Game isn't finished despite not being marked as early access or saying this anywhere. Which feels a little misleading. (Edit: As of now, it appears that at least they updated the game's about section to mention that the game is unfinished and in development. So there's that, at least, which is something.)
There's a solid foundation and I feel like this can become a decent H game eventually, but this still needs a loooooot of time to cook in the oven.
I bought this mainly for the red witch, not gonna lie, and she's not in the game at all yet, which is disappointing.
If this was released this early into development (at least I hope it's early), I hope it's at least to get more funding to keep working and refining it and replacing the (what feel like) placeholder premade assets in some places.
In case it's not clear by the way, this is a vampire survivors clone with (a currently barebones attempt at) an open environment between the combat fights. I like roguelikes a lot, I like the character designs showcased, and I somewhat like vampire survivors clones, so I'm alright with spending a bit of money on slop, but it's definitely not worth it at all right now.
For starters, the English translation is... servicable and comprehensible, but something just feels really off about it. Like it's what you imagine an alien/skinwalker would talk like while pretending to be a human speaking English. The dialect and word choice is really odd at times, but all in all, you can tell what it's trying to say just fine. Probably just part of the quirks of attempting to translate Japanese into English extremely literally.
There's also a few misspellings I noticed, like "4th" being misspelled as "4tj" in upgrades.
I also found one combat start spot (or what I assume to be a placeholder for one since it doesn't work right now) which had untranslated text.
Also, the game never explains what the "+10% charm" upgrade even does, the charm stat isn't mentioned anywhere, and I couldn't spot any difference after picking it several times during combat. Might be a mistranslation of another word (since there's no mid-fight pickup range upgrade), but not sure.
Second, the game is riddled with bugs right now. If you try to bring up the pause menu while picking an upgrade, the game resumes and allows you to move while still showing you what upgrade to pick.
One time once a combat finished, I couldn't move on the map and had to load a save.
Another time, once I spent roughly 20-30 minutes in the same combat trying to farm red souls, the game suddenly glitched out and started the cutscene of meeting the first witch all over again, even though that already happened. This also softlocked the game and I needed to load a save.
There's also odd audio bugs, sometimes sound effects or music just stops working.
Also sound settings don't save.
Third, there's no CG gallery anywhere or a way to replay scenes, so you have to restart the whole game on a new save if you want to do that. Which sucks, because...
Fourth, the game feels extremely grindy and like it's giving you a choice between doing the same combat 50 times over, or farming a few earlygame easier combats (You can't repeat any combat after you finish it by the way) for literal hours until you get ungodly amounts of red souls to permanently increase your stats.
Speaking of...
...The meta upgrades are really unbalanced. They feel outright necessary after the combat difficulty cranks up from easy to medium, not because it gets harder, it doesn't, but because it's just gonna drag on for ten times longer. But at the same time, the only way to get red souls in reasonable quantities is simply staying in a fight you've already won and dragging it out for hours.
A lot of the stats also feel like an afterthought and are completely useless.
Why would I ever upgrade curse, nature or fire damage for 5% per red soul spent when I could just upgrade ALL damage for 5% for the same 1 red soul per pop, and there's no limit to upgrades and they never get more expensive?
Fifth, the game is extremely linear and there's zero interaction with the main witch girls outside of predictable main story cutscenes, and everything progresses extremely fast due to the map essentially being a series of forest-themed hallways with zero exploration or things to do, rather than an actual area to traverse and explore like in an RPGmaker game.
I feel like this game would benefit a LOT from being able to talk to the witches in your "party" anytime, or hearing some dialogue after a fight where they praise or encourage you when you win or lose. Little things like that spread all over the game. Or repeatable things to do involving the main appeal of this game (the girls).
This would also help a lot with the next problem...
...The story feels like it's moving way too quickly. You get no time to get to know a character. It's just... "protagonist meets witch for the first time in his life", and not even a minute later, "protagonist has sex with witch and she's totally super into him"
It makes no sense and feels rushed. There's zero build-up and the player hasn't had time to feel anything besides "oh wow she's built like a nursery" with the characters, which takes away from the impact of H scenes. Which is why I desperately hope for optional/repeatable interactions not tied to the story eventually.
I don't know if the CG's are AI or not by the way, but even if they are, I'd like to see more, because they're really clean and impressive for something made with AI (even if it's touched up later). I didn't find any imperfections myself in the artwork like jumbled hands and whatnot, so if this really is AI, I don't see why the game can't have a lot more optional and repeatable interactions with the witches.
Also, I have to say... the pixel art feels like a hodgepodge of different free assets at times.
The pixel resolution on the entire world map is WAY bigger than the sprites of the characters, and the monsters are a mixed bag.
The slimes match the character sprites' pixel size for instance, but most monsters match the map's pixel size instead (and also look extremely simple, almost like placeholders)
The enemies, despite the immense variety in sprites, don't really do anything different amongst eachother as well. They just have more hp and *sometimes* move faster.
I feel like the game would be immensely prettier if there was more consistency with the pixel art, and the pixel size matched everywhere where it's used. Hell, some objects feel to me like they would look way better and less out of place if shrunken down, actually.
I'll check back in on this as it gets updated, and I'll update the review accordingly, but right now it's just not worth anywhere near the asking price, I'm sorry.
