I've never watched the original Medabots, so I'm pretty sure I've missed a couple of private jokes and references to the source material. But as a fan of TinkeringTurian's writing in his previous game, I was glad to see the writing in Bedabots is pretty much on par with what I typically see from him in terms of quality. Sadly, the storytelling here does a bit too much of telling, rather than showing, the interactions between the MC and his entourage, or his rose-tinted wiews of the big megacity he dreams to live in. The writer could have spared some more time during the prologue to make the characters actually talk and interact with each other, rather than giving us a brief summary of their relationship. We don't really get to understand why the MC hates his life at the farm apart from the fact he's bored, and why he idolizes the life at the city so much; we know he does because it's told to us in the story, but from what we see he's not living a bad life either, and we don't really see why the city is so appealing to them, apart from the fact it's shiny and colorful. It's a minor gripe, though.
The artstyle is phenomenal. Even though robots and petite girls are pretty low on my list of favourite fetishes, the character designs are all pretty cute, and the writer even made a pretty good joke-explanation of why the MC is a faceless nobody when you see his face on the pictures, unlike all those Japanese hentais where that's pretty much the norm; and it actually got a genuine chuckle out of me because I didn't expect an explanation at all. The pixel art in the sex scene is pretty detailed and in high-definition, and the overall presentation of the scenes with the split screens and the character poses really give a lot of charm and identity to their work.
If I had to give the artstyle a bit of criticism, it would be that the drawings in the regular dialogues almost never use more than one color variant. For extended periods of time, the game will just display that pale blue color, and only use other colors for very minor background elements, or when something very important is going on, like the attack on the rich kid. I get they did that to give these scenes more impact and to shorten the production time on them, but it doesn't help making these scenes more memorable, and sometimes it is hard to gauge the character design of some bedabots where there's barely any shading or variance in color, like for the innkeeper for instance.
But overall, it's a really solid demo. My question for the future would be what the devs have intended for this VN to be, because I was kinda expecting some sort of RPG, given the source material was about robots fighting each other, but I'm perfectly fine with the game staying a VN. It's short but it's really good, I'd reccomend it for the fans of the genre.
