Alright, I have a lot to say, so I'll get right to it. I will apologize in advance if any of this comes across as aggressive or harsh, because it's not my intention; I want this game to be better than it is, and I believe making a thing better requires an accurate understanding of its current state and where it's flawed. Some of that involves expressing when I got frustrated with something and why.
First of all, the bugs. I'm playing version 1.4.1, I believe the paid version. My player character (PC) is male, and have so far selected Flare and Karla.
- The first description of the lobby mentions "elaborate stacks of file cabinets towering to the ceiling" which is completely at odds with the actual artwork we're seeing when that text is shown. We never do end up seeing any file cabinets.
- Is the main lobby broken? It just shows Karen, no dialogue, and an A/B choice that does nothing. What's the point of leaving the lobby button enabled if it's currently useless?
- So many times, I end up buying the best room or changing stuff for a character, often even triggering their related scene the next morning, such as the room-changing scene, only to have later conversations proceed as if those changes never happened. In the case of Karla, the game refused to even acknowledge that the room had been changed no matter what conversation options I picked. I had to load an earlier save and wait until the conversation happened for that to work properly.
- Recommendation A: If the player is not supposed to change things until the characters discuss them, especially if there's no code to handle this scenario, do not let them be changed early. Have them all disabled at first, then each conversation enables the relevant feature for that room.
- Recommendation B: Fix up the coding to allow these to be done ahead of time, even if it means skipping conversations or playing alternative dialogue. If a player happens to have memorized the ideal settings for each character and wants to speedrun through them, it should be perfectly doable without causing a sequence break.
- Addendum: The notes I took on this particular issue are... colorful. It felt like the game was expecting me to be as mentally challenged as the PC is - but more on that later.
- The 4th love scene can be accessed the day it unlocks, but will trigger automatically at the end of the day even if it was already viewed.
- After I unlocked Karla and put her in the room next to Flare's, the intro scene showed Flare's room type rather than the default room type. It was correct when I visited Karla's room normally.
- The UI seemed to show Karla as being at 4 hearts at first, though she wasn't.
- Flare replays her first couple of conversations once all her content is completed. This is a problem because those conversations are things like "Don't call me Miss" and "I'm obviously a fox". It's immersion-breaking compared to how it goes with Karla, where conversation becomes "You have a nice conversation with her" which is a good way of saying there's no story-related dialogue left.
- A significant amount of the time, selecting "General Discussion" does nothing, and I have to select it again for something to actually happen.
- Karla's meal plans are all mixed up. She's always talking about how she likes meat and wants meat, though her favorite thing is fish, just as an afterthought, but when I select the Meat option, the game says "lol eat it yourself that's the wrong food dumdum". When I went out on a limb and selected Pescatarian, which is by definition supposed to be seafood, the exposition on that result described... a lot of red meat and poultry, but no seafood. Karla even commented she loves all the meat but seafood is still her favorite, which is supposed to be what she got.
- The writing for Karla's sex scene with a male PC is inconsistent with the art. At one point, text describes the PC playing with her nipples, but she's still fully clothed. When the text describes her pulling the bottom of her suit to the side to expose her nethers, the art instead shows her fully nude.
- Level and Rep are completely broken. Ever since I maxed out the Rep the first time and unlocked Karla, supposedly leveling up, the meter never returned to 0 and has remained full this whole time, and my Level has also continued to display "Jr Researcher". I've done everything possible with Karla and advanced several days despite having nothing to do, even exceeding 5000 Rep, but nothing has changed. If there are only two characters, there should be something that tells me I've hit the end of available content.
- A couple of the conversations with Karla about her vertigo seem to be either alternate possible conversations, where one or the other should play, but not both, or they're playing out of order. In one, she talks about being one of those 12% of harpies that's born with vertigo, and it's like "Man, that sucks, I'm sure we can research a cure," but then in a subsequent conversation, the PC once again seems to have no idea that she has vertigo, and Karla tells him directly, like they didn't just have a whole conversation about it. Then they reiterated the research angle, but it's jarring to basically have the same big reveal happen twice.
- Typo: "By the might of our power of flight, none shall whether our gale!" whether -> weather. You weather an ordeal or crisis, whether you like it or not.
Now for other feedback that's not bugs but just things I want to mention:
- Is any post-fuck content planned? More dates, more research, more conversations? Right now, it's like the entire character stops existing the moment you fuck them, get promoted, and get another test subject, which is a big disappointment. I would almost compare it to the distasteful "hit it and quit it" fuckboy mentality, or the typical Hollywood "the movie/series ends when they get together" trope. Avoid this! Add more dialogue, more conversations after the affection meter is maxed out. More experiments! We're supposed to be researching, here!
- The room types need descriptions; the pixel art is nice, but purchasing a room is almost guesswork right now, and if one wants to take a role-playing approach, the Junior Researcher would definitely be writing a description of what the room should have in it for the work order.
- The relationship with Karla proceeds more quickly than I would expect. She talks about how her people tend to be monogamous, and it takes forever for her to open up about her serious neurological disability (!!!) yet she jumps this guy's bones after only knowing him for a few days. It's like these milestones are just getting checked off a list so we can quickly move on to the next girl. I would like to see their relationship be more of a slow burn, and also one where her disability is in her file but early on she shuts down emotionally when the subject comes up because she doesn't want to cry about it, rather than it needing a big reveal. Have some special events where they test various drugs the scientists came up with to see if they have any effect on her vertigo, with the potential for more shenanigans like the face-sitting scene. Eventually, as the medicines improve, she opens up to the PC more, and one day yoinks him up to the nest after she goes an entire session without feeling like the room is spinning, and they make sweet love together to celebrate.
- I cannot stand the player character's personality (good thing I'm sitting lmao). In most ways, he is the opposite of what I would expect of someone with his job title, lacking in intelligence, forethought, and personality traits other than "dumb cowardly doormat". I understand starting off with flaws so a character can grow, but this character is currently all flaws, except that the monster girls magically find him attractive in spite of everything else.
- Several of his interactions with monster girls involve him asking about things that should have been in their file, which a halfway decent researcher would have at least skimmed over.
- Knowing he was entering a room with a flying monster girl in it, but acting all confused and wondering if he got the right room, instead of immediately looking up when he doesn't see her, is not a sign of intelligence, and as a result, it's not funny when she jumps on him despite the scene being played for laughs.
- Karla tells you her preferred room type, and the PC gets annoyed. What? It's literally his job to find this stuff out! And it's supposedly his passion as well, but stuff like this makes me question it.
- PC just fucked Flare (and might be fucking her on an ongoing basis), yet for some reason he's shy around Karla? He seemed like a turbo virgin around Flare, so one would expect him to be riding high off that and be a lot more confident, but apparently he's back to being a blob when Karla shows signs of being into him. The most self-assured thing he does in the entire game is work his tongue when Karla lands on his face, and that had so much assertive, read-the-room energy it was almost out of character for him.
- If you want the player to identify with the PC, or at least be able to put themselves in the PC's shoes, that usually means making them normal, reasonably competent, and maybe a bit shy the first time they get naked with another person. This PC is someone I can't identify with at all; his only redeeming factor is that he gets to fuck monster girls, and even that's more a consequence of his job description. I end up tolerating him to get to the porn.
- You seem to have a dom fetish, and that's fine, but I'd like some more variety than that. Three female characters in this entire game so far, and all of them take a strongly dominant role with the male PC, who as I said before is a complete doormat. I think it's better when the one being dommed is actually competent and sure of themselves but takes on the submissive role to satisfy the partner's desire to be dominant. It helps them feel more like real people and less like the confident one is taking advantage of or manipulating the less confident one.
- The game's version number is a bit deceptive. If there's only two rooms unlockable at the moment, out of what, 16? This is more like version 0.1.4.1 than 1.4.1. It makes it seem like there's way more content than there actually is. 1.0 is supposed to be a full release, where all the main content is complete; 1.4 would be several major patches and/or DLC later.
- The plot is really going with the Black Company model, isn't it? Karen has a terribly abrasive personality, and the PC just rolls over and accepts everything, practically simping for the company as soon as he meets her, when he's been given no reason to do so aside from being hired and then intimidated. It's not a good look, and brings up unpleasant memories of some of my own horrible former bosses. In that sense, I suppose it's realistic, but a porn game ought to be an escape from that part of life. Ever read the hentai manga about a Black Magic company? It's one of those with an obnoxiously long title, "Though Young People Recoil From Entering The Black Magic Industry, I Found Its Treatment Of Employees Quite Good When I Entered It" (and that isn't even all of it lol). Most of the presentation of this company seems to more closely resemble that picture of things, so Karen's harsh "shitty boss" personality kind of clashes with that. Making the player quietly sit in her office for half an eternity while she fucks around with some paperwork only to eventually reveal his promotion (which he should have been expecting anyway, the meter exists for a reason) does not work in her favor. Those are intimidation tactics; the subtext is "I pay you, I own you. I will make you sit here and do nothing for 10 minutes like a good little slave because I feel like it, and there's nothing you can do about it." It doesn't feel good, and it feels even worse that the PC sits there and passively takes it without complaint or resentment.
- The idea of time advancing continuously in a game like this doesn't seem to serve a purpose. I ended up just leaving time paused, having conversations, and advancing the day when I felt like I had done all there was to do. I think a better way of doing this would be to advance time for every conversation, by an amount based on what specific conversation it was. So far, none of the conversations seem affected by the time of day, so time of day should basically be used as a natural limitation on how much you can do in a single day, there's no need for real-time advancement.
Oof, that's probably too much. I do like the game, I swear! There's just a lot that frustrates me about it in its current state, and a lot that I had thoughts on. I really hope some of this this helps in some way.