I bought and played through this game a couple of nights ago.
There were a bunch of things I liked about it. The whole "game about creators" concept appeals to me - it appealed to me in Comic Party, and it appeals to me that much more here, when the team is working on creating Visual Novels. The game seems to be about the right size - there's not a huge amount of story here, but it feels like it's enough when balanced with the simulation element. It took me an evening to play the game through to an ending.
I genuinely liked the girls and their arcs. Unlike many games, where the game seems to end right as the characters get to know each other, this one actually throws some conflict at them and lets them help each other with it - and it's that help that gets them together. The game takes place over a year, and the characters change over that year, so that's nice.
The story segments feed back into the simulation, which prevents the "Two-games-in-one" effect you see in some of the other simulations. I didn't notice any feedback in the other direction. It could have been there, but it wasn't very noticeable, and you wind up talking about in the simulation.
The main simulation aspect consists of allocating your time, and the time of the two girls, to different aspects of a game development project, such as programming, art, music, game design, etc. The characters also need to be rested to ensure they stay healthy. There are other bits of the simulation, like picking which game to make and how many copies to order, but these don't really factor much into gameplay. There's a money aspect, as well, but in my playthrough, I fairly quickly had more money then I needed, to the point where I (Tom) felt guilty about how little I was paying my workers. At defined time periods, you sell the game (and older games) at a convention.
A problem is that the simulation uses an overly granular timescale. There are two time periods a day to manage, and (IIRC) more than 80 days between some of the conventions. The result is a lot of decision making, with little of it being meaningful. You almost always want to do the same thing you did yesterday, but even when you don't, you can freely switch things - the result is that there's no constraint in giving each task exactly the time you need. The result is that you can easily rest a girl for a couple of days, then give her more work.
There's 3-4 clicks per turn, minimum. So you wind up with a lot of clicking that feels kind of repetitive, with the story keeping you there despite that. In my opinion, the game would have been better (less repetitive, and with more meaningful decisions) if the time periods had been longer - maybe a week? There's a balance to be struck, as you want the user to "earn" the story events, but IMO there was a lot of busywork here.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't quite understand how to allocate time between game aspects, other than trying to maximize the "doneness" of each one.
You also wind up having to do a surprising amount of scrolling, as important information about things like game progress is often hidden behind scrollbars.
There's another plot
involving some sort of conspiracy and the kidnapping of the PoV character, and resulting in what seemed like good endings being turned into, at best, melancholy endings. This plot doesn't seem developed enough to me, and seems a bit out of place, to the point of not making a lot of sense.
Thankfully, we only encounter this plot intermittently, until the very end - after we get some resolution to the girls' stories. But it's still feels very different from the rest of the game, somewhat superfluous, and hurts the endings.
What we have here is a game with a lot of busywork and some out of place story elements, but one with a basically good game mechanic and story.
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Another Old-Fashioned Bishoujo Gamer
Supporting creators since 2004; Code > Drama
(When was the last time you backed up your game?)
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt
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