Engrish. Lots and lots of Engrish.
Yep. The first makeout between the MC and Rosie had instances of 'slide your hand down
his pants/up
his shirt' when referring to action taken by the male MC with the girl. Then the MC walks into his house and addresses his father with 'Hi Daddy!' strait faced without a shred of humor or irony. A lot of the words are not in the proper tense or gender.
In response to the MC's sister asking him about his girlfriend and if he's ashamed, his response is this...
I have no idea what this means. What are
movies in this context? Maybe this is some turn of phrase in French? But if so, then something has been lost in translation, because this doesn't make a lick of sense.
Also, I feel like the literal ellipsis needs to file a restraining order against this dev for chronic misuses and abuse. There is a lot of reading of people's inner thoughts, and every fucking damn line of that is bookended with brackets and ellipsis front and back. That's all not counting the various times ellipsis are used throughout the normal spoken dialogue as well. It feels like everyone is pausing for dramatic effect every other goddamn second.
But that's far from the game's only shortcomings.
The intro is really rushed and lazy. In about a minute the game goes from the MC being spooked at hearing voices, to confidently affirming he has super powers. Yeah, sure. Hundred of thousands of people throughout history have heard voices in their head they didn't attribute to themselves. We have clinical mental disorders and diagnoses that cover such things. But nope, the MC is the
one dude in all of human history who is actually hearing other people's thoughts and not just his own over-active imagination. Perfectly reasonable assumption to make,
and not at all the delusion of a troubled horny teenager.
Later he jumps to other conclusions, like listening in on his mom being 'excited' at work and just assuming she's cheating with someone (that it later turns out to be true doesn't fix it, but rather makes it lazy foreshadowing). But the funniest one is when the MC's dad catches him sneaking out the two drunk girls that spent the night after the party, and the dad just assumes they're prostitutes. Hilarious, because while it is absurd given the story, it is exactly what I would have thought given how they actually look (Emilie in particular looks like she's hiding a meth habit).
The scene where the MC masturbates to porn on his laptop is so deliberate in its constant and unrelenting framing of the MC's junk that it feels like
gay porn. You
are going to watch the MC jerk themselves off to completion,
and his dick is going to stare you right in the eyes the entire time. This can happen again after the date with Rosie at the movie theater, and in the shower the next morning, and again later that same afternoon, and a few more times after that. Boy is jerking it so often he's gonna have carpal tunnel syndrome before he graduates. You can't
just jerk off to lower your libido stat so that you don't finish early with a girl later.
Oh no. You need to watch the MC jerk themselves off to completion each and every time, with the focus always on the MC's own dick. It is presented in a way to only be enjoyable to those who get off on the sight of dudes masturbating.
I have no idea how old anyone is supposed to be here. The students all look like frumpy and shrunken 30-somethings with the deadeye stare of someone who's been working in a soulless retail job for years, and with an unhealthy fast-food diet to match. But when the mother catches the MC masturbating and you later read her thoughts at dinner, she's worried about having
the talk and debating how
normal it is for her son to be sexually active like he's a
fucking child.
Also after the shower the game bugs out and keeps playing the sound of running water after that. Loading an earlier save or restarting the game entirely doesn't fix it either. Kinda surreal to be 20 minutes into a house party session of Truth or Dare and still hear someone taking a shower. Ending that day finally fixes it...
You want lazy writing? Rosie's father being the pervy teacher who's thoughts hinted at him fucking one of the students is treated like a big surprise reveal. Wait, how in the actual fuck is the fact that Rosie's dad a teacher at their school,
and one that they all have a class with, somehow this great mystery? The game plays around with being coy about who her father is, and it turns out he's just Generic Pedophile Teacher #37 that we already ran into earlier? Does nobody know anybody else's surnames in this topsy-turvy alternate universe!?
It ends up going even more downhill from here. I tried to see what kind of decent person I could try to make the MC be, with as little abuse of his powers as possible. The MC ends up accidently placing a suggestion or compulsion on Elise, the girl who's already being intimate with his friend Steve, and she end up cornering the MC in a locker room looking to suck his dick. You can decline (with one of the game's percentile based RNG options that you can insta-cheese by just rolling back until and retrying until you succeed), but then she vanishes the rest of the day; causing the MC with Steve and Rosie to track her down after school. Elise then goes to talk with Rosie alone, and the thoughts between the Elise and the MC are all worried about 'what happened', to the point that the MC memory-wipes Elise to stop her from spilling the bean on 'what happened' to Rosie. For the record,
what happened was
fuck all. Elise made a pass and was rejected, and none of the people involved here are in any sort of established, exclusive, or committed relationship. Being unable to stop perceiving the thoughts of those close by or fucking with someone's mind
on accident is one thing; but this was petty, stupid, and shocking callous.
The final nail in the coffin in the MC's lack of redemption was when, with no choice or input from the player, he forcibly alters the mind of Emilie (who is presumably a lesbian) so that she stops fawning over Rosie and moves onto the MC's sister Mia. Even if you as a player want to not be an asshole and deliberately fuck with people's minds,
you can get fucked. Which is fine I guess, but also just reaffirmed why this isn't for me. This MC is incapable of being aspirational on his own merits, and the whole mind control angle just makes everything too bland and uninteresting for anyone who actually enjoys the power-play of some non-con scenarios. So the MC is in effect a rapist (despite the player's best efforts); but without any of the fun, charisma, confrontation, taboo, or power fantasy of non-con.
I don't want to be too down on it.
This person is trying. The writing, and the translation, both need work. I think all of the characters are pretty fugly and the MC is an absolute wanker, but that just means the game isn't for me. The 'gameplay' they're trying to go for with the three different sliding scales meant to alter the chance of an action succeeding is a novel idea, but only works on the honor system and is functionally effortless to cheese and bypass. It also has other knock on effects, like every sex/masturbation scene needing to be able to run out the clock and keep cycling back through repeated frames for as many times as you need to for the libido meter to fill and reach orgasm; that means that having more stamina subjects you to insufferably longer staring sessions with the MC's dick when he jerks off.
Someone tried and put some genuine effort into this, even if it's not particularly good and I'm not the intended audience. This isn't a scam, or an asset flip, or (to the best of my knowledge) plagiarized content. You can certainly do far worse here on F95.
But I was rather referring to the fact that with the appearance of this Mc it seems to be the typical story of a loser who, even having that kind of power, will continue to be one haha.
You are correct in your assessment. He's a petty tyrant, using his powers to do little more than get his dick wet.
