Once Ever After

Great: Great worldbuilding and story (especuially if you like what-ifs scenarios or enjoy the works of Jasper Fforde) Good: Varied monster art Progression Combat system Ok: H-art Bad: Repetitive dungeon combat, doubled down by monster respawn and "guess a lever combation" mechanic. Seriously, doing the same fights over and over again makes me take a break from completing a dungeon.

fan of the Last Sovereign. This was pretty good as well

I AM GOING TO ALICE

On par with the rest of Sierra lee's games. Very fun and interesting play.

Would have loved to see more interactions with Ingrid and her alternate fable counterparts. I also agree with other reviewers on the combat. It is rather annoying, and it feels like a slog to get through so that I can enjoy the writing. Would have love to read more dialogue instead of fighting again and again.

Alright, so I'll start with the Sierra Lee disclaimer. Ahem. "Sierra Lee games are incredibly intelligently written, insightful, well themed, charming, and accessible. They are also porn games, with NSFW content that cannot truly separated from said incredible writing. In my opinion this in no way makes them any worse for it, but if NSFW is a dealbreaker for you then you will want to give them a skip. If you are on the fence, then you should absolutely give them a try, as they are excellent at being NSFW games for people who don't like the usual creepiness that comes with much of the genre." Alright, now for the review of the game proper. As is usual for Sierra Lee, an incredibly well written story. In particular in this case it has strong themes of self-discovery, self-improvement and embracing one's own sexuality on one's own terms. For those coming here from the Last Sovereign (which is both excellent and FREE), this is a very different story. Sexual themes are still there, but without the emphasis on politics, and the story is far more of a personal journey than an ensemble grand fantasy story. Also it has an excellent ending, which anyone familiar with RPG's knows is about as easy to find in that genre as a unicorn. The bad, in this case, is unfortunately the gameplay. The main positive thing to say is that it is highly functional, has some challenging fights without requiring complete optimization, and greatly de-emphasizes rng (with much of your build incentivized to reduce its presence even further, treating it like the enemy of progression that it is). It is also *relatively* quick. If you can't stand turn based combat with minute long cutscenes where a simple encounter takes 5 minutes, then you won't have that problem here. The two main issues are grind and ease. This game has respawning enemies, and while the system of archetypes is neat (you level up and draw abilities from what are effectively different fantasy archetypes), the time it takes to level them is tedious. The fact that many archetypes are weak while you have them equipped to level them up, but have powerful abilities that can be used when you don't have the archetype equipped also incentivizes fighting weak enemies to level up your abilities, rather than leveling up naturally in hard fights that engage the brain and aren't completely boring. This leads into the second problem, which is that when you have 20 completely trivial fights to get through before the next one that is even possible to lose, you ignore a lot of the game's options to gravitate towards maximum efficiency. Not to mention the amount of time you spend just plowing through enemies that can't fight back, trying to get to the next dialogue scene. Finally on the bad, I had a number of crashes on area loads. These weren't an actual problem, as the game autosaved before every crash (and its an rpg-maker game so you'll be able to be back to playing within a minute), but it was annoying. I've spent a fair bit criticizing, but I do think this is an overall good game, just one to go into with your eyes open. And the game is a solo job by a developer I'm a tremendously big fan of, so if nothing else get it to support them. Even if you don't end up liking the game, you WILL have things to talk about and remember from it.