Hiya, I just finished playing the game and I kinda wanted to review it for feedback's sake- this game has piqued my interest for multiple reasons, enough so that I want to talk about this honestly pretty good game, just because I don't see a lot of actual reviews here or on Steam that aren't just "this is a glorified artbook," which I think is unfair to the game.
The idea for the game is a simple but good one. You're to guide a hopeless girl through the depths of underwater ruins, trying to get yourself and her enough money to live through salvaging treasure. The gameplay is a rather simple loop of going to one of the many ruin locations you can explore, getting treasure, and leaving, hopefully with enough resources for you both to live off of. It's pretty simple, but it works well and it can be pretty fun to try and find how to maximize your profits while still making sure the girl has some security in case you can't get her enough food. In short, the core gameplay is actually pretty fun and would, admittedly, work better in a horror environment rather than an h-game, but for what it is it's still a fun experience.
One of the other things I like about the game is the art. Yes, it's an h-game, so art is fairly important given you're going to be seeing a lot of T&A, and I think the pixel art monochrome style works really well in this horror adjacent environment. The two girls in it are both pretty cute in their own ways, all the scenes are interesting to discover, and I think the more simple graphics of the diving segments is done well. The only thing about the art that can be a little jarring is the inconsistency of it.
I'm not going to be super critical on this as I'm an artist myself and I know how much it can suck to get criticism for something you're really proud of, but it was a decently big elephant throughout my own playthrough. Some shots were a little illogical, proportions were often between slightly and majorly off, and one of the weirder things is that with some of the expansion aspects, it implies some scenes would have had the girl have different "levels" than what is shown in the CG. For example, the first time I got the hard mushrooms that "need to be warmed" or something like that, the girl interacted with her standard assets, yet the CG depicted her flat as a board. This might be more in line with one of the bigger issues I had with the game on the technical end, but given otherwise the game is fairly consistent about this part of things so it's not too glaring a flaw. I do really like the art style, but my best descriptor of it is that it feels somewhat amateur and could definitely become much better with some more practice.
Another thing I actually found myself enjoying a lot was the world itself. You get some pieces here and there about how the job you're doing works and what it's like being a salvager team, but it also always feels like there's something unknown about it. The MC knows quite a bit about things that go on, but not everything- so when you're reaching deeper levels underwater you get this feeling that you're entering truly uncharted territory when even the player goes "I don't really know." The wreckages and caves themselves all have their own story to them that you can glean just from the surroundings, and once again the deeper you go the more you learn. Even though you never actually explore it, the idea of "the other side" is also extremely cool and I wish it was an actual explorable place rather than just the hard limit. The game was interesting enough with just the concept of all these wreckages and caverns underwater, but the idea that there's something beyond under the water- what could be there? It's like going into the hadal zone, but suddenly there's something beyond that. That idea in and of itself has a lot of potential, and especially with the somewhat implied idea that the creature in the final dive came from the other side, you just can't help but wonder about it. Weirdly enough, I wasn't expecting something mysterious like that in this game, so I'm super grateful there's something about the world that's only left for the mind to imagine.
Outside of that, I liked the three majorly present characters. The MC has a somewhat distinct personality unlike most games like this, the girl (the titular "salvor") is quite endearing and she herself has some backstory that is lightly touched on but partially left to the mind, and Tish also has some hints as to what her deal is but is also fun to interact with (when you even can, which is unfortunately rare as I'd love to hate on her more). I personally didn't get both endings as I feel like the game's a little too monotonous to play through it again just for the Tish ending, so take that part with a grain of salt.
My praises out of the way, I'm gonna rip the band aid off and give my biggest criticisms. The game is paced strangely, and from the technical end it's got some rather large issues. It's built in such a way that I constantly felt like I might've sequence broke the game on accident. For example, in the game, if the girl has over 8 food when a dive ends, instead of consuming 4 food just for that dive, she'll consume another 4 to skip a day and practice diving, which makes the various diving locations throughout wreckages more likely to come up with treasure. Nothing's necessarily wrong with this mechanic since skipping a day doesn't really mean anything to the player and because of the food requirement to even activate this the girl won't waste any money either, but the part that's somewhat strange is that this can happen from day 1 should you somehow, miraculously, get enough food on your first dive to trigger this. The only indication this would happen and why it would happen though, at least in my playthrough, was given to me around 100k depth, which is really late and is through a specific date you go on with the girl that then has you go talk to Tish about it- so I thought something seemed wrong when I'd been getting this diving capability increase even though, according to the story, that deal was never struck until that point. That kind of goes into another point I noticed, though.
It felt like I was able to take the girl out on a date once or twice at the beginning, and then it wasn't until toward my last 10 days that I could date her again at all, but suddenly I was able to take her out just about every day after that point? It's not at all clear what even allows you to take her out in the first place, but it certainly wasn't money as once I hit 20 dollars the first time I never dipped below that again, and there certainly didn't seem to be a dive requirement- so I have no clue what happened there. Regardless, this makes the entire front portion of this game a little dull since it feels like you're not progressing all that much toward anything in particular.
To add onto that, I kept encountering some really strange bugs that felt kind of like I did something wrong. Sometimes NPCs would not move even though they were supposed to, which meant they'd never actually interact with the girl and you'd miss whatever interaction was meant to happen (which was usually a gangbang, and I'm not really into NTR, but I did turn those scenes on just to get as full an experience as possible and they still would break), and the only way I found to fix it was to re-open the game. This was fine when it came to followers clearing debris as just having the followers counts rather than them being nearby, but for getting as many CGs as I could, this proved to cause the monster in the final dive to do literally nothing. A similar bug would happen with the dates, where occasionally I would reload the game just to make sure the game was working, and suddenly on a re-open I was able to go on a date with her. It was a little exhausting opening and closing the game so much just because of the NPC bug, so seeing this made me feel even more like I'd broken things way too much and might have needed to reset my data, which I was tempted to do several times.
There are a lot more minor gripes I have that more have to do with creative choice rather than the technical end, like the existence of futanari in the depths (who were extremely obnoxious to deal with since they don't stop pursuing you aside from the about 20 seconds you get when they stop after catching you) that are ill explained and those pheromone clouds that if you aren't spamming click you will be stuck in for a literal minute trying to get to the next area because the girl can't calm herself the hell down. My standards for continuity in h-games are low and my standards for gameplay are even lower, don't get me wrong, but when everything else felt like it had some meaning to it I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed when something like that had no explanation. There was also the whole cursed clothing thing that suddenly was being talked about that I feel like there was even less explanation for, but they kind of joked in the game about that not going anywhere so I don't know if I just missed something or if that feeling was intended. I also was not a fan of the gallery menu even if I did like the art, as it was very confusing to search through. I'd personally suggest a system where each unique scene you can select you could use a different button to switch between bigger tits/ass, smaller, etc. just so it's not one big scroll list where it's kind of hard to tell what's what. It would also make it easier to tell what the ACTUALLY unique CGs you got were and could potentially tell you if a certain size is even attainable for that CG.
All in all, very underrated! I had a pretty fun time exploring wreckages and trying to get money while also trying to figure out what order you had to do things in to get into specific areas. Some of the mechanics I did like was using the expansion/downsizing aspects as an actual way to get through specific areas which would either lead you to a new CG or a chunk of treasure. Or both, in the follower crushing case. I feel like they're underutilized, sure, but it's used enough to where I'm not entirely dissatisfied with it as a mechanic and pushes this into puzzle game territory. I, admittedly, like the girl a lot and got pretty attached to her as well, so curses to the developer for making me get attached to a character from an h-game.
I'll admit, I'm kind of excited to see what you make in the future! Thanks for reading if you did! I just had a lot of thoughts and I felt it unfair to not verbalize them where the developer could see.