I liked this medium-hot game above average.
There are two ways to engage with this game: one is to take it as a relaxing (other than the abuse your body will sustain from all the laughter) steamy visual novel with a passable tactical minigame tacked on for fun. It's easily 9.5/10, it's nigh impeccable, there's but a handful of little missteps and one rather annoying one in the end with a whole other "minigame" you have to play which can be rather frustrating because of how vague your choices are. The other way is to keep time management on, set difficulty to anything but lowest, and then we have problems.
The game is three different block types stitched together. One is just your typical on-the-rails VN story section, and those are placed as needed by the story. Two others go hand in-hand, tactical turn-based combat during which you spank baddies and try to loot stuff and complete side objectives while maxing out XP gains and minimizing casualty reports, and rest+interlude (or, as one of the more sane charaters calls it, resterlude). During [i]resterlude[/i] you have the paradoxical mechanic of time management, because of course in the game which strongest side is characters and writing, one would want to bar the player from experiencing those by capping how much they can get per sitting -- and then further cut it down by punishing for not being good at fighting. Each action during resterlude consumes your precious time, be it talking and bonding with your companions, passing mandatory HR trainings, [i]equipping and swapping items[/i], and replaying past fights to earn swag and increase shareholder value.
That's not bad enough, of course, so there's also burnout mechanic, taking longer to complete fights and doing it with more (temporary) losses leads to the protagonist burning out and accumulating penalties. Failing fights altogether leads to even more burnout, time lost in resterlude, and, as a result, fewer opportunities to reduce burnout during that resterlude. It's a death spiral with no saves to fall back on and no way to reset it other than dropping the difficulty. It doesn't feel good, the rock-paper-scissors combat isn't an afterthought, it's a fully-fledged system that is carefully crafted, that fits the world, that is fun enough to play, but failures snowball in the most disgusting way that feels far too punishing, and doesn't fit the overall wholesome narrative. It can be all fixed, with a lot of number crunching and tuning, or very quickly and efficiently by giving players a better option to replay fights at no cost. Generally, manual saves would be great, if only a single slot. Until then, the best way to experience the whole shebang is to disable time management, the second best way is to nuke the difficulty together with it.
It's a struggle to find more issues with the game though. I lied about it being medium-hot, it's not centre-of-the-sun hot, it's fusion-on-Earth hot. The characters are charming, with stellar writing and top-notch voice acting -- and everything is voice acted! And all the narration! There are tropes, legions of them, some are played straight because they are good, some are invoked just to be subverted, and some are there to be basically laughed at (yes, I'm looking at you, [i]handsome Vacari[/i]… or at least at your abs). Steam description goes out of its way to point out that the game doesn't go into showing intercourse but don't let it fool you: you can't call the descriptive text 'vague' without a handful of perked eyebrows, and there are [i]no[/i] stops or handbrakes when it comes to foreplay. It's hot, it's kinky, it's not your birds and bees it's all hawks and hornets. And with most of the cast being polyamorous, you get to have your cake and eat it too, with a long queue of those who want to eat it. Toxic romance turning touching, friendship slowly growing into more, monster-diddling, making fun of a sad simp or helping them to progress to a slightly-less-sad simp. All of it being fused together in such a precise way that leaves plenty of opportunities for crass talk with mutual innuendo while not going too hard into casual sex world trope so the characters are still frequently left blushing and lost for words, is nothing short of a masterwork.
But great writing supported by lovely art and professional, passionate voice actors who seemed to have a time of their life yelling into the mic that they are, in fact, utmost bangable, is one thing. Whole other is that, beyond characters and story, it's all found in a surprisingly well-crafted world. Character elements used for RPS in combat are an integral part of this world. Our protagonist is a bureaucrat, and the entirety of UI is various forms and waivers, you can't even bang your companion without signing one! Different races are vastly different to each other and the game takes it seriously, the colored humans trope is made fun of specifically by having "humans" all featuring elf ears but being your basic featureless race otherwise. Meowans suffer from absurd fertility, and the absurd number of heirs to the meowan Queen is both a world/plot point, and a repeated source of jokes; Weft Stalkers that feast on souls are utilized as horrifying executioners… Same goes for professions, of course in the land of late-stage bureaucracy even thieves submit all necessary paperwork and have insurance, and less skilled pyromancers are utilized to burn said paperwork (after the mandatory keeping period, of course).
I highly recommend the game, for enjoying as a great horny VN, for a great world/system to use in a (probably, very kinky) TTRP, to make horny fan-art of, and to write even hornier fan-fics of. Can't wholeheartedly recommend it as a "proper" game, unfortunately, it still needs tuning for that.
