Thank you very much for your response! So many points to answer and so little time... :) I try my best to pick the most important points:
- The co-op puzzles in TLS are missing in Sweet Science, because the story is not really coop... In TLS there were a few friends getting caught in an adventure, here are a few people that slowly become friends, therefore co-op puzzles wouldn't have fit as well. Also, there is no big action here. I got the feedback from TLS that the parts that players most liked where the non-action parts with lots of fun interaction between the characters, that was one reason why I focused on this aspect in Sweet Science.
- I like to promote things that I think might also be important to others. Go is definitely not known enough in the West, and I got feedback from some players of TLS that they encountered it for the first time in the game and were fascinated by it. Same with science topics. I think that in this way, a game can have more positive long-term impact on a player: when it makes them discover a new world outside the game itself.
- Thank you for the suggestions regarding the games you played, I'll take a look at them by myself. I have played some, e.g., Everlasting Summer which definitely had a big influence on Sweet Science. I have also played a bit of its successor ("Love, money, Rock 'n Roll") and was disappointed (similarly as you).
- For your missing endings: For Ben I have written down how to get a good ending in my guide on Steam. For Honghong you need to solve Go related questions well, solve the escape room well, be approachable and flirt well in the romantic scenes and in general be smart here and there (like remembering Li's phone number, the correct song line etc.) Then you should have romantic scenes with him on the date, in the forest and on the "sea". If you play as man in the rainbow mode, in both cases (Ben and Honghong) you will have interesting conversations with your mum, obviously... ;) So while the endings are the same, the story changes a bit between rainbow mode and non-rainbow mode, as well.
- Honghong's knowledge extension: he can basically access Wikipedia in his language (and a bit more), but that does not help him with translating words much. And mathematics is more than knowing things: It won't help you to remember Pythagoras (a^2+b^2=c^2) if you need to solve a math problem where this formula is used somewhere if you don't have a good ability to process information in a logical way. Learning by heart only helps you a bit when you need to solve math problems. It's usually not enough.
Finally, something entirely different: Since I've read that you are Ukrainian: I'm sorry that your country is suffering from this terrible war right now. I don't want to write too much about politics here in this forum, but I sincerely hope that a good peace for your country will end this war!
