The animations and the personalities of the characters are delightful, and the story is properly engaging, all of which are oftentimes overlooked in games that prominently feature kink as gameplay mechanics. I can safely say that I didn't expect there to be as much depth to the production as there turned out to be.

However, because it's a game that features BE as a prominent selling point, we now have the reverse problem: It takes so long to actually get to the point where the BE starts factoring in, and because it's interwoven into the plot of the game, it's also inevitably going to take even longer to "level up," as it were. If I'm right, then each new level of BE is tied to completing another major story milestone, which means you could potentially go hours without seeing the next stage, depending on how skilled you are at the game. Slow burn is fine, I'm not dominated by my hormones, I can handle when kinky games have legit gameplay to engage with, but I imagine there's more than a few people who are going to feel overly frustrated that getting to the "good parts" is such a trial in and of itself.

For me, the part that actually sticks in my craw is the way the combat mechanics ramp up out of nowhere in terms of complexity and difficulty. You start out with a Bejeweled-esque combat system, then there's a Gradius-style 2D shooter, then the Gradius shooter gets put on top of the Bejeweled system, and before long, I'm having to juggle what feels like twenty different things just to land one attack on an enemy that I'm expected to fight multiple times as a random encounter, while they're busy rolling me into the grave with relative ease. To say nothing about the Shapes, who I actively started trying to dodge after a while because fighting them was such a non-stop hassle. 

What ended up happening was that the game blocked off all my points of progress with unavoidable Shape battles, so I had to choose between suffering through that nonsense, or just... quitting the game. And I chose to quit. It was that frustrating. Call it skill issue if you like, but I'm the kind of maniac who will spend literal days grinding levels in RPGs in order to have my party be massively overpowered for the next boss fight. If I'm running away from random encounters, then that's a problem.

And that's only two mechanics - I didn't make it much further. I dread to think how much crazier it gets in later levels.

All that could be forgiven, however, and I would be able to work around it (with some degree of frustration, but it would happen eventually), were it not for the fact that you suffer a loss of resources when you die, and in a very Dark Souls fashion, you have one chance to recover them before they're gone for good. That's fine for Dark Souls, because typically, even the late-game enemies can have their attack patterns be realistically learned and countered. Yeah, losing my souls sucks, but it's not so daunting a task to get them back, and if I lose them for good, at least I can build them back up with some patience. Because of the utter chaotic mess that combat turns into in this game, however, there's no "learning enemy patterns," because the enemy has no patterns and is just throwing everything at you to see what sticks. I die to an enemy in this game, I may as well just write those resources off as lost for good, because there's no shot that I'm getting them back, and less odds that I'll have the patience to stick around and roll the dice against other random encounters to build up what was lost again.

The side-scrolling battle against the first Angel you have to fight in order to get to the point of the game where Shapes become a problem is also a slog, I will say. It vastly overstays its welcome. You have to spend so much time whittling the Angel down the first time, only to then immediately have to do it again, and it's all bullet hell mechanics from start to finish, and if you die, you start all the way over from zero, no mid-boss checkpoints for you. And as for instructions on how to actually fight the Angel: Did you do the carnival minigames before going to the temple? No? Then no tutorial for you, because those were the tutorial, they weren't just optional side content.

It's a delicate balancing act, making a game about kink that actually has a game to play alongside the kink. You don't want to just throw players into the kink stuff right away, because they won't bother playing the game and will just spend as much time as they need to get their jollies and then call it a day. But on the other hand, if you focus too much on game-ifying your kink content, players might get tired of it long before they ever make it there. This game has its good points, and I want nothing more than for it to be a successful project, but it needs to seriously dial back some of the current mechanics, because they are way too much to just dump in players' laps right off the cuff.