Your very first day in the game you get groped with no way to avoid it.
That largely sets the tone for the game. You
will get assaulted.
I don't want to say there's no player choice, but the choice sure is limited: You either interact with somebody or you don't. Often times events occur that you have very little say in, being forced into situations that I would expect out of a rape game, which is not what this advertises itself as. Despite that, it's a staple of the game's content and you quite literally cannot avoid it. On top of that, there are no real repercussions to the characters who engage in these actions. That guy who gropes you on the first day? Nothing. Get assaulted in the bathroom? Nada. You'd think you could at least report them to the principle? He seems pretty cool, and not just because he's one of the few male characters not intending to assault/rape/sexually blackmail you. I am in no way opposed to games of that nature, I play them regularly, but that is not what this claims to be.
As an example of how you would adjust this,
But what bothers me most is that the game is inconsistent to the point of being buggy.
For instance, boy is being bullied in the hallway. I intervene. He talks to me the next day, I'm polite and introduce myself. He tries to have lunch with me later, I decline, he says outright, "I won't bother you again." I receive a text from him before the scene even finishes fading out. Excuse me? Didn't you just say you wouldn't bother me again? When did we exchange contact information? If that happened the game sure didn't tell me. He wasn't even in my contact list in the phone. Is he a stalker character and got it from someone else? I have two people in my contacts list, one he has no contact with and the other who wouldn't talk to him, so who gave me up?
The game has dream sequences, some of which are pretty good. Even better, the game provides a menu where you can enable/disable certain things appearing in dreams. There are a few issues with this:
- For what the game advertises, these selections are not enough. I can enable or disable "Yuri" but not straight content? Huh?
- No description for the categories are given. Is "Femdom" MC dominate or submissive? Is "Submission" MC sub or dom? Enable both and encounter a scene you don't want in order to figure it out.
- Dream settings are in some cases incorrectly categorized. I disabled both "Multiple Pairings" and "Exhibition"...and then received a scene about the MC playing with a coworker in the middle of her workplace in front of the customers and having a customer undress her. Huh? Doesn't this violate at least "Exhibition", if not both? (For the developer, this is specifically 'monsi7_dream_scene', your events file is pretty well-organized and readable so I had no issue editing this myself, good job there.)
Text messages can sometimes cover events they shouldn't. For instance, you start dating Kate, after work you walk her home in the rain. You text her after going home yourself, only for the MC to...ask her if she works today...when you just walked her home from work...and to let her know it's going to rain today...when you just walked through the rain...and the MC forgot an umbrella herself that morning so I'm not actually sure when this text is supposed to be used at all...
Many things that I would never even consider "corrupt" increment the stat. I assume that the stat affects reactions to certain situations, but I'm not even entirely sure on that.
The MC is often times not just naive but outright slow, to an unbelievable degree. This is typically to set up "corruption" moments, but is again something that is forced on the player. The player knows something is wrong, they have to sit there and watch it happen.
This is very minor, but I want to mention grades. I'm not entirely sure how much impact they have, I always kept them up, but I feel the system often is at odds with other aspects of the game. For instance, you sometimes go to work and it forces an event that you can't turn down, this leads to it being night, which means you can't complete homework that day if the RNG homework system gave it to you. However, at the same time, one of the benefits given for keeping your grades up is that it means completing homework does not consume time...so...why can't I do it at night or the morning before school if it doesn't consume time? Maybe add a check to see if your grade is high enough to complete it without consuming time, and allow it to be done at night or the morning if so. This would at least add a benefit to having managed your time up till now.
Typically in Ren'py, you can delete saves by hovering over the save and hitting "delete". This is not the case in "Uni", and while I can understand that in some games which don't really need a lot of save states, this game absolutely does. I imagine this is due to the custom UI, but as far as I can tell there is no method for deleting saves in-game, which it really needs.
Essentially, at least at this time, the game advertises itself in a way I would define as "misleading", if not an outright lie. I don't deny that there's a good amount of different content present, and you could certainly argue in its favor, but I feel that the game leans and pushes the player in a very specific direction. Should the game's current content be adjusted to allow the player more influence, as well as the scope of the content, I can see myself recommending it, but due to the rather dishonest presentation I can't help but have an overall negative opinion.
Edit (0.53): Just want to say that the "revised" bathroom ambush with Kenzie's group has signficantly worse writing than the old one. It provides less tension and build-up, skipping directly to the rapey bits
before offering an out, whereas the previous version offered it as it led into the rapey bit. Of course, this also further pushes the game towards a central focus on rape and sexual blackmail, as well as moving it further away from containing well-constructed player choices. It's overall just a bad change.
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