I was a bit hesitant to try this, maybe due to a disappointing experience with an unrelated but similarly titled game? But must say this was very surprising in a positive way. I can’t say that Harem Hotel is the best game in the genre story wise, but I for sure did not expect it to turn in the direction it does and then double down on it. Politics wise I do feel it’s still somewhat “confused” in a few ways (who isn’t, really) but it’s got its heart in the right place, for sure.
I guess one of my only regrets here is that I didn’t think to keep open a document to collate typos and missing flag checks as I DID have a handful of events that ended up coming in a bit of a weird order.
Overall, though, I still have some feedback that may be useful [v0.16.2] [spoilers ahead, though I try to be somewhat vague]:
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I feel early progression is a bit wonky. The game leads you to exploring the city but content there dries up almost immediately. This ended up giving me the impression that this was going to turn out somewhat barebones (that was an extremely wrong impression, lol, and always felt weird given the package size).
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For repeatable church content, the Seer could be used to give the player hints for how to trigger upcoming events, since the girl menu doesn’t seem to have any sort of tooltips or anything of the like. gamey but would work
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Additionally, it feels like the game is uncomfortably constricted until the event where you <acquire many moneys>. It’s a stage of the game where you’re presented with a load of things to spend money on but you don’t really make money in any significant way. Active ways of making money could use a lot of boosting, honestly. Even the best option, which only unlocks way late into the game doesn’t give you much (also at that point my expenses were already a bit weird since they where largely event related). This makes it a bit too awkward when you need to suddenly spring 7500$ to progress, or get hit with a surprise 4K expense
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I believe the super expensive premium elf has a quest tracking issue on her slave route. I was 4/4 progress, saw the scene with the dildo but the tracker still showed the “event available” flag which I couldn’t find on my own and is not listed on the wiki
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For the dungeon competition event I think the game ended up making me more scared than necessary. I ended up worried I might miss up on content there and it caused me to delay that event until I could train the relevant girl no more. This turned out to be very overkill, I believe.
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Still on training, if unavailable options got greyed out it would be quite nice. I believe there’s at least one that is listed and is not even currently obtainable
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The dungeon comp also stuck in mind during the hospital event. We get an option to call Cornwall there and the MC is just super mad and screams at him but that felt odd. At that point in the game, after the dungeon comp, we actually have a good relationship with Cornwall, who has a high opinion of the MC as a slaver. I kind of expected the phonecall to be a bit more along the lines of leveraging that relationship and respect to ask Cornwall for a favour in securing the purchase of this slave that is just about to hit the system. Also given the reason they go to the hospital in the first place, the MC being as aggroed as he is still turns out a bit weird, but that one contributes to the drama and theme more directly so it bothered me less
All in all though, this game surprised me greatly and I’m excited to see where it goes. I feel like even characters whose story/theme/trope I wasn’t super excited at first (hello, Android) ended up delivering interesting moments and getting me invested in the end. When it comes to horny, shoutout to pair scenes in the dungeon, I guess. 2/2 on those. Looking forward to the next update and the continuation of the very expensive elf being educated in her new position