Just finished act I a lot sooner than I thought I would, and wanted to make an honest review about it. By that I mean that I'm going to be... well, honest about the game. What I liked, disliked, literally my overall experience. My objective here is to not offend the developer (not actively, if I do it without realizing it feel free to call me out), so if anyone else feels offended by my opinion on this game... well, I couldn't care less. With that said:
Definitely an interesting experience, not many games create this classic RPG setting full of the typical cliches of actual tabletop roleplay sessions mixed with some cliches from RPG video games as well. I like the design of characters and enviroments as well, there was a considerable amount of effort in making the game not look like a bunch of stock assets put together.
However, and this is where the whole thing of being honest without offending you, the developer, comes into play... let's get into detail on how my personal experience quickly devolved into a somewhat painful, a bit rushed and at the same time repetitive insistance of seeing act I to the end. Let's start by the prologue in it's entirety, from the first few scenes all the way to the timeskip. It felt weird at first because the dialogues were rather short and sometimes bland but I put all that aside thinking "well, prologues are normally the first thing on the to-remake list of developers so I won't look too much into it." but it didn't take long for me to notice that the same issues of the prologue still were there, they were part of it. None of the dialogues were particularly inspiring, even the ones giving huge chunks of lore like the conversation with Sloth, not to mention the fact that each scene with a character didn't last more than a few minutes, which led to basically me not caring about most of the characters at all, relationship building wasn't really a thing throughout the whole game.
Especially because some characters sometimes appeared (or were seeked by the MC) only for sex scenes and the cherry on top of this problem alone is that Mida, supposedly the character that I should care about the most given that she's the MC's girlfriend, was the one who suffered the most with this. In a Cinema Sins way of speaking: she literally vanishes until the plot (or a sex scene) needs her again, and this is true for many other characters, pretty much ALL of them. Which was funny because right on the timeskip, which came WAY too early and only reinforced the problem of relationship building being basically non-existant, when it is told that the MC started dating Mida I thought "well, maybe now things will slow down a bit and we'll get to the serious stuff with maybe, and I'm totally in for that, romance" but alas... none of it happened, and it made the corruption and love points system useless.
Next there's this "Meanwhile" thing... honestly, with the breakneck speed of dialogues and the rushed story that sometimes kept going in circles around itself, the whole game felt like a huge "Meanwhile". What I mean is: don't show me what led to a certain battle or major event in the story, show me ONLY the consequences, the actual battle or major event and leave me to wonder what led to it. Not to mention that out many of these were sex scenes that I couldn't care less about. Bredita raping a helpless, mind controlled girl or some demon guy fucking his sister, like what the fuck? Don't I have better things to do? Training? Interacting with chatacters to advance the plot?
Now that I've mentioned it, the story of the game... during the prologue it felt like a slow-burn (as slow as it could be given everything that I mentioned) but, again, after the timeskip is when problems start. This feeling that it kept going in circles, always talking about the same things and same characters, and constant repetition mixed with the "Freeroam mode" (add a billion quotes there) honestly made me want to give up sometimes. But I persisted, and I'll mention the reason at the end of this.
To be honest, it only felt like the story started to move foward during the fight with Gluttony, when the game just decides to force me to use Lucifer's power (or Lich, I started refering to him like this after understanding that he is the father of the sins, even though he might have whatever name Ataegina gave him) instead of giving me another choice and this one could've been used as a big alignment change: if the player uses his power, he loses like 5 points or more, and if he doesn't, Ataegina shows up (again, only because the plot needs her) and unlocks a part of the MCs power temporarily, leading to the same battle plus a few more alignment points for choosing to "stay in the path of light". Then you could've progressed with the script, going to hell and talking to Sloth, everything else happens normally. By the way, the alignment system felt basically as useless as the love and corruption points. I played a rather neutral route, doing what I wanted to and ended with almost 20 points (towards good), but the only times where it was mentioned were during the what, 2 or 3 times Ataegina appeared after the timeskip?
Last but not least important: the battle system. I honestly don't mind a battle system in the game, afterall what would be the use of a stats system without practical use, right? The problem is making it just a minigame of random luck, where it's very easy to lose in the early game because you don't do much damage and the enemy damage is basically random, but almost impossible to lose later on because while the enemy is stuck somewhere between 6 and 15 points of damage, the MC deals more than 30 each round, I managed to deal like 50 points of damage many times myself using batflemagic. So... do what you want with the minigame, personally I'm just here for a fantasy story. And honestly I couldn't take most of the battles seriously due to the clunky plot. Believe me, by the time I reached that fight with "Horror", "Terror" or whatever he was called, instead of being confused or intimidated by it, I was like "Get dead, bitch. Anti-Eldritch squad here!".
So, to summarize my experience: high hopes that quickly devolved into painful insistance of seeing what would happen next, hoping that the problems would slowly be solved, meaning that they were attended to with each update. And my opinion on the game is pretty much the same I had after finishing the triology of a game called Breeding Island, not known by many who only use Itch.io as their source of NSFW games. I believe that only someone who has seen a book, movie or game to the end has the right to give opinions about it, basically because they sat through the entire experience on their own. And I knew that there was a big chance that I was losing precious time of my life after finishing Breeding Island 1 but I still gave a chance to both the second and third game, because I still had hope and because of this point ot view. My opinion on it? A total waste of time.
I'm sorry to say but if Ataegina keeps going like this, I fear that by the end of Act II or by the end of whatever act is the final one I'll have the same opinion I had on Breeding Island, and believe it or not but I don't want to. Why? Because the Grand Canyon-sized difference between your game and that one is that you're putting effort in it, even with the many setbacks I mentioned that can be solved rather easily. I don't want to finish Ataegina and think "what a fucking waste of time" because, at the end of the day, I still like this game. For what it is now, with many flaws, and for what it can be with the right fixes and maybe a step-by-step series of updates focusing on remaking it.
Well, this was a lengthy text of me... being honest. Again, offending the developer wasn't my intention at any moment, and nothing that I said here will stop me from playing Act II, I just wanted to get everything out of my chest before moving on.
On a late side note: I hate the fact that there are actual giant spiders in the game, which 100% adds to the authenticity of the fantasy experience, but as a guy who suffers from severe aracnophobia, highly stimulated after getting a few hours of Skyrim + The Witcher 3: Heart of Stone in, I can't help but hate it. And I hate the fact that, of all things, you nailed the cliche moments of them appearing. Had to wander into a frost cave to hide from a blizzard? Look upwards... :) Exploring some ancient ruin looking for relics and old knowledge? Hey, what's that in the darkness? Looks big... :)