This is a review for 0.17, but barring significant rewrites of the game's scenes, will remain broadly applicable.
'Kay, so... I'm really disappointed with this one. And I love games about cute guys getting tormented, so I totally get why someone would be desperate for representation of their fetish enough to give this a high rating. I just can't this time. Apologies to the dev.
This game is interminably shallow, boring and badly written everywhere I look. What jumps out mostly at me is the utter, utter lack of any kind of proofreading, or seemingly any playtesting, when it comes to the dialogue. Which for an RPGmaker game comprising mostly of long stretches of text over still images is painful to see. In some cases the text wraps off of the edge of the window! No, 'sure' is not spelled with a 'sh' for god's sake! Look... I can understand being bad at spelling. I can. But you're writing a picturebook! Get someone else to proofread it for you before you post it online, god! :O
(Edit: I've been made aware that the developer's english is quite poor because it's not her first language. That's fair enough, and I wasn't aware of it at the time of writing (I was quite frustrated, as you can plainly see) but it doesn't really change the way the scenes are constructed otherwise.)
And that kind of basic lack of quality control is everywhere you look here. Even if the spelling and grammar were fine, and I'm struggling to get across to a potential reader just how not fine they are, the pacing of any given scene is horrendously fast.
Part of the reason for that is that there's barely any description of what is happening. Sure, we can see the images you might say, but cutting descriptions means dialogue has to do double duty in making a scene sensual, and as we've established... that is asking waaay too much of this developer. Like, established writers struggle with doing that, so it's a pretty ruinous decision for the game's atmosphere not to describe anything. So it's not sexy, because there's little to no buildup, and the lack of description makes the scenes very fast-paced, so the protagonist goes from 'starting to be stimulated' to 'cumming' in the space of a single line of dialogue. Even the game's focus, trampling, gets zero description of sensations, tastes, smells, etc.
The characters, including the MC, are all written to be flat archtypes you've seen a million times, which would be just about acceptable if everything else was working for me. God, I'm not asking for Romance of the Three Kingdoms here, just give me something to work with! Even the protagonist's renders are bland and inexpressive and stiff as a fucking board, to say nothing of his characterization, and when I'm critiquing the posing of the cute anime boy, that's when you know I'm really done with a game's shit.
I just... I can't enjoy that, I'm sorry. The renders are otherwise quite competent for the engine being used (they can be a bit stiff but it's fiiine, whatever) but they can't carry a sense of eroticism that just isn't there in every other element. The flatness of the cast overall just completes the feeling of 'this is a cheap game made without passion' that oozes from every orifice of this game. Or... maybe I'm being uncharitable. Maybe there's passion here, but the developer only cares about adding <newer, shinier thing!> when really they need to go back and do some serious editing/rewriting of scenes.
Needless to say, the gameplay itself pretty much just walking between various people to either get scenes to happen (no buildup!) or to grind money/items. How could it not be at this point. God, everything about the way this game is designed is painful, I swear. It has a day/night cycle which mostly just exists to force you to go to bed over and over if you want to play without cheats. It includes cheats ingame, which is nice I guess, but it's just so... so obviously badly designed that I can't not comment on it. Why didn't you just make your game mechanics better, if you knew this was an issue?
Which is all to say, I am predisposed to like and overrate games which focus on cute, expressive men getting teased and tormented, but this one is such a swing and a miss I'm pretty sure the bat landed in a pond the county over.
'Kay, so... I'm really disappointed with this one. And I love games about cute guys getting tormented, so I totally get why someone would be desperate for representation of their fetish enough to give this a high rating. I just can't this time. Apologies to the dev.
This game is interminably shallow, boring and badly written everywhere I look. What jumps out mostly at me is the utter, utter lack of any kind of proofreading, or seemingly any playtesting, when it comes to the dialogue. Which for an RPGmaker game comprising mostly of long stretches of text over still images is painful to see. In some cases the text wraps off of the edge of the window! No, 'sure' is not spelled with a 'sh' for god's sake! Look... I can understand being bad at spelling. I can. But you're writing a picturebook! Get someone else to proofread it for you before you post it online, god! :O
(Edit: I've been made aware that the developer's english is quite poor because it's not her first language. That's fair enough, and I wasn't aware of it at the time of writing (I was quite frustrated, as you can plainly see) but it doesn't really change the way the scenes are constructed otherwise.)
And that kind of basic lack of quality control is everywhere you look here. Even if the spelling and grammar were fine, and I'm struggling to get across to a potential reader just how not fine they are, the pacing of any given scene is horrendously fast.
Part of the reason for that is that there's barely any description of what is happening. Sure, we can see the images you might say, but cutting descriptions means dialogue has to do double duty in making a scene sensual, and as we've established... that is asking waaay too much of this developer. Like, established writers struggle with doing that, so it's a pretty ruinous decision for the game's atmosphere not to describe anything. So it's not sexy, because there's little to no buildup, and the lack of description makes the scenes very fast-paced, so the protagonist goes from 'starting to be stimulated' to 'cumming' in the space of a single line of dialogue. Even the game's focus, trampling, gets zero description of sensations, tastes, smells, etc.
The characters, including the MC, are all written to be flat archtypes you've seen a million times, which would be just about acceptable if everything else was working for me. God, I'm not asking for Romance of the Three Kingdoms here, just give me something to work with! Even the protagonist's renders are bland and inexpressive and stiff as a fucking board, to say nothing of his characterization, and when I'm critiquing the posing of the cute anime boy, that's when you know I'm really done with a game's shit.
I just... I can't enjoy that, I'm sorry. The renders are otherwise quite competent for the engine being used (they can be a bit stiff but it's fiiine, whatever) but they can't carry a sense of eroticism that just isn't there in every other element. The flatness of the cast overall just completes the feeling of 'this is a cheap game made without passion' that oozes from every orifice of this game. Or... maybe I'm being uncharitable. Maybe there's passion here, but the developer only cares about adding <newer, shinier thing!> when really they need to go back and do some serious editing/rewriting of scenes.
Needless to say, the gameplay itself pretty much just walking between various people to either get scenes to happen (no buildup!) or to grind money/items. How could it not be at this point. God, everything about the way this game is designed is painful, I swear. It has a day/night cycle which mostly just exists to force you to go to bed over and over if you want to play without cheats. It includes cheats ingame, which is nice I guess, but it's just so... so obviously badly designed that I can't not comment on it. Why didn't you just make your game mechanics better, if you knew this was an issue?
Which is all to say, I am predisposed to like and overrate games which focus on cute, expressive men getting teased and tormented, but this one is such a swing and a miss I'm pretty sure the bat landed in a pond the county over.
