Review for v0.6.3
My Maid Dreams of Electric Sheep is telling the story of a suicidal man in a dreary world essentially finding a new reason to keep on living. As a lover of wholesome stuff, and despite how dark the premise is, this game really hits for me. It took me a minute to get there, but once I familiarized myself with the systems and began to understand what the game is trying to do I ended up enjoying this a lot.
I think I read the setting may be based on a book, but if (like me) that means little to you, here's the premise: A sort of totalitarian government has mandated that everyone must take a gray pill every day that eliminates all emotions besides happiness. The catch is something like ~20% of people suffer from the adverse effect of becoming extremely depressed instead. We step into the shoes of one such individual, seemingly at wits end. That is until an unusual robot maid is introduced into our lives.
What's probably the main deal breaker here is if you enjoy sandboxes or not, as this game is very much a sandbox. Personally I think this has done a nice job with it, and the way it has been set up gets you surprisingly immersed. Yes it is repetitive, but where a lot of games feel like that as a result of design flaws, this sort of makes sense given the scenario. It starts with repeating a dull factory job over and over to be able to afford food and an eventual robot maid. Then it begins slowly but surely expanding itself as new needs and opportunities arise. Still though, if you don't enjoy that "grind" for money or managing food and sleep (as easy as it is) I don't know that this would change your mind.
But lets talk about why this game is REALLY good. Number one: the quality. This is among the very best of Koikatsu based games when looking at animations and renders. Sex scenes are great, but there's also a lot of extra little animations for Ako, our robot girl, that really bring her to life. Plus the care that has gone into sound design elevates this even further. It's also a great idea that, making use of Ako being a robot, there's parts to buy that give variations for sex scenes (such as bigger boobs).
Two, and what really makes the game, is the writing. This takes a very minimalist approach is maybe the word. Most events are pretty short and a fair amount of them contain very little dialogue. But man do they still convey everything that they need to. There's a lot of emotion present, but its usually just left unspoken and on the reader to infer. It's a style that I think is working for the game. The robot girl is actually super cute as well, and I'm really enjoying watching her essentially gain... sentience I suppose? Whatever is going on, I'm here for it.
I think the biggest flaw this has is the fact that it's an incomplete sandbox game. There's still a ton of room for making the daily stuff deeper and more varied. I wish there was more events. There's seemingly a few side girls that have little to no content (one girl only has a bad route for example, which I wasn't into). The game has a LOT of room for expansion and it's just simply not there yet.
Really that's what's holding this back from being five stars to me. When the game is hopefully more complete and rounded out I'm sure I'll love it, but even now I enjoyed this a lot in its current state. If you don't mind sandboxes, I think this is a great game to try out.
