Night of Love 🌓

Hours played at review time, across 40 reviews with recorded playtime.

This work gave me a bit of cognitive dissonance. It's set in a town where barely anything's changed in four years and the jobs available for grown adults are dead-end and low-wage, yet there's room for two bars, an arcade, and an "adult" shop, and the view of it from a nearby mountain has more glowing nights at night than some big cities. Despite being a "NIght of Love", the story actually takes place across two nights in a 24-hour period, with the exhausted protagonist sleeping through all morning, midday, and afternoon after the first night. The first Adult Only Patch scene is set on a beach, which is visited on a whim with no mention of bringing even a towel, yet the art shows Jen grasping at some unmentioned fabric beneath her. And speaking of Jen, the main love interest, for some reason all three screenshots on the Steam store page that show her talking instead list her name as Jane? The proofreader also missed a few typos, such as Jen being called Ken once in a flashback and Carl, the owner of one of the bars, being called Karl at one point, but it's easy to tolerate a few accidents while the other points feel like significant oversights to me. The story was alright, I suppose. It starts with an interesting premise of having to work with your ex to fulfill the last wish of your recently-deceased mutual friend, with the implication that you'll be falling back in love over the course of the night. However, the scavenger hunt is briefly derailed almost right after it begins by Jen and the protagonist having to fill in for a missing act at a local music bar, they renew their relationship right after, and the rest of the scavenger hunt is then practically speedran (and intercut with a few lewd scenes with the Adult Patch enabled) now that the two aren't pausing every few minutes to bicker over past heartbreak. Morally, I'm also a tad displeased that the answer to everyone's problems about affording a future together is solved in the end via cryptocurrency. With that said, the protagonist and Jen are both complicated characters that show off a lot of personality over the course of the story, and their interactions with each other were always fun. The art was, aside from that cognitive dissonance, very good. The backgrounds were varied and incredibly detailed, such as two different bars each having completely different vibes instead of copying each other. Something about Jen's face bothers me, but I liked her outfits, even if there were only two of them (and most of the story is spent in the second). I also wish there were more character portraits than just of Jen, mainly because I hadn't even considered that the protagonist whose first-person perspective we never leave might be anything other than a real-life human until artwork showing just his junk or his hand reveal he's probably the same species as Jen. The number of pictures for the Gallery is very impressive, with at least five different adult scenes consisting of three images each, and I'm honestly a big fan of how many pictures were NOT adult and instead just cute moments of Jen falling back in love with the protagonist; I think those enhance how much a character appeals to me, and in other Dirty Fox Games works I'm lucky if there's just one of those. Ultimately, I would not recommend this at full price as-is, but if you're interested in punk rocker chicks, there have been discounts as low as 85% off by the time of this review and I do suggest checking it out during one of those; I may not have Loved it, but I still had a Night of Appreciation.