Alright, so i’ll start with the positives and end with the negatives, though I believe both are crucial sentiments shared by many of us playing the game. I’ll try to keep this spoiler-free for anyone who hasn’t finished the game as far as 0.8 yet. I hope my comment doesn’t get deleted for being critical here.
First, the good stuff. It’s a female-protag adult VN and I had a lot of fun playing through most of the story. The main characters all have their quirks, even if they’ve not all been fully fleshed out yet, and the designs are good. I actually appreciate that the game isn’t a sandbox too, I like the linear story format much more because it means more content of a higher quality and a single story. The reveal about Hubert the plant and Charity’s “power” were hilarious and made fun of the genre while also adhering to it coherently which is hard to do.
Now for the bad stuff. The biggest issue has to be that this is an Adult VN, yet there’s essentially no sexual content, only a few scenes of toplessness. This isn’t inherently bad if it’s genuinely going to come, but when a dev is putting out very small updates and then says “Hey guys, i’m actually going to start working on a new game before finishing the current one”, it’s almost confirming one of the two games is gonna be abandoned sooner or later. The other big issue is Mio. The idea could’ve possibly worked, but it was done so unbelievably poorly that it’s broken immersion and completely killed the story. I doubt you’ll do this (hell, you probably won’t even see this comment), but i’d honestly say just redo 0.7-0.8 to either:
1. Remove her entirely
2. Remove the scenes of her in the “real world” (keep her confined to the castle)
3. Give us some clear signs that something is getting screwy with reality and have at least one character recognize it as an audience surrogate. I thought that’s what was gonna happen when Hubert first mentioned it, but no, he just immediately gave in and said “Yeah, that makes sense”.
The way it’s been handled feels like it was written by someone who’s writing the story as they go along with no end goal in sight, which sucks, especially when 0.1-0.6 were so well done. I truly hope this Mio business gets cleared up in 0.9 and that her initial entrance is altered to make a bit more sense. I had to replay that into like four or five times because I was so stumped at how that made it into the game, it was just so poorly done.
In conclusion, I really do like this game and I wouldn’t be ‘busting your chops’ over it if I didn’t care. I’m a female myself, it gets so tiring seeing every game of this genre be dudes and harems, so this was a breath of fresh air and while idk if you’re a dude or not, the story is clearly written with a more feminine mindset. The protag actually thinks in the same way I do, whereas the male protags of other games just feel either too “to the point”, I guess. I genuinely want to see this game thrive, it’s one of the best of the genre, but 0.7-0.8 desperately needs fixing or at the bare minimum some kind of drastic overhaul in 0.9 that explains everything. Again, hoping this doesn’t get deleted, but it seems a lot of comments in this thread from the last few weeks have been deleted, so I dunno. Maybe just bots