After playing
Love At First Sight, I really wanted to know more about that artist and the other games he made. I had already briefly played Teaching Feelings a few years back, but I didn't go very far in it. A few months beforehand, I had the opportunity to play
Butterfly Affection, with the same gritty atmosphere and visual style, where you raised a girl quite similarly to TF; the mechanics are basically the same here, except quite a bit more exploited and complex, as the game entirerly revolves around being a slave raising simulator.
I also played
Determinable Unstable, which wasn't great and was quickly abandoned, and made me honestly doubt about the developer's skills as a writer, as so far the only game whose story I liked was Love at first Sight. So after hearing about TF and how popular it was with the community, I hoped to find a middle ground between BA and LafS, with a compelling story and characters and the same mechanics.
So, Teaching Feelings is, sadly for me, just a slave simulator. There is not much in terms of story here ; you just received a girl as payment for saving a guy's life, and now you have to raise her and teaching how to properly function as a normal human being again.
The main issue I have with all of this is the way her character development is conveyed here is really
boring. The only thing you do all day long is pressing the same two buttons and choose obviously the morally good choices in branching paths and you'll get the girl do whatever you want. I hoped I could find here something more than in BA, and while there are many customizations options for the girl, which is nice, very few of these things actually impact the story in the grand scheme of things. At the end of the day, this is just a training simulator with a few flavor text and clothes as a reward for pressing the same two buttons again and again.
It doesn't help the fact that this game is only partially translated even to this day ; there are many instances of texts being left alone in japanese on buttons and menus, which makes it virtuall impossible to make certain choices unless you select the right option by accident. That's why I didn't spend a long time on the sex menu, as everything is still in japanese for some reason, as if the translators decided to sleep halfway though the translation. This isn't the fault of the dev though, so I'll let it slide.
What is the fault of the dev however, is using the same subpar visual novel engine he has been using for all his game so far. Usually I'm not the one to bash engines, and I don't know how much of it is the fault of the dev or the engine, but his games are often laggy, with poor control schemes, take a while to load images and open menus, don't have a rollback feature during dialogues, and might not even start when you click on the executable. Cherry on top, the dev sometimes decides to either hide the save function in some bizarre way, or like in TF, only allow at very specific moments in the story. I know Japanese devs prefer to use Japanese engines for their games, but this time, just this time, I think the dev would be better of just using something like Renpy for that kind of stuff.
I didn't finish Teaching Feelings. I expected something mor akin to Love at first Sight, which was a simple story that effectively handled the themes it wanted to convey, and wasn't bogged down by useless mechanics like in TF. Butterfly Affection also had the same kind of mechanics as TF, albeit much more primitive, but in that case I was fine with it as it was a much smaller game more about the mystery about the monster girl you took care of than real character development.
Here, it's just boring. I wouldn't say it's bad, as the artstyle is really nice, and if you're into slave training simulators, you might find something to your taste. But if you're not, like me, you won't find much of interest that other games don't do better. And don't get fooled by the premice ; there's some lines of dialogue of character development for the girl, but that's it in terms of story.