My unadulterated feedback to the dev and first impressions new players may appreciate to know, with some spoilers to demonstrate my points:
The good (to know):
- Nice renders with glossy skin. That I like.
- Cute Life Is Strange-like diary.
- Some good track selections, acoustic indie music and such.
- Some kinda acceptable use of mini games, e.g.
you need info from dialog to unlock special renders.
- There's a mystery theme with a few good story events and signs of things to come.
- Animations always are appreciated.
The bad or at least not so good:
- Cucking, cheating, humiliation and TMI moments with that douche of a sibling seem to be at the core of the experience.
Some girl gets all sweet with you. You can profess your eternal love to her. Only later it's revealed she's cheating on an actual boyfriend and MC is the non-boyfriend, that's the literal word they use. Wew, thanks? Then you gotta know all interactions with the girls are optional. Except for this: clicking on a door leads to a close-up on your brother's orgasm I didn't really ask for. You take part in a plan to let your brother steal a LI away from you and they clearly have sex... After you and that girl already had spent time fondling each other's whole bodies in front of the brah who mentions he wants to start masturbating at the sight of you. Other example: woman goes on dates with other men. MC gives her an erotic massage and mentions he'd beat competitors into a bloody pulp, but the woman dates other men anyway. In a dream MC starts having anal sex with his mom only for the aforementioned unbearable bro to appear and everyone starts laughing and saying MC is undesirable and needs to go away because MC's penis shrinks and the brother's thing grows enormously. For all of this you never receive a heads-up and it's assumed you'll want to experience it. Seriously, we get to see too much of bro's cock (after four years of lingering hostility, not awkward at all) and too little of the girls. And you wouldn't have guessed it, almost in the very finale, there's a bunch of cheating again, one with a triple layer at that. If all of this sounds good to you (... why?), then it's technically a plus for you. Personally I don't connect any of this to a loving, stable relationship - or life in general - worth a damn.
- A mini game that has as a result you'll have a broken space bar isn't a good mini game.
- To get to the better story elements you have to sit through some nonsense. First,
why would I care to leave uni and effectively not go back at any point so far because a brother who's clearly a jackass and who also abandoned you four years ago shows up with some wild excuse (I can do it alone and we shut you out, but let's do it together anyway) to disappear to a secluded place in a perhaps Northern Rockies-like area where your brother wants to go to bang Hispanics... somehow, and also find your mother who likewise abandoned you. Second,
the premise is their mom has disappeared and there's a sense of urgency to resolve the mystery as soon as possible and get back to your normal uni life and non-girlfriend - you promised her it would take just a week, but MC is busier with dating and fondling (already taken or later "stolen") girls and creeping around.
- The English needs a lot of work tbf. Sometimes it's completely fine and sometimes whole conversations or monologs are mangled like they weren't even written by the same person.
- Scuffed faces: sometimes the girls look really old or simply inhumanly deformed due to bad facial sculpting and a poor portrayal of facial expressions. *
- Not a fan of the wookiee hairstyles.
- Unskippable cutscenes
- Nipples shouldn't be just textures, but meshes that pop out of the breasts.
In short, to me this is a mildly intriguing game that shoots itself in the foot with some really unnecessary stuff while showing promise to perhaps improve later. In my book that's a 3/5.
* Credit to Spacecat and Trasher2018 to remind me of mentioning this.
[Edited to reflect the latest version of my review.]
