I agree, this bothered me about CJ, too. Just... Note that even at that point, there are already at least two homosexual characters in the story (albeit, they're both girls, and I suppose it'd be more accurate to say one of them is bisexual; the other will inevitably end up being… well, forced into bisexuality, in a way). Later on, there's at least one explicitly homosexual male and one bisexual male, one of which is… I can't really say without spoiling things, fuck. And it doesn't seem like there's any way to spoiler tag text on this site.

It concerned me, too, but as the story progresses you'll come to realize that CJ's attitude towards homosexuality isn't as bigoted as if might have seemed early on. Remember that he's still pretty much a kid, he's got a lot of growing up to do. CJ may seem to be the protagonist, but I'm my opinion, that's not really true. Each of the girls in his polycule are just as much the protagonist as CJ is, if not more so. You spend more time getting to know each of them from their perspective than you do getting to know CJ from his. In fact, you almost never see things from CJ's perspective beyond the prologue. 

Let's be real, here: CJ's entire ‘look’ is incredibly metrosexual. Seriously, he practically screams “I'm a closeted bisexual guy!” I think that if Jamie had turned out to actually have a dick, CJ would've made it work. As in, they'd eventually have fucked. 

See, CJ is terrified of being emotionally vulnerable around others, even those he's intimately connected to, just like most men are. It's the same shitty reality that the majority of men in the present day face. There's a lovely phrase for it: toxic masculinity. 

He feels as if he has to always be the “man,” always has to support those he cares about, and that if he ever allowed them to support him instead, he'd somehow be rendered incapable of continuing to provide that support to others. It's genuinely really fuckin' sad.

That said, he grows up a lot throughout the story. Early on, you'd be right that he gives off some very distinctly homophobic vibes, but later, not so much; though, doing get me wrong, they're still there (it's not as if he's dealt with them, after all), they're just not being actively expressed. 

I've just reached around chapter 35 and he's still not confronted this part of himself, and I'm not sure he even will within the next X chapters—before I reach the end of the content that's currently out—but I would be very, very surprised if this wasn't addressed by the end of the series. Several characters struggle with their sexuality in different ways, one of which is explicitly a struggle with homosexuality, and the writers always deal with such topics with maturity and respect. For example, the relationship dynamic that they ask have is far less a “harem” and far more a polyamarous polycule.

Remember: a character's beliefs and actions are not the same as the author's beliefs and actions. Without conflict, one can't grow. You can both dislike CJ's homophobic behaviors and still love the story and characters. These are not mutually exclusive things, after all.

I can't even view this as porn. To me, it's an excellent story that happens to also include sex scenes. Much like many novels will include sex scenes, even when the story itself isn't straight up erotica. Simply superb.

Yup. Happens to me occasionally, too—not because of two fingers, but because I sometimes drip ejuice on my tablet's screen (classy stuff, I know). Not a big deal though, not sure why anyone would complain about this.

Clearly not. A real shame, though. At least he knows about the magic of the comma, I guess? Could be worse.

“Does this game have animation scenes?”

The Simple Answer...

Yes, though they are, admittedly, few and far between. Even so, you shouldn't let this stop you from playing it. I really mean that! It's unbelievably good. I've never read a more excellent VN. This even tops every professional JP VN release I've ever read.

But... maybe you feel like reading a bit more than that..?

longer Better? RIGHT! 

The             BEST        Answer

OK. Cool. So! I mean, sure, it doesn't have, like, a ton of animated sex scenes, especially later on in the story—more on that later—but it makes up for that with the ridiculous amount of depth that each and every character is given. Hell, labeling this game as a harem eroge is flat out wrong. This isn't a harem, it's a polycule. Which is to say, the truth of what's going on in this story is that the writer(s?) very clearly have a comprehensive understanding of how polyamarous relationships actually work in the real world, and they've done an absolutely amazing job of portraying that kind of dynamic accurately within this story, without sacrificing the eroticism of such a dynamic.

“I actually find the majority of the female characters downright unattractive; big titties and supermodel bodies just really ain't my jam.”

I genuinely can't even put into words just how difficult it truly is to portray such complex relationship structures within fictional worlds, and yet, the writer(s?) have done so seemingly effortlessly. It's truly exceptional in so many ways. I don't even find most of the characters all that attractive—if I'm being honest, I actually find the majority of the female characters downright unattractive; big titties and supermodel bodies just really ain't my jam—and yet… this is still my all-time favorite VN. I picked it up maybe five days ago now and I've literally not been able to put it down since then. Seriously: I started the app up and I've not even once had to visit the main menu after that, because it's practically the only thing I've been using my tablet for.

The amount of content and story—and the fucking depth of it—is truly unbelievable, too. I didn't actually realize this was such an old project—nor did I realize that it was still getting updates—but after reading for an ungodly number of hours and still not being at the end, it's clear that the writer(s?) have put an unquantifiable amount of love, care, time, effort, and energy into this story, and it shows. 

“Nothing gets on my nerves more in a story than silly, repeated misspellings or grammatical errors.” “… ‘dumbie’ is not a word.”

I just… I really wish they'd pop open the story files, press CTRL+H, and replace ‘dumbie’ with ‘dummy’ already.  If you didn't know… ‘dumbie’ is not a word. To be blunt, I've even debated doing this myself, because it's truly that maddening to me—yes, yes, yes, I know; I'm neurotic as hell. Nothing gets on my nerves more in a story than silly, repeated misspellings or grammatical errors. Technically, dumbie is an obsolete word meaning “a mute person” that hasn't been used since the mid-70's. It's also a known misspelling for dummy, meaning “like a wooden puppet or doll; brainless, stupid.”

Calling someone a ‘dummy‘ isn't a…articularly common thing for people to do these days—and, to be blunt, it hasn't been for at least a few decades now—but, when it is used, it's typically used in a joking, friendly way. You'd call someone a ‘dummy’ if you thought they'd done something silly or stupid, albeit inconsequential, and you wanted to poke fun at them in a way that they'd almost certainly know you're not being serious.

In any case, it's clear that the writer(s?) want to be using the word ‘dummy,’ given the way they always use (the non-word ) ‘dumbie,’ and it's absolutely maddening to read. Honestly, it's weird enough that a bunch of kids—okay, okay, they're technically not kids since they're like 16 to 19 years old, but still—in the 2050s (or later?) would be calling each other dummies (which is the correct spelling for the plural of 'dummy'), but I'd be able to accept that… if only it were spelled correctly.

A Brief Warning 

on the 

Weird Part of the Prologue

The only real complaint I have about this game is that before the story really fully kicks off—that is, before the reader is given the opportunity to even have a tiny inkling of an idea as to what the hell is even going on—there's a section which… well, very nearly debases the entire concept. I feel as if the writer(s?) maybe weren't really sure where they actually wanted to go with things at the time they write this part, and the result was an important aspect of the protagonist, CJ, was inextricably linked with an old, stale-as-fuck, unbelievably lame, and incredibly immature meme. To be honest, at that point in the story, I very nearly uninstalled the app—it was simply that stupid, that obnoxious, that idiotic, that I figured: if the writer(s?) were stupid enough to include something like that in their story, then the rest of it is undoubtedly going to be hot garbage. I'm very glad I didn't.

“Then, out of fucking nowhere: crazy ass psychedelic trip plus the games first sex scene—fully animated, and highly relevant to the story. And the soundtrack… mmph, my god, baby, the soundtrack just fuckin' kicks.”

Without spoiling anything, the game starts with a very... I guess emotionally dark bit of plot, which has a distinctly psych-horror vibe to it. This is then followed up by CJ having an absurd, psychedelic, 80's synthwave, sort of acid trip adjacent "experience." Both of those sections are absolutely excellent and I love them both quite a bit—though the suddenness of the tonal shift between the dark psych-horror intro and the part that came next was… eh… unexpected, and maybe a bit unpleasant? In the beginning of the prologue, you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd downloaded a depressing psychological horror VN. Then, out of nowhere: (stupid cloud scene, followed by) crazy ass psychedelic trip plus the games first sex scene—fully animated, and highly relevant to the story. And the soundtrack… mmph, my god, baby, the soundtrack just fuckin' kicks.

Now, what I didn't love is what was sandwiched between those two scenes. Again, without spoiling anything: I'm referring to the damned cloud. I suppose it's possible that this scene has elements of an unreliable narrator; or, in other words, it's possible that we've been shown what CJ experienced, but because it was impossible for him to comprehend, it was adjusted by his subconscious in order for him to understand it… and while there's certainly some evidence that points to this—hell, some of the characters even allude that they suspect something similar—that evidence is, unfortunately, relatively miniscule. 

This singular event has a very lasting impact on CJ's character, and—at least up until the point I've read at the time of writing this, which is Chapter 35 or so—it at least appears to be canonically true. I can only hope that it later turns out to not be what it appeared to be, because, just… ugh, come on, seriously..? To be fair, it's quickly made up for by the rest of the story, but… I don't think I'd blame anyone for immediately uninstalling the game at that point in the plot, if they didn't already know that it would get so much better immediately after that. Of course, I believe they'd be making a huge mistake in uninstalling it. It'd be very easy to write the entire VN off as some kind of lame shit in the same vain as poorly written fanfics; as in, it's not difficult to think that this event exists purely as a ridiculously silly excuse for the protagonist to build out a harem. Which maybe would be fine, but that's very clearly not what's happening here. The writing is far too mature, far too god damned excellent for that to be the case. 

Regardless, this is truly an unbelievably good visual novel that I highly suggest you read. Obviously, it's NOT quick fap material. If that's the only reason you're interested, I'd recommend you just go watch some hentai or whatever. Most VNs are more about the story than they are about the sex, especially early on in the plot. If you read through to about chapter 30, you'll be rewarded with numerous and frequent sex scenes. Most aren't animated, but it's about this point in the plot that the characters begin regularly fucking. It does take time to get there, but it's so worth it. By that point, you'll know so much about each of these characters that they may even feel somewhat real to you, which only makes the eroticism that much more appealing.

It's one of the hallmarks of an excellent author when many different characters in a work have been so thoroughly fleshed out to the point that they feel like real individuals rather than simply characters in a story. I think the only aspect that detracts from this is how absurdly horny the characters get in the later parts of the story. I mean, it's not really that bad, and it certainly doesn't bother me, for obvious reasons, but I do think the characters would feel a bit more real if they didn't constantly want to fuck. 

IN ANY CASE!

JUST DOWNLOAD IT! 

IT'S THAT GOOD, 

FOR REAL.

Like, yeah, sure, the sex scenes are nice, and, certainly, more animated scenes would always be great, but the story is so fucking good that you won't care about any of that. Hell, you might even find yourself crying during a sex scene, something I've done multiple times in the time I've been reading this VN . You might make a savefile at the start of a sex scene and skip over the majority of it because you want to get back to the damn story, something I've also done multiple times—well, I don't exactly skip them, more like... I skim through 'em, just to make sure I don't miss any story stuff, because the majority of the sex scenes in this VN are actually used to build up the characters and their relationships, rather than simply existing for reader gratification—now, that's not to say the game doesn't also have many sex scenes that are only there because they're hot; there are, in fact, quite a few of those (especially in the later chapters) and although they're usually relatively short, albeit, they do occur frequently.

BUT ANYWAY, JUST DOWNLOAD IT ALREADY! COME ON! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!? STOP READING THIS NONSENSE AND GET TO DOWNLOADING ALREADY!

Personally, I wouldn't stress over the sounds in sex scenes and vocals and so on. The game, as it stands, simply completely lacks in sound effects and ambience. It gets a bit old listening to the same two generic (mind you, they're not bad tracks!) songs on repeat.

Adding at least two or three more tracks would be great, and more common sound effects would help make things feel more alive. A splash of water in relevant pool scenes, a rumble in the beginning of the dollhouse scene, this sort of stuff would really help flesh the game out, IMHO.

The Download page on itch.io lists "Version 20" in grey font underneath the first two downloads for 0.7.12, and "Version 14" underneath the third download for (Android) 0.7.12. I didn't even notice those until I saw this comment, though. I guess the "Version X" stuff is probably some versioning system that itch.io handles, or something?

Agree so much. Rae is my all-time fav. succubus. Some of the writing in this game is a bit weird/off, but the characters' personalities easily make up for that. Rae and Lyriel, especially, though Cait is a cutie, too.

Woo, thanks! Just spent the better part of the last hour or so trying to figure out why this and the "Find Lyriel & Cait in bedroom" quest weren't proccing.

Except, the latest version on itch.io is apparently 0.7.12? Even checked the Patreon and it seems to jump straight from 0.7.12 to 0.7.14, with the latter being paywalled.

I'll try downloading 0.7.12 from itch.io again, see if maybe it's just mislabeled.

EDIT: Right, my mistake! I clicked "Download" at the top of the page, and didn't read the small list of downloads before clicking "No thanks, just take me to the downloads" (thanks, dyslexia). Version 0.7.13 is there, just paywalled as well. Too poor to be dropping money on entertainment, sadly. Oh well; beggars can't be choosers and all that jazz. I'll wait for it to be released for free. 

Thanks for the excellent game!

NOTE: If you want to skip over my lengthy ramble and get right to the point, scroll to the bottom until you see the next bolded text!

This is a decent enough request, though I doubt it'll be integrated. I'm not terribly familiar with this game's development history, nor whether or not it's still in active development or not. In any case, players of games really need to understand just how much added work it is for a developer—especially an indie dev, who likely has a team of maybe one to five people working on their game, and typically each individual has a very specific portion of the game that they're in charge of, eg. art, music, design, code, etc.—to even add mod support to their game, let alone create and supply the players with the necessary tools to make and distribute those mods.

That said, there's are tools that can make the job simpler, and when a game is designed from the very beginning to support modding, the amount of added work is relatively small. The main hurdle is that the tools which devs use to design their games are usually either a) licensed (meaning, the dev paid for the right to use it) third-party (meaning, created by another company) tools which can't be legally redistributed to the players, as they're only licensed for the development team themselves, b) developed in-house (meaning, the devs of the game created the tools themselves), which are typically finicky, buggy, ugly, hacked-together tools that require a high degree of technical knowledge to use and are designed with very specific purposes in mind (meaning, they're difficult to use, usually have practically no documentation, and are made with the sole intention of them being utilized by the team for specific aspects of the game design). Sometimes, this isn't the case, and the tools used are free and open-source, in which case they are usually much more player-friendly. 

Of course, all of that assumes that we're talking about modding more complex than a simple texture replacement. A lot of indie devs will get around this problem by making use of scripting engines for their game code—though, that's not the only reason they do this, and I'd even argue that the choice to use scripting languages for games is often not based on the fact that it makes modding easier, but rather that it makes development easier. Popularly, Lua is frequently utilized for this purpose, but many games will also use JIT C# scripts, or any number of other scripting language. Unity games are more likely to go the C# route or the Lua route, though. 

In any case, back to the topic at hand: distribution of mods. This gets really tricky, because you're talking about the developer of a game that very likely is a passion project with negative profit margins; which is to say, if we compared the cost (in development time, eg man-hours, and money, eg spent on tools, assets, advertising, ) to the amount of inward cash flow the product generates, many indie games won't even manage to break even, instead starting technically in the red for their entire lifespans. Game development is not easy, it's incredibly time consuming, it's logistically difficult, and the competition is so fierce that most indie games are lucky to see even a small amount of sales, and those sales rarely manage to offset the project's costs. For all of these reasons, when you ask for the developer of such a game to not only build and provide the game itself, but also develop, manage, and host (and pay for that hosting) a website or webservice which allows the distribution of mods... yeah, that's asking for too much. 

NOTE: Rambling over, the rest of this post discusses solutions.

With all of that said, I've seen some very clever solutions to this. The most obvious solution is to make use of a third-party service, such as mod.io or Nexus Mods, but these sorts of services often have strict rules about content, which can be a problem for adult oriented games, like the one we're discussing. The most clever solution I've seen to this problem is to make use of GitHub repositories for the hosting and distribution of mods. While GitHub does have content restrictions, they're often much more lenient and less restrictive. Even better, if you adjust this concept of "any git repository hosted on GitHub" to be "any git repository," you can now include even self-hosted Git repos (such as Gitea, Gogs, Bitbucket, etc.). 

The way such a system works is absurdly simple, at least from a developer's perspective; it's also incredibly straightforward to make use of from a player's perspective, too. You simply include a git library with your game. Mod installation is done via the user providing the URL for a git repository. The game then downloads the repository and updates are done by simply synchronizing the repository. All your game needs now is a basic UI and a manager to handle this process and you've solved the problem of mod hosting. 

The only instances where this might not work is with games that rely on mods including copyrighted content, such as rhythm games. For example, this wouldn't cut it for a game like Rhythm Doctor, because hosting copyrighted music is a dangerous game that sites like GitHub have zero interest in engaging in. For games like that, no pre-existing service is going to be open to hosting that sort of content. 

In any case, to summarize, there's a very good set of reasons why you see indie devs relying on Discord for their modding community. It is, admittedly, extremely annoying and provides a less-than-stellar user experience. It requires users to join their Discord community, which may prohibit some players from engaging with mods at all. It's a shame, because using Discord for mods inevitably increases the friction for players and makes players less likely to bother with a feature that likely required significant effort to develop. 

It'd be nice if more devs would try out imaginative solutions to the problem, though, rather than just throwing their hands up in the air and saying, "Well, what can ya do? Discord it is." Modding is, after all, once of the best ways to guarantee the longevity of your game, as it instills a sense of ownership within your community and gives the game a much longer shelf-life. Just look at Skyrim (horrible game IMHO, but to each their own) or any other game on that engine: people STILL play those games to this very day. Why? Because of the mods!