Hmm, went into the game with no expectation, but came out of it quite baffled. I sat to the end of it with a friend to see if there’s any improvement but the demo consistently offers very little of values. The gorgeous art captured our attention but it’s not enough to offset everything else. There are glaring issues on both technical sides and the writing side.
Some of the animations are jarring and out of place, many of them feels like they were done in Movie Maker instead of thoughtfully created to fit the situation. There are wonky animations everywhere, for example Izel’s earring is misplaced and shakes even if it’s a cuff earring.
The camera panning is also extremely unnecessary in every instances we get it, the parts where we have to sit watching it moving up the character also moves weirdly and stops at the crotch for a little too long. Both of these problems are presented in the UI, which clash heavily with the art except for the textbox which looks fine.
On to the writing, I have many problems with it. For example, the dissonance between the tones the writer was trying to convey clash horribly. The flat attempts at humor completely negate any suspense or horror we’re supposed to feel.
It makes us as players struggle to sympathize with the protagonist’s situation because she seems more like a caricature than a person. She doesn’t seem to be bright, quite foolhardy even, I can accept if these are written visibly as flaws, but the game rarely perceive them as such. The protagonist also doesn’t face any backlash for her foolish behaviors unless we specifically picked stupid choices, which I’m surprised they even exist. The foolish deductions she can make in chapter 1 feels like time-padding instead of genuine choices. They’re very obvious and childish, to the point where I don’t think they were serious at all. The entirety of chapter 1 could’ve wrapped up in 5 minutes had the protagonist been as smart as she boasted to be.
Jokes are repeated a lot, to the points where it gets grating after the fifth time they’re mentioned. The writing gets pedantic really fast and illogical at the best of times. It’s hard to believe this is supposed to be a murder mystery if the protagonist’s inner monologues lack any thoughtful logic. She just generally suffers from fatal flaws which makes me think had the others not been so bland, she’d not survive for long.
The love interests all have similar character voices except for Servant. All of them are generally nice, bland, and vaguely unintelligent. We were encouraged to doubt them but all of them give us very little reasons to be cynical except for what the narrator tells us to do. I also have a lot of problems but I’ll touch upon that later. The struggles with the love interests would’ve been redeemed if they were more hostile towards the protagonist. At least, that way we have reasons to doubt them and it’d also show us that the reason the protagonist was branded a villainess was warranted. As it is, the villainess in the title is very much “show, not tell.”
About the narrator, or the voice in the protagonist’s head, they as a character feels extremely conniving at times. Straight off the bat, you can feel their condescending attitude towards the player in the opening scene. If the words in the tutorials are also their voice then it’s even more troublesome, a lot of flavor text which is bad for a tutorial. In these sections, you should just be straightforward and tell the players which do what.
The protagonist also questions very little about the presence of the narrator, who’s by far the most suspicious character.
Overall, I cannot recommend the game at all as it is, especially since a lot of the problems I have was brought up among the beta testers and never got addressed. Maybe if there’s a complete overhaul of the game, otherwise, it’s better to divert your attention somewhere else.