My review from the moment I finished the game a couple of months back, left with a 5 Star rating.
"This game is 10/10. I do not normally roll with the kind of feminine fantasy powering this game... but this game does it SO WELL.
This is a GEM of a game, that seems relatively under appreciated..
If you love a good AVN, with great story, great feels, great characters, and great adult/romance content... this game is a MUST HAVE".
Mermaids and fae type magic is not normally my bop, and I normally find most AVN which try to be 'Story Rich' with deep immersive narratives, attempting to be some kind of epic adventure, and delve deep in X heavy issues the dev is themselves trying to work through or has lived trauma of..... are always so TERRIBLE at being AVNs. The A bit is what makes an AVN different from any other games done in the VN format..... but they always F that part up, because it is not important to them. You criticise that, and get swamped with White Knights or the dev themselves coming along and declaring "It is not that kind of story".....insisting that Adult in AVN means something other than Adult content, can mean Adult themes, Adult... stuff... and I have to rip them, laugh, and than Hate Vote their trash game.
Because obviously that is Wrong. A hill I will die on. I find MOST AVNs which have the 'Story Rich' and almost no real Adult content, and what is, is done as tokenism and afterthought.... basically HAVE that terrible content, because it is a gimmick... and if a Dev tosses in some sex, and tags out with NSFW, Adult Content, Sexual Scenes, etc etc in the tags... they know they are targeting a specific audience, in a NICHE category now, and have much less competition for the money (most of my worst experiences have been with games on Steam). Sex sells, to they add some to a story where it makes NO DIFFERENCE, and does NOT MATTER, they put in some tits and ass to market better, at a smaller niche, with a higher purchase ratio, and make money. Then they LIE about their motives.
At first, when I played this one, and saw the emerging story... a fisherman's son, poor kid in a beach shack, dead mother, kind heart, meets a woman living on the streets..... man, the little thing in my head I call the 'Story Rich Rip-Off" meter laughed, because this game was free... but I rolled my eyes thinking 'Thank christ this one was free" but decided to roll with it to see just undercooked the A part of AVN was, and how token the sex scenes would be, in number and quality.
I wondered just how melodramatic this story would get too. I figured, given the angle, and how .... cottagecore, tradwife, fantasy... it felt....dealing with themes normally reserved for young adult... namely young FEMALE adult, romance fantasies....this would dime store Romance itself in to batshit cray cray land pretty fast, and I would be dealing with a lot of forced emotional melodramatic romances, surrounding this toad who was princess in disguise (but with little adult content)......
When I saw HOW WRONG I was...this became I think... the first game I went and reviewed. My review history might not show it, because I am always editing spelling errors, and that then moves their order around in my history.... but every other review I have given, like 45 now I think.... was because this game made me bother with one for the first time, because it was not only JUST SO GOOD.... but all things considered, in my experience, could have been SO BAD, and almost all others games I have played even SLIGHTLY similar to this one HAVE BEEN.
This one is 10/10, 5 Stars, AAA, SSS Tier, awesomeness all day long, and will tell ANYONE I can that.