To Kill Eros

Great Story! Loved it! At first, I really liked Icardi's story. But then I met Vitale, and he stole my heart. Even after playing through all the routes, his story is still my favorite. If I can recommend, play as shown in the menu: Icardi, Dr. Love, Vitale [spoiler] Aphrodite that b... 💢(｀∧´)💢 [/spoiler]

I bought the game without any expectations, simply because of the attractive graphics. Firstly... IT'S GORGEOUS. Secondly, it turned out to be a very good story, both in terms of the plot and the chemistry between the characters. I'll briefly describe my impressions of each. Icardi He seems like a cinnamon roll, and I'd say he is... but with some quirks. I recommend playing his route first, as the game itself suggests. Dr. Love He truly loves his job and acts very gentlemanly, without spoiling anything. Vitale He's a total spoiler, so his route only unlocks after completing Icardi and Dr. Love. And for good reason. But i promise, his root is worth this.[spoiler]The fact that he loves the main character no matter what, after Eros's hidden route, gave me a lot to think about.[/spoiler] Hidden Route [spoiler]Eros's route was a complete surprise to me. His lack of understanding of how relationships work was at times irritating, but also completely understandable. The relationship dynamic was very unusual for me, but that's precisely what made it so beautiful.It also has an incredibly stunning design, on my opinion.[/spoiler] The best $10 i've spent in a while. <3

It was a pretty cool ! The arts are also pretty great ! [spoiler] My favorite route are Icardi !!!!!!! > Vitale (He definitly loves Melrose in every route) > Dr Love. Eros' route felt a bit long but their love was as well so rushed. Like why Eros keep wanting to make love to Melrose come onnnnn :/ [/spoiler]

I just finished one route and I was genuinely pleasantly surprised. I had assumed it'd be more one dimensional than it ended up being. The main lead is a fun character As a heads up, at least for the one route I played, the choices are very much so "do you want a quick bad end or do you want to get on with the main story." This meant there was only three choices, with the final one deciding what ending you got. Personally I'm fine with this and actually appreciate this, but some others might want more planned out bad ends. Also the art is GORGEOUS. the characters are all so pretty and in a game that writing wise is a massive thumbs up, the art manages to be a highlight.

I'm hoping posting a review helps push this game to more people, because I genuinely think it's amazing. The love interests are all unique and subvert expectations in interesting ways, the plot keeps the game from feeling too focused on the love interests while still giving them plenty of priority, and the game requires you to get every ending before unlocking the more plot-heavy routes, which makes it so you have a complete understanding of the world and its systems before it throws you into the deep end. I find this extremely rewarding and motivating, even though seeing the bad ends was very sad, made even worse by the (beautifully drawn) CG's. Which is another point: the art in this game is beautiful. All of the characters and backgrounds look so beautiful, they really help make the player feel like they're experiencing the world as Melrose is. Take this from someone who normally HATES dating sims, there have only been 2 that I've found genuinely interesting in my entire life, and this takes the cake. Melrose feels like a real person with a deep past, and the love interests also have their own flaws and past traumas that get explored as you get to know them. If the price puts you off, try the demo, it has a ton of content and if you genuinely enjoy it, buy the full game! The demo got me hooked in the first place. I'm genuinely crossing my fingers that this game blows up in popularity someday, it's CRIMINAL how little its talked about and I think it deserves its flowers!

Overall, I really enjoyed this visual novel and I recommend checking it out - while initially I was a bit lost about being thrown right into the action without having more explanations for the overall lore/other things that our character was supposed to know, I grew accustomed to the game's less 'hand-hold'-y style. I really liked the story and the fact that each romance interest had his own unique route - so 'introduction' was the only common part between all them. The setting is really interesting, and I also really loved how the game was drawn. Melrose was also a really entertaining and relatable main character, I loved his defined personality and struggles. Though I wish there was a bit more interactivity to it between the major story beats, even if we had to roleplay within the bounds of a predefined personality. Dr. Love was the first one I went after - and he remained my favorite throughout the game. While I liked both Icardi's and Vitali's route, I found Icardi's harmony route [spoiler] to be kind of lacking, as it was the only route where we didn't get to see more of the inner workings of the Thespiae in the 'concluding' chapters, and it felt kind of unsatisfactory that the conflict with the cupids/other gods just went away without much explanation?.. [/spoiler]. On the technical side, there was one major problem - this game doesn't have a proper cloud saving system, so since I played the game on 2 different devices while travelling, I had to manually sync up with RenPy's servers to transfer my save files.