without good old intersex relations, which were portrayed quite life-like. It was enjoyable experience all the way to the final update, story comes to normal end and by itself it's achievement (rare dev can make a good final).
Then there was "The interim domain", showing us that every genius has it's moment of weakness (or that everyone of us is a human and humans do make mistakes). In my opinion, it was the story that made game uninteresting. Writing skill was on the same level, characters were interesting but the story itself was the stone that broke camel's back for me.
And the third game, "Toxicity". The same story trick, humans amid life-changing event, MC is a some kind of common man with nothing to show off, but in this event he got some kind of awaken call and he's trying to overcome the odds. As in the first game, he's surviving not alone but with a group of women. The rest is easy to guess.
What I like about ILS Productions is the that he's not trying to find ideal story scheme and just follows it. He's a writer, so he wrote one story and then he's writing another. He's learning from his mistakes but he's not trying to repeat his first game with the third one, he's writing something new. So, what's new?
In my mind, the most difference was in the way story is told. Again, adult MC with some life experience under the belt. But in this case he's the most common one as he can be. A guy that go with the flow, no ambition, no goal, just following the majority. A loveless marriage, divorce, a job with nothing interesting but everyone needs to pay their bills, some coworkers with the same approach. Then comes the toxic fog. No zombie apocalypse here, just toxic fog. Why - is a mystery, of course, it just happened. And so we see with the eyes of this commoner what is going on and how he tries to survive. Fucking all the girls that's near him, of course. We see how his female coworker falls into depression, how he tries to cure her soul for her to come back into surviving mode, how he justifies for himself each and every sexual encounter... It's the same "Now & Then" but with all the soap opera drama (inside MC's head) and all that "soul research" that some wo... people like to read. I think it worsens the story and storytelling but it's like how Americans see each other and the world around them. Beside that dev made some links to some terms and idioms that some non-Americans can be not familiar with. Not like many people, speaking American English, don't know what second base is (after all, more than half of American movies used that term) but I'd say it's good to have an explanation (and now I know what the first and the third base is).
So tldr (thanks dev for explanation, now I know what it means), it's typical American story about common people that were put into "survive or die" situation, with all the psychology of typical Americans. "Now & Then" was totally fine without it but here... it's like watching some dumb American TV series, clearly worse that "Now & Then".
