The loading bar sits there for what feels like forever, just a white screen and that little circle spinning. I almost closed the tab, honestly. But then you get the gift box scene and something about the way the sister character looks at the protagonist, this weird mix of grief and something else, it hooked me. The voice acting for Katrin, when it kicks in during certain scenes, has this breathy quality that's completely at odds with the fantasy setting but somehow works. It's like she's in a different, much dirtier game and nobody told her.
The orc attack backstory is just window dressing. Every 12 years they come, father's dead from a mystery disease, here's a box you can't open yet. Standard fantasy quest framing that the game seems to forget about for long stretches while you're busy with the innkeeper's wife or whoever. The sprite art is inconsistent, you can tell different artists worked on different characters. Some look like they belong in a polished visual novel, others have that slightly off proportion thing that reminds me of early Newgrounds submissions. The H scenes though, those are where the budget clearly went. Over 60 of them and still counting, which is absurd. The one with the drow character, Xerana, has this voice performance that's trying so hard to be sultry it circles back around to being genuinely hot. The audio mixing is a mess, sometimes the moans are way louder than the dialogue and I had to scramble for my volume control.
I keep thinking about that gift box mechanic. You wait a whole in game year to open it and I won't spoil what's inside but it's not what the buildup suggests. The game pulls this bait and switch that's either clever or lazy depending on my mood. The patreon link is right there in the menu, always visible, which is a choice. Some scenes just end abruptly, like the artist ran out of time or interest, and there's no real resolution to the orc threat yet because it's still in development. The death lady character, Morta, has dialogue that reads like someone ran a thesaurus through Google Translate but her scene is one of the better animated ones so I guess that's the tradeoff.
