Love Shore

Absolutely gutted that this is a 'do not recommend'. I've been so stupid excited about this game since the kickstarter first went up. The soundtrack is everything, the aesthetic is perfect, the artwork has a few misses (mostly hits), but the writing is what brings this game down - kind of a kicker, when your game is a visual novel. I've only played one route so far and it had multiple spelling errors and even at least one slide where a sentence stopped halfway through. The story takes place over a few days, the romance felt forced but also like there was no risk (and therefore reward), and for about half an hour towards the end there, I had no idea what was going on. The entire route felt undercooked. The ending was underwhelming. If this review was on aesthetics alone, it'd be an easy 8/10, but for a game that was in development for so long, the story felt unfinished and uncompelling with two dimensional characters who weren't given enough time to leave a mark. Genuinely devastated, lol. EDIT: I will say, I keep seeing criticism about there only being one save slot - there isn't. There are multiple and I saved regularly without running out of space. Press 'Esc' and save there.

As a Kickstarter backer, I had a lot of high hopes for this. It supposedly checked off a lot of boxes that I look for in VNs. I found myself greatly disappointed, unfortunately. The writing is fairly basic, and choices seemed pointless. I could get past this, but the biggest turn off had to be the art quality. In many CGs, the characters looked nothing like their sprites. Proportions were so off sometimes they appeared just plain goofy (don't really want bobble heads in a xxx scene, ya know?) . It completely distracted from the story (what little there is). What appeared to be 5 years of dedicated development time turned out more to be 5 years of development hell, and it shows. I haven't reached a true ending even in my first playthrough and honestly have no plans to. I can only hope the studio learns from the critiques of this game for future releases.

This breaks my heart, but I have to put a "don't recommend" review for this one. I've been following it since its early days, and I've been extremely excited for it from the very start. Worldbuilding and lore is amazing, characters are good, art is pretty (though a bit inconsistent thorough the various CGs), music is nice... Sadly, it all came crashing down in the final product. Now, I will preface this by saying I played only one route (Aziz), but that's a common thing when I play games like this one - I rarely do more than one or two "routes". Also, worth to mention I usually don't post negative reviews - me doing this is mostly due to some of the technical issues being reported a long time ago with the demo already, and not having been adressed at all. I think the major issue of this game is that it's an exposition of an awesome universe / setting, but the "story" we're told that takes place in this great setting is... not so great. It lacks soul, so to speak. Early on, in the content that was present in the demo - especially the extended one - some of the choices seemed like interesting "starting points" for further developing our protagonist (in this case Sam) and so on. I was very excited to see just how he would develop, and how my choices would affect his evolution. I was sorely disappointed though because overall, the choices amount to nothing. Certainly, your choices will determine if you have access to a few stat gated answers at some point, and will determine if you're on a good or bad ending's route with your chosen love interest. But at the end of the day, it feels like there is no flavor text at all. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, by flavor text I mean narration and reactions that change depending on previous choices, without being literal story changers - just customization to make your playthrough unique depending on how the game perceives the "personality" you gave the protagonist. Of course, Sam and Farah are relatively "set" characters who already have their own personality, but for example, in Sam's case, the game gave me a lot of opportunities at the start of the game to make him disgusted by everything he did before, and clearly state he wants to quit and that he won't be going back to the "underworld" affairs anymore. But then, later in the game, these opinions are not acknowledged at all. Worst of all is that in Aziz's route case, this is actually an important point, and it could have been so interesting to reflect the contradiction between Sam's initial wishes and what he has to come to terms with by the end of the route. I understand flavor text is something that takes a lot of time to do (I'm a betatester for a lot of text based interactive fiction games), and we can't expect all visual novels to have customization levels on par with for example "Our Life" or "Scarlet Hollow", but I have played free indie games done by solo devs, with very unprofessional art and free music with more flavor text that this one, which says a lot. Even not counting the flavor text though, there is simply little meat to it. We see a succession of events, and sure they are connected, but there is very little real "interaction" with the world. The ending seemed pretty abrupt too. All in all, it felt very "hollow". In addition to this, the game is buggy and laggy. It was made with an engine not really suitable for visual novels, and it shows. Freezes that take minutes to get unstuck (if they do at all) are the worst. But there is also the lack of rollback and no text log, which is a mix that's never good. It's all the more frustrating when there is nothing in the game as far as I can see that would have prevented the devs from using a more adapted and stable engine and make the game more accessible. I have also noticed a few instaces of sprite errors, but these will probably get patched up soon and are a minor issue. Basically, it's a lot of wasted potential in my opinion. Do I regret playing it? Not at all. Do I hate the game? Certainly not. Do I like the game though? Well... can't say I do either. I think I would have enjoyed a lot more an extensive book on the lore and story of the world the story is set in than I enjoy the story itself. If you still want to get it though, I highly recommend waiting for it to be on sale.

I hate to give this a "do not recommend", but where the game currently stands, I can't say I would tell anyone to play at the full price. I was a kickstarter for the game and I believe that this was a game where they bit off more than they could chew. I've seen many indie games made during COVID be effected, so I do think they believed they could deliver on their promises, and this wasn't an attempt to sell a fake product. While the art and music are fantastic, the characters and the story just fall short. The story goes by too quickly, the endings feel rushed, the choices didn't feel like they had any effect? I started the game in excitement as I've been really looking forward to this game, but felt myself become so disappointed when finishing my first run. I quickly realized how much was actually filler and how none of the relationships felt like anything more than fleeting. I truly believe that "Perfect Garage" will create great things in the future, and I look forward to what they do!

The way the game sets you up, it wants you to play all of the routes until you put the pieces together to completely understand the story. The huge problem is that it fails to convince me to do exactly that. While the premise is very intriguing, the delivery falls flat, the story per route is short, and the characters are so bland. I played Aziz's route alone, and if the enemies-to-lovers pairing (sorta, they're exes), one of the supposed-to-be spicier tropes bored me to death, how are the rest supposed to entertain me?

can i date farah instead?

Sadly I'm disappointed: the art, music and idea are amazing, but the outcome is underwhelming. It could have been a nice game because the concept is awesome. I really like the idea of this world and would have loved to get deep into it, learn more about the origin of cyborgs and how the gods are ruling the city's underbelly, how it's all connected - but the game isn't compelling at all! I only played one route and I finished it in ~1 hour, it ended so suddenly. The characters I encountered were bland and the dialogues were often quite short. The story in general covers a few days, which felt too rushed, especially for a LOVE story. I definitely wouldn't risk my life for a person I only just developed feelings for? The dialogue choices you make are changing your stats - it would have been so much better, if you could see which one goes up, especially because some choices are locked if you aren't meeting the criteria. But you also don't know which level you need to be on to be able to chose it so, never mind... I'm not a native English speaker but the dialogues were easy to understand. Other reviewers mentioned grammar/spelling/structure mistakes - I don't think I encountered any in the route I took.

The story and its world just aren't that compelling. The paths all feel short and not well fleshed out. There are too many glitches with the save system, and it has design flaws that make replying for different endings a total slog.

I was so looking forward to this game’s release, to the point that I bought it the moment it dropped without waiting for any reviews (which I literally never do). Pains me to say this, but I wish I hadn’t. I got maybe 30 minutes into the game before I had to quit because I found myself reworking the writing in my head to correct tenses and make it more interesting. Ended up leaving it running in the background of my pc while doing other stuff because I was really hoping I could muster up the courage to pick it up again but I don’t know if I will (and by leaving it running in the background I accidentally ran past steams max play hours for refund rip). Genuinely hope the devs choose to go back and polish this off because the art is really appealing and (from what I’ve seen) the plot is promising.