I'm giving the game a thumbs up because I really want to support the dev and look forward to his future games and (possible?) future updates to this one, but this game is a mixed bag.
So to start, this game added some progression mechanics that uncle neighbor didn't have. It adds a grind for affection that you need to raise for each character to unlock their personal storylines. Let's just say, I probably would not have been able to play this game if there wasn't a story mode that removed it, because it was so tedious and boring that I had to quit like 3 hours in. Getting around the different rooms and the map is really annoying too, and takes forever.
The stories themselves are definitely shorter than Uncle Neighbor's stories. Even though there's technically more scenes as well as some extra mini stories, they're very short and the story goes by super fast. I suspect this might not be noticeable if you play the game in it's regular mode (which I don't recommend, it's really not fun and you're not missing out on anything), but playing through it in story mode really shows just how much less content this game has than Uncle Neighbor. The progression from chapter to chapter is also very weird and disconnected. In Uncle Neighbor, you could tell how much time had passed by and the beginning chapters were all happening through a couple of days. In this game it feels like you jump through plot points at random speed.
I played fully through Chris' story so far and it didn't feel like a natural progression from strangers to lovers like in UN. You start as strangers in the first chapter and then really quickly seem to just start dating and things kinda go from 0 to 100. It doesn't feel satisfying or meaningful. It also doesn't help that we don't have a NSFW scene that kinda "marks the beginning" of the relationship like Neighbor had.
Another disappointing thing is the lack of world building or interaction between characters. Unlike the first game, this game's stories are all extremely isolated from each other. As far as I have played, love interests don't interact with each other much, if at all, and don't really seem know each other at all. Uncle Neighbor had a cool overarching narrative between all of the characters you met where you could see different possibilities in how the town's inhabitants progress as you date the different uncles.
There's also no minigames, which in Uncle Neighbor were usually pretty fun with a couple of exceptions. The only "gameplay" you have is the choices which do absolutely nothing in story mode since you don't need affection points (I don't even think they even affect anything in the story) and the "jobs" that you can do in the RPG mode, which is just clicking a button and watching the timer go up. That's it. Pretty big step down.
The characters themselves are all way too similar. Uncle Neighbor had this problem too where most of the characters were just muscular white men with slight variations. This game has the exact same problem except that instead of white they're mixed (latino?) with a few variations but not much. Adam, Charlie, Chris, Daniel, and David look like identical siblings. I'm not even kidding, when I was trying out the rpg mode and I was looking for someone in the map through their tiny pictures I kept getting them mixed up because they're so similar. So in a way the character variety is actually worse than Uncle Neighbor.... seriously they look the same!
Now for the good: the illustrations are definitely improved. The backgrounds are far more interesting and detailed than the first game which had pretty simplistic backgrounds. You can tell a lot more work was put into them. A shame that there's so little scenes of the uncles and no NSFW scenes, but oh well. The translation is also vastly improved and so far I haven't found any untranslated lines (which still haven't been fully fixed in Uncle Neighbor BTW).
There's also a big issue where dialogue lines don't show the correct character when they're speaking. It shows "Chris" when it's actually the main character speaking and vice versa. This got me super confused a couple of times.
Overall, I think this is a big step down from Uncle Neighbor. I believe the dev focused too much and developing the "RPG" part of the game and didn't devote as much time to the actual stories and the characters. I really wish he would have just stuck with the Uncle Neighbor formula which worked so well and just worked on the illustrations and the writing. It's a shame because I love this dev and Neighbor was such a good visual novel. Looking forward to future updates and future entries :)
