This is mentioned in another comment as a possible Linux Mint issue, I'm also facing this issue on Ubuntu
A member registered Apr 27, 2021
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-- Love at First Tail Review --
Disclaimer: i only played the "nice guy" route. I kept celibate as long as possible and picked all the nice options. I am assuming that if you agree to the sex Hana offers you at the beginning, that changes the game significantly
Rating: 8.5/10, Excellent game
I did not expect this game to impress me as much as it did! <minor, nonspecific spoilers from hereon>
To start, it can't not be mentioned, the concept for this game is incredible. It's a rainy evening, you come across a mother and a child inexplicably sitting out in the pouring rain. They approach you, a total stranger, and desperate to find shelter they plead with you to spend the night in your home. Do you take them in? In the first moments of the game i was already hooked, but concept alone is not enough to drive a game, and the heavy themes underpinning this game's characters and situations require delicate care not to seem insensitive and gauche, or worse yet glorify abuse or nonconsent. So how did the writer(s) handle it?
The writing in this game is quite good. It is not perfect, and i will elaborate on the problems i have with it, but first i must give credit where it is due. The game features recurring themes of domestic abuse and trauma, and the depictions of both of those things were well above average for the genre (furry porn games i guess). In short, the game doesn't overstep its boundaries, and allows the characters to express themselves naturally through their actions. They're clearly hurt, and that's a real part of their character. Take Hana for example; As you play through the game and become better acquainted with her, you come across her old habits one by one. Her insistence to "make herself useful" and "repay you" by for example cleaning and cooking for you. She makes a conscious, constant effort to be unobtrusive and keep attention away from herself. She habitually rejects your attempts to do anything that makes her life easier, she doesn't even want you to think she could want things at first. And her reactions to compassion towards her and her daughter are most telling, spread throughout many events in the game and usually prefaced with some kind of mishap or accident, like breaking a plate or leaving chores unfinished. Bit by bit you are given a complete map of her psyche. I think Hana's characterisation is the strongest part of the game, and does service to the concept brilliantly
I also really like how her furriness was used as a device to convey this aspect of abuse, the dehumanisation, that's less spoken about. Though, given she is literally not human, it's not very subtle haha
Now, as for Rina, less time than i would've liked is spent on her character, though she was mute for 25% of the game so it's understandable. What is there, however, hit quite close to home for me. I have a feeling that more of her characterisation is revealed in the "pervert" route, for now though all i can say is that i like her quite a bit, and i hope we get to see more of her.
The characters are generally well-written and believable, but a big problem i have with the writing is regarding your conversations with towns-people. The dialogue in those sections felt.. flat. It was as though the characters didn't live in the town that they live in. They somehow feel limited to the information we have, and references to events or locations we don't know about seem superficial to me. This is by far the weakest part of the writing to me. The rest of the game kept me engaged, but the parts with Billy and Oliver felt like VN fluff and weren't in line with the rest of the story quality-wise imo.
I am currently in the part of the game right before Lily comes over, so i can't speak to the rest of the story but i imagine the themes of gentrification are touched on more with Fauna and Lily, and the mc's history with the town and its people is touched on more with Oliver and Billy. It'd be nice if Oliver got to play a part in the story too
The 3D renders are quite nice, the animation is smooth and cute, the characters are expressive enough, i didn't notice any visual bugs
The UI is okay, kinda slow to navigate for me, i think it needs a minor redesign but ui design is a ballache and i understand if this is delayed until V1.0
And that's all I can say in general about the game, but i have a lot of notes from my playthrough that i'd like to go through now. This includes suggestions, typos, bugs and spoilers
<Spoiler alert from this point forward, go play the game already it's free!>
Let's start with the bugs i found, which thankfully weren't many
- Upon reaching 7 affection with Rina, and an odd couple times after that, her affection scene hint just said "fail" in black text. It later went back to normal and didn't affect my progression. I didn't notice that bug with Hana or Lily which is strange
- Some longer hints mess up the UI, i assume you already know this
- Music in the house cut off randomly once. I was checking the hints at the time, and i was tabbing out of the game kinda often. Had to leave the house and come back to restore it
- Grocery shopping with Hana and clothes shopping with Rina don't charge you anything
- Some hints are outright incorrect or impossible, for example there is one for Lily which says "visit her at the store in the evening", but the store is closed in the evening, and the actual way to progress is to build more trust with her. There's some others like this, which require you to raise a certain stat but demand something completely different, and also some like "i need to ask hana for a tailjob" (the Rina hint) which after you've done that enough didn't change to reflect that you just need to wait (unless i missed it)
- Hana's Actions menu doesn't unlock until you can headpat her, but Rina's was always unlocked even with no actions
As for typos i found even fewer:
- Scene in the living room after buying new console: "Rina: You see, this level is very difficult, *I'm not able win.*"
- Scene after sleeping together with Rina (not in that way!) for the first time: "Rina: *You're* cheeks are really soft."
Now, every dev's least favourite section, suggestions! But also some more general stuff about the game:
First of all, story stuff:
- I would like the option to progress Rina's lust route without asking her explicitly for sex, maybe this is a me problem but it really feels like i'm proving her suspicions right and taking advantage of her. Maybe the hint should be like, "Ask her to use her hands or wait", and after enough time passes or enough events happen, she comes forward and asks you instead. I appreciate the dynamic you've set up here, i just think it's really inappropriate given the circumstances and her accusation
- While we're on Rina, I feel after the encounter with her while we sleep (where she accuses us), hanging out should change in some way or be disabled. After a heavy accusation like that, it feels unusual to hang out or gift sweets like nothing happened.
- And one more thing about her, during the nightmare breakdown scene, i forgot to check if it already is but please make hugging her the wrong option. That should backfire, she asked you to not touch her and needs space. As someone who's been through similar i can't help but gag when stories suggest that the best way to calm someone like that down is to disregard their boundaries and make physical contact, hug or otherwise.
- Away from Rina, it'd be great to get more direct-from-mc commentary about the town while we explore it, maybe some solo events where we just have a walk around town. I feel the town in general is underutilised, it'd be nice to know more about it while also developing mc's character. Speaking of..
- Assert MC as an in-universe character rather than a player stand-in. Now, this is a massive request, but i feel there's very good reason for this change! Not only does it open up great possibilities for exploring trauma from an unaware outsider's perspective, but also addresses a pretty big issue in how the game handles the mc. To summarise, i think the gap between our and his knowledge and experience is simply too massive. From the beginning of the game it felt disorienting, after witnessing Hana and Rina's abuse firsthand, to play the role of someone who hasn't seen any of that at all. And it made me let them leave after the first night instead of saying they could stay; what reason does the mc really have to keep two strangers of questionable background in his house? His characterisation is not strong enough to justify him making that decision (unless he's a massive pervert and you do that route maybe??) and it can't be strong enough while he's expected to be our self-insert. So to me, immersion was never achieved and the narrative suffered for it. Less noticeably but still important is his knowledge of and history with the town and its residents. I think that and us knowing about Hana and Rina makes it unreasonable to treat mc like a stand-in for the player, and it can only conflict with the story moving forward. For instance, if you wanted to add interactable objects in the overworld for more flavour text, that only accentuates the disconnect between us and him, he simply doesn't think what we think, i think. It's understandable if this isn't ever changed, and he keeps riding the line between character and puppet, but in that case i really think the game shouldn't open with us seeing the abuse outright; at least more should be left to interpretation.
That was a big one, let's talk about gameplay now
Despite this being a visual novel, and in fact because of it, i deeply believe that the mechanical elements of the game can serve the narrative greatly and should not be half-assed. Now, i'm not gonna request a turnbased jrpg combat update for oliver's place, but there is a system that i believe this game desperately needs to have:
There's a disconnect between the narrative and the gameplay, there are story elements that should be represented mechanically in the game but aren't. One such instance is after one of Hana's events in the dining room, it went something like, she was cleaning the entire house every day and struggling to do so, but she believed she had to somehow repay you for your kindness, and one of your options after that exchange is to suggest splitting chores between yourselves. The problem with this scene, is that directly after it, our character goes back to doing fuck all around the house and leaves everything to Hana to deal with! That's what the pros call ludonarrative dissonance, and it really made the game feel unfinished to me. So this is the system i want added, some way to actually help after that, something to actually contribute. It doesn't need to be particularly complex, but preferably not trivial. There's a lot that you as the developer (the only person who'd read this far in this review) can build around that system afterwards; from simply, events only accessible by doing your part/not, to entire minigames adding mechanical spice to an otherwise simple vn to avoid repetitiveness. Even if none of that happens, it's still a way to codify the premise of the game into a mechanic, the premise being these people's insecurities and the tension of being unexpected guests, with your role being to help them into a healthy coexistence after a life of abuse. What better way to show you care and respect them than working alongside them to care for your shared home. I really hope we see something like this.
I don't have much else to say about the gameplay, this is still a visual novel after all, but i have to mention the hints system.
I completely understand its inclusion, and used it heavily myself later on in the game, but i feel it's a crutch compensating for how unreadable the events are. For instance, the event with Lily where you have to go to the park in the afternoon would be absolutely impossible to find without a hint telling you to go there. Most players by that point will already have checked the park multiple times and found nothing of interest there, so why would they think to check now? Are they supposed to check all locations four times daily? I'm sure you're aware of this issue, a common way i've seen of getting around this which you might employ is map indicators for events telling you where to go when you need to be somewhere, but that doesn't make it feel any less like a checklist than the hints do. At the end of the day this isn't a massive problem and is expected of these games, but the less hints are needed to progress, the better.
That wraps up my thoughts about this game. Thank you for making it! I hope my review has been helpful and insightful, and accurate too. Please let me know if i got something wrong, i'm going off of memory and my notes so i might have made some mistakes. Thanks for reading this far and have a great day <3
And uh, one last suggestion. Maybe we could ram that ram Billy silly at some point in the future, if you know what i mean ;)