I get that I'm probably not the target demo for this game, but I just need to get this off my chest because I really wanted to like this game.
Given how friends talked about this game when they recommended it to me, I was hoping this would be another MGQ type of situation. Fun gameplay, decent writing, and h-content that does a good job of balancing and contextualizing the niche and vanilla stuff. It fails pretty badly at the latter. Overall, I loved the game, but loathed the porn.
Honestly, this is the first h-game that made me wish there was a censor patch for it. Like, everything about the sex in this feels intentionally engineered to turn you off. Like having ice cold water poured on your boner. Whether its the sound design in the scenes, or the wretched x-ray cutouts. It nearly gave me ED. I joke(-ish), but I just did not enjoy most if not all the scenes, even the passable ones often had something off about them.
I don't even care about the MC being an ugly, fat, little horndog, or that the use of mind control (influence? hive mind??) as a major plot device really undermines alot of the themes they were going for in the writing. The scenes alone often just straight up sabotage the associated dialogue and writing on their own. It started off as a vibe, so to test it out, I did an experiment with a buddy. I took one of the more "vanilla" consensual (one of the handful without the mind control/influence too) scenes and showed it to him out of context and asked for his impression. He thought it was a rape scene, lmao. Though, tbf his tastes are pretty vanilla, even more than mine.
In at least one scene the x-ray cutout is drawn as though it was a physical opening on the girl and the cum literally oozes out of said opening during the climax animations. At that point I was convinced that whoever animated the h-scenes was going out of his way to troll either the player or the other devs. It didn't look like a bug or glitch at all, it just looked as though it was intentionally drawn and animated like that.
What frustrates me is that most of this stuff isn't even all that disturbing, or titilating for that matter (in the watching gruesome liveleak videos sense). Even the handful of niche scenes I checked out of curiosity were pretty meh. It's just offputting in the same way that having your favorite cereal served with lukewarm water instead of milk is. The game just felt like it wasn't sure what it's scenes to be. Like it was trying to force the vanilla without letting go of the niche stuff the dev likes. Honestly, if they had dropped all the h stuff early in development, and just made and released the game as a run of the mill indie game it would have probably better than it probably currently has, and been lauded as yet another pokemon-like game doing laps around gamefreak, the current gameplay's that good.
5.5/10, would pointlessly rant about a niche h-game in a random porn forum again.
P.S. I'd pay for DLC where it's just all the chicks from the ruins going to therapy and spending time with service animals. They got done dirty (yes in every sense of the word, lol). The resulution of that mini-arc just felt halfassed. Though knowing now what the main dev/artist is all about this woud probably be a monkey's paw situation for me, lmao.