@Gorl
I think Sunscoop already explained this on their first post. According to them, there was a "monk-boy" and a "snake-boy" that apparently got "gender-swapped", hence why they thought this was an otome.
Now, I don't know if this was before the Kickstarter, if they simply mistook this game for another or if they simply saw early sketches/designs and though they were male-looking when they were actual women. This is a Yuri game and from the looks it has been since the beginning... so maybe there was a big misunderstanding here.
Otomes are VNs whose central figurine is a woman pursuing or being pursued by several romantic options, sometimes exclusively male, sometimes mixed. But more often than not its usually male ROs. Since this here is a Yuri game, I don't think calling it an Otome is correct IMO. So yeah, probably Sunscoop misunderstood.
(hi, I'm geck/the editor!) as someone who plays mostly otoge and BLge, mizuchi has been an interesting learning experience in the demographic differences, haha- you'd think otoge and yurige would have a lot of overlap, but the things I've come to expect from otoge are.. pretty different? the simplest- and most significant- of which is probably protagonist agency. with otoge, the devs, generally correctly, think the player wants to be swept away from their boring normal lives by handsome guy(s), and it's /that/ sort of fantasy- with yurige, it seems to be more ex/implicitly about empowerment; this is a pretty consistent theme with media 'for and by LGBT+'. romance VNs across the board are escapism, but it's a different flavor of it for each main group.
(fwiw, BLge tends to be this weird in-the-middle mix of the swept off one's feet effect but with the protag in intense denial the entire time until they finally surrender to their intensifying (often considered in-universe as horrifying) gay desires. it's one of the things that are most telling that it's a genre not really by or for gay men.
that got kinda longwinded. oops😅)