Review

[smallcat]

It should be noted that I am both a long time enjoyer of this genre, video games, visual novels, otome games, fandom spaces, and more. I am also a writer and an artist. I've also briefly studied visual effects and cinematic techniques. That being said, I know what I'm talking about here. I've been interacting with content that this game is at the crossroads of for almost half of my life at this point.

This game in its current state as a demo is a missed opportunity to capitalize on the rising popularity of the isekai villainess sub genre. It is not a well made game, though it is clearly much loved and has good art.

I'm not going to touch on every issue I saw, just the main ones that really stuck with me.

Special effects and technical issues:
- The game seeks to use interesting camera angles and special effects, but both overuse these and do not use them effectively to begin with. They often zoom in too quickly in an attempt to do extreme close ups and use a ton of swirl effects and rotating screen movements. In doing so, the game becomes (literally) nauseating and dizziness inducing. One user reported a seizure due to the special effects used, which are not warned of in the game despite the devs being well aware of them.
- The animations would also freeze mid way before resuming at different points in their run through, and would occasionally cause the game to buffer in place due to the tax they had on my system. I would get the game to respond, only to find that the frozen animation dropped me into the story after it had "ended" and therefore did not get all the information I needed from it. Multiple users have reported issues of this nature.
- The overuse of these effects also has technical issues associated with it where it causes even high functioning gaming PCs and setups to fail. I've been able to run a heavily modded sims 4 and Skyrim without my computer having issues, but this game crashed multiple times during my play attempt and constantly had errors and lag issues. My computer's internal systems hit as much as 190*F at one point despite my fans being full blast. Again, this has been reported by multiple users.

I couldn't finish the full demo mainly because of these specific issue. I made it as far as after the meeting of the "Duke of the North" character, but could not proceed further due to this. After my computer forced me to restart it due to it crashing my PC, I tried to pick it up again. I resumed, became very nauseous, and despite trying to power through and at least finish the common route, needed to lay down. I have not attempted to finish the game demo since yesterday when I first played

Writing, Plot, and Translation(?) issues:
- The writing in this game is a poorly done attempt at humor, satire, and use of the English language at best. I think this is mainly a case of inexperience paired with an ambitious concept.

- The writers are going for, in their words "a darkly humorous" story, but it reads closer to a vague satire of the genre paired with Alice in Wonderland style phrasing (nonsensical and hard to follow) and a writing that feels more unintentional than intended.
The narration is often nonsensical, and though a follow-able logic and train of though is present the way things are worded and discussed makes them difficult to parse. Often, the jokes interfere with the flow of the story.
- As I said, I could barely follow the plot. The dialogue wandered too far from the story in many places, and again, the constant jokes made me lose track of what was happening and continually lose my train of thought as I tried to piece the story together. The best writing I saw in this game took place during the carriage scene at the beginning, which was fraught with its own issues.

- Common tropes of various genres are present and remarked on (isekai, villainous, romance in general, web novel humor, etc), but again the writing makes it difficult to have fun with the jokes being made. Even when I wanted to laugh at some of the commentary, the poorly written language of the jokes often caused the humor to be less enjoyable.
- Scaling back the humor in the game to accommodate for more story beats would make the humor more effective, although it should be said that many of the jokes fall flat due to both being ill timed and bizarre in nature. This style of humor can be done well and is commonly used in this genre of story, but there's a specific time and place for humor like it. Unfortunately, the writing and grasp of English shown here is not good enough to communicate these effectively and it still occupies much of what dialogue I was able to view.

There are a lot of good concepts and ideas here, but this game needs better writing to communicate those. With such pretty art it would be a shame to have this game ruined by it. Unfortunately, I couldn't justify playing this when it both made me feel sick to try and I could barely understand what was happening anyways.

Fixing these issues would make me excited for the game again, like I was when I saw it advertised on steam.

[done]

I agree wholeheartedly.
I can see the love and dedication to the vision of this game but it is overshadowed by the overuse of poor animations, odd pacing, and juvenile writing. I can typically comprehend and forgive bad writing enough to enjoy it but everything combined made this unplayable for me personally :( I wanted to love it so bad. The concept and art are the only saving graces at the moment.

[car0NT]

This right here! Thank you, you summarised it perfectly!

The art is gorgeous, but, as this is meant to be a Visual Novel, the writing should be the one doing the heavy lifting. And currently, It does not.

It feels messy, sometimes even disjointed. The moment I felt it was most natural was when our Protagonist was talking with Narrator/The Ominous Voice . Almost at the end of the DEMO.

The start was good, the playing detective was also nice. But if MC could tone down the unseriousness and nonesense a bit, it would help the pacing. MC can be smart, but repeating it outloud numerous times will not make it more real.

I can't hear another "I'm a genuis" for a few hours or I'll turn off the pc, I swear.

Getting to the end of the demo was harder that it should be, not because of the mechanics (which are quite good, some I've not seen in other games before) but because of the pacing. And understanding the Love Interests/Suspects was hard because of the atempted banter/conversation which mostly was confusing.

Again, the writing being the issue.

All in all, a work in progress that has potential.