TLDR; the only reason I'm not giving this 1 star is because I couldn't manage to finish the current content and I don't feel fair giving it lower than a 2 on the off chance that it miraculously improves. But the art is mediocre and the writing is really awful. I genuinely do not see why this game has such a high review score
Now for the long version:
If your standards go above mediocre archetypes and "hurrr feminism bad" jokes, then please don't waste your time.
Now for the long version:
- Visuals: The renders are pretty rough. The models are pretty bland and the colors are too vibrant, makes the locations look pretty ugly. The characters are attractive enough, but they're all just... bland. They all look like pretty stock, typical Honey Select models. Nothing about them is noteworthy or stands out in any way.
- Audio: Also meh. The music and sound effects are all pretty basic. It's the same sort of license free music you hear in 90% of the games on this site
- Writing: Alright so this one's a doozy. I saw many reviews praising the writing of this game, particularly the character writing, and I'm starting to wonder if I somehow downloaded the wrong game or something. The character writing in this game is truly awful. Pretty early on, Dev with their ridiculous caricature of the "feminist" character, Rachel. She’s just immediately super hostile, rude, and doesn’t talk about anything except “triggers” and “privilege”. Then literally the next day the dev can’t help themselves but to try clown on this strawman of a feminist they wrote with embarrassing shit like “Math is a patriarchal construct”. Like come on man, anyone laughing at this shit in 2023 needs to grow the fuck up. These are the kinds of jokes that 13 year-old boys make when they think being edgy makes them funny. It’s incredibly cringy and you're embarrassing yourself.
But it's not just her. Every character is basically just a basic stereotype. Shy girl with sob story, bitchy girl who's actually just misunderstood, male rival who's a complete moron, etc... Maybe they get more depth later in the story, but fuck if I can make it that far when nothing even remotely positive happens in the first week or so of the game.
Even the MC is written poorly. I was at the point in the game where you give Lucy a key and really started to think that we really need to understand this dude’s thought process as he unconditionally trusts a complete stranger like this. Maybe later we learn why he acts like this, but we see the MC's inner thoughts for basically everything else (down to mundane stuff like cleaning and sleeping), so why are we not getting any of his thoughts about this? It feels like the dev is burying the lede so they can have some reveal later, but it’s at the expense of the MC behaving in an understandable way at the outset of the game.
I could really go on and on. The character writing is abysmal, and the plot/world of the game are nowhere good enough to carry that weight.
If your standards go above mediocre archetypes and "hurrr feminism bad" jokes, then please don't waste your time.