I know it’s somewhat late for this type of comment but I’m of two minds about this game so far.
I’ve been playing it for a bit and like a lot about the game’s flow. Cassandra starts out nigh unbeatable and you’re just controlling the bleeding while trying to build up your own strength, weakening her as you prepare to pounce and reverse the roles.
This is a fun dynamic and gives the game some nice tension. It’s quite satisfying once you decide you can actually start winning and flip the switch to go aggressive.
The game also has a lot of content and it’s satisfying to advance all the different tracks. But I think it also tries a bit too hard to no lose all its teeth, so to speak.
So some progression spoilers from here on out
Cassandra has 4 categories of cards. There’s her “personal cards” which are the ones you weaken by blackmailing her Her reputation card, which weakens as you progress with her overall blackmailing tracks There’s Tiffany’s card which stands on its own And there’s her “support cards”. Things like interns and empty wallet which you can’t weaken.
So the thing is that as you advance through Cassandra’s blackmail tracks (this COULD be related to glory thresholds from you but that doesn’t seem to be the case) and her personal cards get weaker, the game fights back and tries to up the difficulty by enhancing her support cards. Additionally you lose max hand size and start getting random hostile events when trying to explore (something other people have complained about).
This ends up making the game quite difficult again because the support cards are quite powerful and having less cards in general really hurts. Additionally, the dynamics of the game are a bit all over the place. In the “survival stage” one of your main goals is accumulating resources. By the time I decided to go on the offensive, I had around 1200 money and blackmail. But you need to spend a lot of those resources in order to win against Cassandra, especially since in some ways, your work weakening her personal cards gets undone, as she becomes strong with a whole different set of cards which are by and large, all strong in inconvenient ways.
So it ends up feeling like the game sort of punishes you for not “finding a sweetspot” where Cassandra is juuust weak enough to be beaten but not weak enough that her support cards become oppressive, which seems a bit counterintuitive.
It also feels a bit weird, if you finish all of Cassandra’s tracks, for example, she has essentially no money, yet “empty wallet” is now a “loads of riches” card. But does mean that there is a very genuine fear that you get into an irrecoverable situation.
At this stage of the game, smaller hand, hostile overworld and more aggressive Cassandra means that taking a break to gather more resources (as you DO burn through those so easily) as she desperately tries to claw back from 0 glory (where you will easily put her at the tail end of your survival stage) doesn’t really feel feasible, you’re bleeding more than ever and it’s hard to hoard anything, despite you having weakened Cassandra as much as you can.
Again, it’s a bit like you’re being told that you went too hard on what the game told you to do (at least initially). At where I am as I write this, I’m between 700 and 800 glory, I believe I have between 200 and 300 money and blackmail and I’m not sure how longer I can go on. I think I can win from here, playing more carefully and all, but I have more than half of emili’s track as well as the entire “optional tiffany” track you pay for to go through in terms of events and I don’t at all believe I have any chance of getting through those, because the game will not allow me to claw back if I cede any ground. I have become too powerful and, thus, the game is too hard and too punishing.
So… yeah. For people wanting to get into this, 1200/1200 not really enough to claw through the glory hoarding stage of the game comfortably. You DO get access to some more powerful cards later on once Cassandra gets whore status but looking for them becomes risky because half the time you trigger an overworld event that’s just you getting beaten up for less 20 energy (which becomes hard to hoard as you’re probably going even harder for work in battles now) and money (which is dwindling as you pay to get her influence down).
Other than that, the combat system IS interesting and HAS fun dynamics. All of the 4 allies are really useful and well worth the quest chains and there is A LOT of nice erotic content here. Just a shame the progression becomes a bit of a slog in the end in that way.