Update 20.01.2024:
Changed the stars from 3/5 to 2/5, because in chapter 4 there are even multiple scenes where other guys jerk off behind your character while you have sex with girls, and your ugly nerd cousin Steve is constantly having his hands on your girls, even though NTR is turned off.
Original Review:
Oh boy, this game could've been a 5/5 so easily, it has the potential to be one of the best adult games ever made. That is due to a kinda interesting open world, tons of girls, a "story" that is fun (you work yourself up and get richer, buy businesses and stuff, which makes you feel like really going somewhere) and lots of great ideas by the dev (for instance, you teach a female class about sexuality and you can imagine where this leads to. Lots of cool ideas and different places with different things).
But.. there are many things that keep the game down. First and foremost, the open world isn't really "open". You often can only chase 2-3 different paths at once, everything else is hardlocked behind progress on these paths. But this works against the idea of an open world.
I could understand if some major events were locked behind some sort of overall progress, but here it's really constantly like this.
Then this game falls for the usual trap: Tedious tasks with 0 gamplay value. To be fair, it's not exaggerated here like in other games, and it doesn't feel grindy often, but still you'll find yourself walking to stores buying items, or visiting the same girl 3 days in a row and see nothing really new in order to progress with her story.
But often you'll also have a hard time figuring out how to progress, and the ingame hint system often is useless. It should actually tell you what to do, and not give you hints that you already got by dialogues.
So if Jennifer says to me "I lost my ring at a place between X and Y", the hint system should tell where that place is, and not repeat the same info.
Often you'll have to search this thread on F95 to find out what to do next, and you'll also be constantly looking into the guide. Not as much as in other games again, but often enough to be annoying.
I can't stress this enough: Good game design is when you DON'T need a walkthrough to play a game. Everything should be designed that it comes naturally while playing.
Next thing that drags the game down is, that a lot of sex scenes are the basic one from the Illusion game that was used for making this game, and they're being recycled too often. Luckily, in chapter 3, there's a bit more of custom scenes (as it appears), but still they only make up like 20%. I would have loved to see more own ideas, since the world and the places and different girls give sooo much room for fantasy. Potential is being wasted a lot here by the same sex positions over and over again.
Then, the dev does also two mistakes that most adult game devs make:
1. After ejaculation you'll be faced with a static image instead of the animation keep going, this is a huge turnoff
2. Many sex scenes are wasted by close up shots on the dick how it goes into the pussy. That always erases the complete personality of the characters having sex. You could literally take any of the other 100000 games and watch a scene with a dick into a pussy and the only difference is the artstyle.
Good shots show at least the female partner, her body movements and her facial expression. Lots of wasted potential again.
Chapter 2 isn't reworked yet, so after you finished chapter 1, which is great, you'll have to torture yourself through the chapter 2 with less good graphics, no ingame hint system, laggs when you go to sleep for the next day to occur and some game-breaking bugs that you can only solve by downloading hotfixes that are somewhere hidden within the 779 pages of this thread here and by uploading your savegame to online save game changer for renpy and manually editing missing corruption points, that the game just doesn't give you.
And some events trigger randomly and then only on day X, but are required to move on, so you'll find yourself grinding through weeks and hope for the random event to occur. Or save right before it and reloading a couple of times.
Last but not least, the game forces more and more voyerism to you, as you find yourself more and more often in sex scenes where other men are watching you fucking girls standing next to you. I even had a scene where I had to fuck a girl with a black guy together despite that I have turned NTR off.
Changed the stars from 3/5 to 2/5, because in chapter 4 there are even multiple scenes where other guys jerk off behind your character while you have sex with girls, and your ugly nerd cousin Steve is constantly having his hands on your girls, even though NTR is turned off.
Original Review:
Oh boy, this game could've been a 5/5 so easily, it has the potential to be one of the best adult games ever made. That is due to a kinda interesting open world, tons of girls, a "story" that is fun (you work yourself up and get richer, buy businesses and stuff, which makes you feel like really going somewhere) and lots of great ideas by the dev (for instance, you teach a female class about sexuality and you can imagine where this leads to. Lots of cool ideas and different places with different things).
But.. there are many things that keep the game down. First and foremost, the open world isn't really "open". You often can only chase 2-3 different paths at once, everything else is hardlocked behind progress on these paths. But this works against the idea of an open world.
I could understand if some major events were locked behind some sort of overall progress, but here it's really constantly like this.
Then this game falls for the usual trap: Tedious tasks with 0 gamplay value. To be fair, it's not exaggerated here like in other games, and it doesn't feel grindy often, but still you'll find yourself walking to stores buying items, or visiting the same girl 3 days in a row and see nothing really new in order to progress with her story.
But often you'll also have a hard time figuring out how to progress, and the ingame hint system often is useless. It should actually tell you what to do, and not give you hints that you already got by dialogues.
So if Jennifer says to me "I lost my ring at a place between X and Y", the hint system should tell where that place is, and not repeat the same info.
Often you'll have to search this thread on F95 to find out what to do next, and you'll also be constantly looking into the guide. Not as much as in other games again, but often enough to be annoying.
I can't stress this enough: Good game design is when you DON'T need a walkthrough to play a game. Everything should be designed that it comes naturally while playing.
Next thing that drags the game down is, that a lot of sex scenes are the basic one from the Illusion game that was used for making this game, and they're being recycled too often. Luckily, in chapter 3, there's a bit more of custom scenes (as it appears), but still they only make up like 20%. I would have loved to see more own ideas, since the world and the places and different girls give sooo much room for fantasy. Potential is being wasted a lot here by the same sex positions over and over again.
Then, the dev does also two mistakes that most adult game devs make:
1. After ejaculation you'll be faced with a static image instead of the animation keep going, this is a huge turnoff
2. Many sex scenes are wasted by close up shots on the dick how it goes into the pussy. That always erases the complete personality of the characters having sex. You could literally take any of the other 100000 games and watch a scene with a dick into a pussy and the only difference is the artstyle.
Good shots show at least the female partner, her body movements and her facial expression. Lots of wasted potential again.
Chapter 2 isn't reworked yet, so after you finished chapter 1, which is great, you'll have to torture yourself through the chapter 2 with less good graphics, no ingame hint system, laggs when you go to sleep for the next day to occur and some game-breaking bugs that you can only solve by downloading hotfixes that are somewhere hidden within the 779 pages of this thread here and by uploading your savegame to online save game changer for renpy and manually editing missing corruption points, that the game just doesn't give you.
And some events trigger randomly and then only on day X, but are required to move on, so you'll find yourself grinding through weeks and hope for the random event to occur. Or save right before it and reloading a couple of times.
Last but not least, the game forces more and more voyerism to you, as you find yourself more and more often in sex scenes where other men are watching you fucking girls standing next to you. I even had a scene where I had to fuck a girl with a black guy together despite that I have turned NTR off.