The following review is based off my personal experience with playing this Game/Visual Novel... I try to be as brutally honest and detailed as I can, and these are my own opinions and thoughts, from one or more play throughs... The version this review is based on is Ep. 7 v0.10.1...
The developer was not kidding when they say this is a slow burn visual novel... Not sure, but I do get a bit of an Incest vibe with this one...
The visuals of the characters are very well done... I do recognize several of the models, but there were also a few I did not... The backdrops are a mix of ones I've seen before, and ones I have not... There were just a tiny few animations, but they were extremely short with not a whole lot of motion... They could have just been left out entirely, and I would not have minded at all... At the end of the current content, the developers introduce a Navigation system, which felt a bit late to be appearing so far into the current content... For now they are just testing it's functionality... I did have an issue with the navigation highlights, sometimes being far too light colored, almost to the point of barely knowing you've hovered the mouse over them... Also, some of the navigation points didn't always feel intuitive... So it probably still needs some work... The user interface for the character stats is well done, and simple to figure out... I wish the functionality for going Back was turned on, but the entire menu that is typically present in most Ren'py VN/Games is completely turned off in this one... So be prepared to save a lot if you feel you made a bad choice or accidentally clicked the wrong thing, because your only recourse is to go back to a prior save point...
The script for the most part was alright... There were cases all throughout the text where I ran into spelling/grammar errors, and some very light broken English, which might be because some wrong words were used now and then as well... So it needs some more proofreading... The plot revolves around a male protagonist (although now and then you do see the inner-monologue from other characters points of view) who used to be a corporate business man, and had some family issues which lead to divorce... But now he has his adult daughter with him as they move together to a new town... Where he becomes a Junior College instructor, and his daughter attends as a college student... From there the story twists and turns through all the meeting of various other male and female characters... To include and followed by their first week attending the school, along with the first weekend...
The protagonist meets all sorts of characters, most of them being female... Most choices you are presented with will increase or not increase (didn't see any decreases in the current content) Friendship and Love stats with certain key characters... It was really hard to tell if any of the current stats gated much content... There might have been some gating with a couple characters, but it was subtle, therefore hard to know...
Each character has their own personalities, with several of them feeling more realistic than what I typically see in these things... Not all the characters have a huge amount of interactions yet, so their character depth is still up in the air until further development occurs... Initially a few characters did seem a bit stereotyped out the gate, but it wasn't as bad as I've seen in other VN/Games... And eventually you learn some things about those particular characters, that lead me to having an easier time believing they are genuine people rather then being over played...
This VN/Game is definitely a slow burn, as the developer mentions... Focusing a huge amount of time on just day to day interactions with some occasional deeper interactions... There were some moments when it does feel as though the story is being told a bit too slow, perhaps focusing a little too much sometimes on the mundane day to day hubbub over actual useful story progression... But it was just like that now and then, and didn't permeate the entire story...
The narrator takes an active role in the story telling... Sometimes acting like just an inner-voice of a character as they contemplate things... And other times it felt more like it was trying to influence the character instead, pushing them in one direction or another... So, sometimes it was hard to decipher if it was, perhaps, some sort of active presence with it's own agenda, or if it was just the internal ID of a character trying to work things out internally... Because of that, sometimes I would get this Mystical Corruption vibe, although it was hard to tell... The nighttime dreams were also a mixed bag, because sometimes it felt as though the protagonist's dream was just a normal dream, influenced by the recent activities... But then sometimes it felt confusing, like he was being haunted by and/or toyed with by some evil ex-wife entity, which kinda felt out of place since at no time does the ex-wife even show up in the current content, and she is rarely even mentioned beyond the very beginning and mentioning to others that he is divorced... So I was rather confused by the existence of the ex-wife dreams... Maybe it's another mystical like element? Or he was just that completely traumatized by her, I don't know...
There is only one very brief erotic event, which happens in a dream sequence, but is very short lived... I didn't mind the lack of erotic content, as it didn't feel necessary yet, as most of the relationships are at the very beginning stages for now... You don't even get the impression that the protagonist has any romantic feelings towards anyone yet, other then perhaps small feelings towards his daughter... Of course, that doesn't mean almost every female character doesn't have some level of infatuation with the protagonist... Because based on the visuals (i.e. looks and poses) and some of the text, you can tell most of the female characters are showing some levels of interest... Even if it's just friend level interest...
Overall, it took me several hours to get through the current content, and for the most part I enjoyed the read... Some choices are hard to know if they make a difference or not until you try them, with some feeling rather vague, but every set of choices effects the stats in some way with various characters... There is definitely depth and meaning to the story, although sometimes it feels like it might be unnecessarily drawn out from time to time... Don't expect a huge amount of plot movement, as most of the current content revolves around character introductions and the most basic of early relationship building...
Based off the navigation stuff at the end, I'm a bit fearful it plans to go from a Visual Novel Stat Grinder Style to a Navigation Stat Grinder style... Which is something you either do from the beginning or not at all, if it's gonna work right... The current content already takes a while to get through, and adding a time consuming navigation grind I feel might hurt it... The story telling is already as slow as I've ever experienced with an Visual Novel in this market up to this point, and adding an even slower navigation mechanic, depending on how they implement it, might end up hurting it or slowing it down even further... Obviously it's too early to tell right now, if or how that mechanic will be used in future content, but I'm a little leery about it for the moment...
Even though the current content is lengthy, the story has not really progressed all that far yet, which shows just how early this VN/Game is in it's development cycle... I did enjoy the current content, despite the occasional text issues and how slow it sometimes progresses... But I really hope, that it is not a milking ploy to make the development last as long as humanly possible... For now I can see it's potential for being an entertaining story focused VN... So I guess, for the moment, we'll just need to see how it progresses over time... I will definitely be revisiting this one, but I'll probably wait a while to give it a chance to grow... I'm a sucker for a good romance story, without over the top melodrama... So I'm hopeful for now...