review as of v0.4.3
I have a love-hate relationship with this game.
On the love side, there are:
+ Very nice, albeit limited, art. The characters all look nice, and animations, while rather rough, are not unpleasant either, for an early feature especially. But you don't play HTML games for visuals, so it's just a pleasant extra.
+ Good writing. The setting is fun, the story is interesting, the characters, while kinda one dimensional, are not unpleasant to be around and have some growth over the course of the story. Basically, yes, reading is a joy, not a chore in this game.
+ The general idea of a "school" where you go about your daily life while making others submit to you (or submitting yourself, whatever you prefer) is not something you see too often, especially implemented well, and I would say this is one of the better examples.
However... when you get to the actual mechanics of this game... oh boy does it get bad...
- For starters, the optimization is actually kinda bad. This is the only HTML game that takes more than a moment to do things. Moving around can take a second or two. Saving and loading take around 10. It's a little thing, but it definitely detracts from the experience. Add to this that you can't fast travel to a distant location, so if you want to move 5 spaces, you have to click the adjacent one, wait a few secs, click the next, wait, etc.
- Sex scenes are so... unbearably... boring... 30 turns is way too much for it, but that is, thankfully, customizable, but even then, just adding "end scene" button would go such a long way to making it less of a pain to go through. I don't want to be here for half an hour just clicking "Thrust -> commit action -> thrust -> commit action -> thrust -> commit action...". What a chore.
- Same can be said for combat, although for some reason I find it less tedious.
- Talking... talking to characters is one of the worst experiences I had in gaming ever. And there are two main culprits for this.
First is the fact that characters act COMPLETELY out of character during these. The shyest of girls will start touching and caressing you out of the blue when you were just talking about weather or something. It ruins all the nicely written events and personalities that were established before that. Completely immersion breaking.
Second is the fact that you can't tell other characters to fuck off. You start talking to someone, then someone else joins the conversation, and all you can do is leave yourself. No. NO. This is a game about domination, give me an option to tell them to fuck off. I don't want an orgy, I just want to work on a character I like.
This is done atrociously. You have zero control. And this lack of control over anything is my main issue with this game, I guess. You are way too dependent on game interacting with you, rather that letting the player interact with the game and... you know... play it...
I feel like this game would be better served as a renpy game, or one of those numerous "choice of games" projects, with just story and multiple choices, abandoning most of mechanics entirely. So far, they do nothing but detract from the overall experience, unfortunately.
It's a sex game where you'll actively be avoiding sex because it's so boring. A "dating sim" where you'll be avoiding social interactions because they break characters. An RPG where you'll be avoiding combat because it's simply frustrating.
And yet, it's a game that I tend to enjoy and wish for it to succeed. But it's not there yet. Far from it.