Early alpha review (v0.0.8). In summary: very good, even in its current early alpha state.
I'm not entirely enamored of the run-or-rape genre (for more than a few reasons that are probably not worth getting into here) or of furries, and a lot of people don't like playing as a female protagonist getting boned by a game full of male-cis-mascs (I'm personally not fond of male-trans-mascs or intersex-nonbinary either, but those aren't in the game (yet?) and I won't kink shame anyone who does).
If you're not one of the many buffoons on F95 who feels the need to spam that you're not even bothering to download something doesn't match your preferred tags (you know who you are), you're going to find something that behaves like a modern, streamlined version of Legend of Krystal, and satisfies at least some of the Demon Girl/Angel Girl/Shinobi Girl monster-on-girl fetishes.
Animations are incredibly good; although there aren't any inverse kinematics affected by the environment, the character rig is quite impressive and the MC moves in an exceedingly realistic and smooth fashion, especially for a 2D game. The character uses independent limbs rather than a skinned model, like LoK, but other than the occasional overlap for your underwear while walking or a hard line when the tops of your character's breasts jiggle far enough to overlap your character's collarbones, you'll hardly notice, and the walking and running animations are still pleasing to the eye both aesthetically and sexually. Sexual animations are fairly impressive, as well, due to how smooth they are.
The aesthetic is somewhat paradoxical. Literally everything in the game world wants either to ignore you or to rape you, which gives a feeling of loneliness and eventually boredom, even though the art aesthetic makes the game world seem cheery and it gives the impression that everything is still running smoothly. This creates a strange and probably unintentional vibe. The buildings are more than bright enough to navigate without turning the lights on, so rather than carrying the panic of I Am Legend (non-porn novel/video) or horror games, it's really rather tame and you don't actually fear going into buildings in the same way that you might in a roguelike or even a first person shooter. The play experience suffers as a result.
More emphasis on the breakdown of social order that would come with the "mutation" or whatever event caused all of the goatmen, slimes, etc. to be running around is probably needed to reconcile the game's strange lack of emphasis on the player waking up into what by is purported by the concept to be a disaster scenario. I assume that will be fleshed out as time goes on, but there's also no clarification that the player "started" as a furry girl or "became" a furry girl immediately before play begins, and clarifying that would be a good first step at pinning down exactly how abnormal the situation is, tempering or priming the player's expectations.
Scavenging is a little frustrating at the moment, especially for clothing, because if an enemy successfully strips your character, they will immediately take your clothing and eat it. If it was harder for enemies to digest your clothing, giving you the chance to get it back a little worse for wear, it would be more entertaining. Eventually, especially once you get the hang of the combat, you'll probably just stop caring about wearing clothing because the stat benefits they provide aren't really worth the need to replace them over and over again, and the enemies are usually hostile/horny enough to attack you anyway, regardless of whether you are dressed.
Scavenging actually carries A Valley Without Wind (non-porn game) vibes, which is also a fairly good thing. Unfortunately, some of the genius of the procedurally generated shopping district is also its curse, with bizarrely backwards level transitions at times, making it hard to find your way back to the city exit simply by merit of the city being non-Euclidean. If the shopping district were just a straightforward set of 3x2 panels that you could flip between north and south in the midpoint or flip between adjacent panels at each end, it would work wonders on making the scavenging experience a little more fun -- or, alternatively, going full AVWW and having a navigable minimap of non-Euclidean panels like Hachina, etc.
Getting the hang of scavenging isn't too hard, but one problem with the game is that the crafting system is locked to tables with resources that are not easy to acquire, especially on your first couple of days. There isn't enough overlap between locations to scavenge basic staples, and the "random number Jesus" RNG can often make your first few day trips into the shopping district a wasted trip if you can't find one of the building types you need. Some days you'll just run into a bunch of seafood restaurants, some days just a bunch of clothing stores, when what you really want is a construction site... and so on.
Combat is a bit lacking. Because of the same smooth animation system lauded earlier, attacks are brilliantly smooth looking, but telegraph far too slowly. Mastering the timing becomes more annoying than fun: when you have to compare a 1.3 second swing to a 1.5 second lash of a bunch of slime tentacles, combat feels stilted and mechanical rather than fluid and engaging. Losing combat doesn't feel like you're being punished for your own mistakes, but rather being blamed for the game deliberately holding you back as you swim through molasses. In fact, a global doubling of the attack speeds (or, possibly, moving the attack animation speed to a game option) would probably do half the work of solving that problem. Additionally, for reasons inexplicable, the "Get Up" button is its own separate keybind rather than bound to the game's "Activate" button or more intuitively to your movement keys.
It could definitely do with some Sheltered-style encounters with random NPCs who are variably either friendly or hostile -- which I assume is forthcoming -- to break up the monotony. While I'm not sure a full-fledged companion system would be warranted, the game quickly becomes boring without a drive to go on. By the time I built my crafting table, I didn't feel particularly compelled to proceed through the rest of the process.
At time of play, 0.0.8, there is a bug that causes your character to vanish when "seduced" by the forest wolf, who appears only at night; it's an avoidable bug (just search the forest during the day) but it's something to keep in mind. This soft-locks the game, requiring you to exit (and lose your progress, as saving can only be done at your bed). Otherwise, I haven't run into any unrecoverable bugs whatsoever, which is quite impressive!
