H Scene Count- 50-ish

Created by Dystopian Project

Length- 5+ hours. My playthrough stalled at 3:45, but there’s like an hour or two of content I wasn’t intending to do.

Choose your own future/decisions matter adventure RPG Maker MV Patreon game. It was… alright.

Story

So the continent is being overrun by monsters and one day, they break through the last real defense point. Where your father was stationed. The monster arrive on your front step and your mother sends you away, hoping to buy you time to escape and get to the shore, where you can get a boat to the Isles.

So Claire arrives at the first refugee camp and you the player will quickly realize this is a pretty crapsack world. Of course the guards of the checkpoint are taking full advantage of the situation, to Claire’s misfortune. You can dodge that and arrive at the port where after hunting down a ship and earning the money for a trip you finally get to one of the four Isles and then….

So Claire’s quest ends there. She has escaped the continent. She technically doesn’t have any other goal. At best, its to find a place to live and a means to earn a life. There’s really nothing to why she does anything she does after she gets to the islands. Each island is of course its own crapsack set, though only two are reachable at this point. Rathpike is controlled by four criminals essentially, and each has some things for you to do. It’s a scummy town where each district has its own reasons for being miserable. Velos, the other reachable island, is actually a pretty decent place if you ignore the crazy nobles and the futa nuns. Velos’ gimmick is weird fetishes and honestly from what I’ve seen its the best place to actually live. It’s not like the fetishes are that crazy. You can even start a breeding service and really make enough money that the game should just end there. Claire’s reached a sustainable life, done.

Gameplay

So the whole choose your adventure, your decisions matter thing is something a lot of games promised, and few even came close to that. Claire tries and suffers from the usual issues that come with those development ideals.

So you have four stats and money as your main resources in the game. No combat, just running around and talking to people. The four stats basically decide how Claire can deal with issues that crop up and unlock more overall content for the player to experience. Right now, there is no reason to focus on any one stat, in fact the way the game is actually designed you are way better off playing a mish mash of the different stats so you see more content. More content = more stat increases=more content which is the main loop of the game. So it isn’t choose your adventure as much as a couple of worse ways to play and the factual best way. Which happens a lot, as balance and designer vs player views mix, you very often end up with unfocused design. That’s not to say later development won’t make things that require higher stats that require you to focus on one or two of them, but I can’t say if that would be better design.

On the other hand, if you want to actually play a devoted character, you are missing 50% to at least a third of the game’s content, depending on what you focus on. I did three of the game’s stats and avoided sex, as game’s like this are way more difficult/interesting if you don’t abuse prostitution and sex as the out of every situation and I feel like I missed way to much. Based on the sex scene gallery, Velos’ questlines are basically 60% sex scenes while Rathpike has more non sex content, it also has plenty of content aimed at that stuff. Avoiding made the game feel empty and kind of dead ended my playthough as the only quest options I have left are sex related, and I wanted Claire to remain a virgin. Which isn’t surprising, patreon games are going to have a lot of sex focused stuff, it just kind of feels empty to play my way when there’s such an obvious main way to play.

As for the your decisions matter thing, I don’t think many games have ever done that well. It usually comes down to negative vs positive, or long term vs short term rewards. Because you can save all the time, you should never get negative rewards, and when should you deliver that long term reward? 8 versions from now? Two screens away but in the same version? Timing in this is basically impossible because it ends up as more of a reward or no reward thing until the game is done. And since only one or two characters where reoccuring, I had no feeling of my past decisions coming back to me. Which isn’t surprising, work in progress after all, but it does feel questionable as a bullet point of the game. Honestly the decisions matter thing feels more like your decisions make your stats which control how you play and effect the world more then decisions will affect the world.

Oh, and the hunger/energy system. Basically, the game put a limit on how many jobs you can do before you sleep and how many time you can sleep before you die of hunger. Food’s easy to get though, and few inns are expensive enough that you can just walk around a bit, sleep, eat and then get back to work. Really this system only means anything at the start of the game when all your resources are limited, and adds a couple of steps when doing the sex related jobs.

H and Other stuff

So every scene has multiple cgs and each time it changes to a new one the game hangs on just the cg for a second or two, making sure you can see the full thing before the next 3-5 lines of text appear. This is really weird to read and makes for a really off flow to the scenes. Having to sit, unable to do anything, as the scene displays a static image for a few seconds constantly isn’t really something I can say is a good idea.

As for the scenes themselves… I didn’t read a lot of them. The ones I did were short to medium in length. Focused more on spoken words then narration. Covered a decent range of what I consider patreon fetishes. Animals, futa, fake incest, possession, prostitution, the usual list of things you can find on that site. At least there’s a decent number of consent and non consent scenes, even if I don’t care much for the variety the game does have. The game says your seduction and  depravity change the text. I did notice a few things here and there, so its probably worth playing around with those to get the Claire that reacts how you want in your game.

Also, can’t say I’m a fan of the art style. This is mostly personal, but Claire isn’t really that attractive to me, but the world acts like she is which feels weird.

Verdict

I can say with confidence I’ll probably play a later version of this with a slut Claire and actually experience the rest of the game. At the same time, can’t say I loved this. It had decent points, and having the world suck and Claire unable to do a lot to change it was a great change of pace. You are not a hero, you are a random women trying to get by in life in a crapsack world. At the same time, my playstyle left me unable to advance with way to many obvious sex only options open, whcih didn’t really feel like a choose your own adventure the game is promised on. That’s not to say that won’t change, but crowd funding has a tendency to make games focus on sex first, game content later which ins’t suprising but does ruin a good number of promising concepts.

Save for Claire’s Quest

Contains- Save 2 has all scenes unlocked. Which you can do in five minutes just by using the in game cheat menu so I don’t expect anyone to bother with this save that basically can’t progress. I decided to not do any sex stuff since I was promised you could do a pure run and those are almost always the more interesting ones since you don’t just sex your way through everything. Thing is, there’s a lot of sex only content that I won’t do, and the only two or three things I can still do require stats I don’t have or having sex. So I dead ended myself and decided that was a good stopping place.