Sorry to hear that!! It may be one of your extensions causing the problem? You could try turning some off to find out the culprit or try playing on a different browser!
Current estimate is somewhere around 25-28, but it may end up a bit longer depending on how the rest of the chapters go. The polyamorous routes will be added after the main game and the solo routes are finished!
I won't be making any guides for the game (beyond the walkthrough I made for how to get a love interest locked in, that is). Players can feel free to make those guides themselves for others if they want 🙏🏼
As for your question: yep, that's a step back from their relationship status. Don't think of it as pushing the issue, and it's not really about the dagger either. It's more so about the fact that X is clearly hiding something incredibly important, which includes severe political ramifications which has caused problems for the Crown on multiple occasions, as well as being emotionally unavailable and distant.
If the Crown just lets it go and makes no further effort to close that emotional gap and hold X accountable, as well as showing X that they want to know the real them and not just the performance they put on, then the relationship remains surface-level. However, it still falls within the acceptable threshold of romance points that keeps the relationship steady, so it's not a problem yet. Hope that gives you some understanding!
Oh, tysm, that's a great catch!! It's been like 5+ years since I wrote the start of the story so sometimes I forget the details of what I established prior, I'll make sure to adjust the scene with the horses to account for that 🙏🏼
I think maybe that could be doable for the first 4 chapters? But after that the coding would take more time since the story splits into separate romance routes, and diverges with plot variations later on too 🧐
It would have to be a QoL feature to look into after the game is finished, I'd say!
About Yekbûn specifically, she and the Crown will have opportunities to deepen their relationship later, but it wasn't really the time for that in this chapter considering how busy the Crown is atm. The Crown's question about their parents is not about the Crown actually doubting that, it's more of a veiled way of saying, "can you reassure me about this?" especially after they feel the weight of expectation on them more heavily than ever. There's social nuance there ;)
Politically/socially speaking, yes! D's would be the taboo romance. R and A also have positions at court but their romances would not be as scandalous since neither hold political power the way D does.
I've tested it in 3 different browsers on 2 devices. This is definitely an issue on your end, not with the game. Try playing the game in a different browser, turning VPN off, turning adblock off, etc. I've never heard of this issue before so I can't say what's causing it, unfortunately.
CH9 is basically the very start of where the game starts to evaluate your relationship, so you have many, many, many more opportunities to improve it in the upcoming chapters. It also does not affect the amount of scenes you get with a love interest, it only changes the content/tone of those scenes!
Depending on your choices and the variations you get, per playthrough the novel is roughly around ~270k words. In total (including all variations and the different romance routes) it's 585k words!
Oh, thanks for that!! I had a really long break between writing CH11 and CH12+ so that detail must have slipped my mind, I'll definitely correct it in the next update 🙏🏼
I really appreciate that!! It was definitely important to me to make each love interest feel distinct to give players a completely new experience whenever trying out a new romance route, so I'm glad that comes through well. Thanks so much for the kind words 💖🥰
