(Ah wait, there *are* mouseover tooltips! Only for your own abilities and for status effects, but that's already a huge help.. why couldn't I get those to show up the first time...? Pressing shift to show them works great, too, but the "Shift: View Tooltips" text on the right sidebar only shows up while I'm pressing shift @_@ That whole first match, I had no idea...)
Since I knew Mahjong already, I went straight into the story mode, and the first match felt really rough around the edges. There didn't seem to be any way to check the characters' powers while in the match, so I was just kind of flying blind about all the abilities getting fired off, and about what my own ones ("master baiter"?) even did, since there aren't any tooltips or anything.
All the abilities happen so fast, too, it's so easy to miss them - I think something like a chatlog-style window that tracks them, with mouseover tooltips for what stuff like getting "aimed at" or "poisoned" even does, exactly, would go a REALLY long way to clear up the confusion there?
Lastly, the music got really grating REALLY fast and I found myself wishing there was a way to adjust the volume from the pause menu!
That's all! Right now, this is looking pretty rough, but I'm really excited for how it'll end up later down the line!
This is really tough, I wish I could *always* see where the pieces will end up... I like the art and music, at least! The characters (I've been able to reach) are all really charming..!
Oh HECK yes, I'm really glad to see those changes to companion distance. Always nice to see another mutation become feasible for companions (and clones). Thank you!
I was really happy about how compassionately both Cassia and Senna are treated... having read Starry Flowers, it's nice to know Cassia finds happiness..! I hope Senna does, too - she struck me as the "gifted kid burnout" type, so I got really worried by the last day! (And the epilogue!)
The puzzles are really fun, too! To think that this is all renpy... that's amazing... The patterns are cute, and the difficulty curve is really gentle. I was really happy to see more of them in the gallery afterwards!
I skipped the tutorial, so I can't speak to that, but even without the verbal explanation ahead of time, it's easy to find a nice starting point in the early ones, and it felt like some of the intermediate concepts are just kind of naturally taught through the puzzles themselves..? And then it really ramps up for the bonus ones! Oh, and I liked the short thoughts in the music gallery, too... so much charm in such a short VN!
It's the roughest ending, and you get it if Chloe has so little confidence in you that you skip right past the first choice of recommendations, then make the joke about rubbing one out.
So it's pretty hard to get by accident! Qmin is too good at her job. That specific option is perfectly fine if Chloe is already comfortable around you, but it's the straw that breaks the camel's back if she isn't!
The very top one is the roughest ending - you get it if she has so little confidence in you that you skip right past the first choice of recommendations, and then make an overfamiliar joke.
It's pretty specific! Qmin is too good at her job to mess up like this unless you reeeaaally lean into it, bless her.
Aaahh, I remember reading and enjoying this in 2019... I really wanted to show it to some friends and acquaintances that like robots, but I can't access the game's page anymore (it's "restricted" now?) and I don't have it downloaded ;_;
