An ambitious project from a small team.
Art was good, voice acting was great, romances were the standard fare and exactly what one might expect from the tropes of the genre.

I really enjoyed that in the end you get to choose whether or not you want to get married or have children, and that those choices don't cut you off from any aspect of the endgame romance. I personally enjoy that, it's sadly rare, but I also felt it was a very good choice given the themes of the game. (Although, nitpicking I suppose, in this vein I disliked that there is an element of embracing (symbolic) children required for a good ending when my playthrough was quite adamant about not having children at all. Felt counter intuitive.)

Akash seems to be at it's core a game attempting to reckon with reproductive control and misogyny, from the perspective of a cisgender woman. There are themes of idealization coupled with dehumanization, the sense of betrayal at being free as an ungendered child and immediately constrained as an adult woman that the game focuses on quite a bit. For this reason I'm unconcerned with plot contrivances if they're in support of the theme. I did feel the PC's resistance to the misogyny around her was weak.

There was the self-awareness to say gay marriage exists in an (almost) all-male society, but also you don't meet any gay people except some implied (in my opinion stereotypical gay BFF type) side characters, and Rocco was unfortunately a bit of the "bisexual slut" stereotype, with strangely misogynist attitudes considering he was the most transgressive of society generally. Queer attitudes were palpably missing even when queer characters were present. These often raised more questions to me than they answered.

Fictional parameters have to be set to communicate the theme and focus on something specific. In support of this I don't mind suspending my disbelief, or agreeing that THIS story is about a straight cis woman's perspective. I don't have to relate directly to every protagonist to get something out of a story. Of course, this is the reason for the setup: you're the only woman, so you really feel the full force of society's reproductive coercion. Whatever magic is needed to justify the premise is fine.

However, I could not suspend my disbelief when it came to an all-male binary-gendered society with a complicated reverence toward women that somehow contains not a single trans woman or nonbinary person. I would normally suggest redefining the fiction to better focus on the topic you want to and have the expertise to discuss, but I am truly not sure there is a way to define away trans existence and still have an informed discussion of gender. You're either talking about it or you're not.

Similarly I struggle to relate to feeling constrained by your gender and never considering that you are not that gender. Sometimes when the expectations of womanhood bother you, it's because you're not a woman. This needn't be the protagonists conclusion, but it was notable to me that it was never on the table, and that it was never mentioned even in their history.

I personally take no issue with repetition between routes, but think they could have been stronger, better supported the theme, and have had less to skip through on a replay if they more deeply explored different aspects of the PC's perspective by having the LIs routes be more concretely anchored around THEIR more clearly differing views. If Rocco was more blatantly rebellious toward gender roles, if the traditionalist were more traditional, if the best friend prioritized your safety over your agency, if those attitudes defined their routes and effected your relationships directly more than their otome types did.

I think there's a lot of potential in this creative team and I'll keep my eyes out for future projects but I hope in the future they better refine their scope and intentions to either embrace the complexity they're aiming for or aim for mastery over something smaller. Felt like this one got away from them, a bit.