Parts of this review are updated, I've given it another star.
The actual story of the game is this: Certain political groups seek to impose restrictive laws upon women through congress, and it's up to our girls to stop them (pro feminist!) by fucking them (not so pro feminist!) Each turn congress will try to pass a law to make your gameplay harder, and you need to fuck the voters into submission to stop them.
That's about all the story really. There's some flavor text describing laws and moves, but not much more. Oh yea, this is a card game of the deckbuilding variety. That should probably be somewhere in the first post.
(Update: not a lot of changes story wise from 0.1>0.2, but some new cards promote the theme a bit.)
Gameplay consists of using cards on dudes to get resources to either use more moves or buy new cards. You need to max out someone's lust to give them pleasure, and maxxing out that increases their corruption. Once you get maxxed corruption you can fuck them to make them a puppet. Puppeting the entire enemy party wins you the game (I think. Game softlocks after I do it.)
It's much easier to understand once you start playing the game rather than reading the tutorial. The tutorial really sucks for teaching wtf is going on. I think the non-congress dudes you can puppet make buying cards easier, but it might be a party by party thing.
(Update: Game is a lot more clear, but tutorial is still an info dump. Mousing over UI elements tells you what they are, making readability much easier. I think the game doesn't suffer too badly from the weak tutorial as much as it could, because difficulty early is pretty easy, allowing the player some room to make mistakes while learning. Difficulty does grow, and errors can punish you farther down the line, but that's kind of what the game is, and I like a challenge, even if blood flow to my brain might be impeded if you know what I mean.)
There's 2 mod girls with the launch, Elsa and Leana. It's neat how this gives replay value and different ways of playing, even if it's just 2 right now. The real issue comes in how I think people are supposed to mod this. Looking through their files, the girls have very extensive .rpy files to set them up as usable decks. While this gives a lot of control into the modders hands, it looks like pure hell to actually do without a tool. Hopefully the dev has something to make this easy.
(Update: the two girls got new cards that make them even more replayable and complex. They both have specific 'themes' like you can find in other deck builders like Slay the Spire, making builds fun to pull off. I don't think the dev is looking for modding support just yet, so that's a non-issue for me atm. I do hope we get some new girls soon though. You're a bit shit out of luck if you don't like these two.)
Half of the resources you can get seem useless, but I might just not have gotten the necessary cards. The ui is also lacking some fundamentally necessary things for a card game (I'm thinking deck size here). Scrolling is also very awkward sometimes, as you can scroll on some cards to read more information, but going too far can trigger Ren'pys rollback feature.
(Update: This is pretty much the biggest fix from 0.1>0.2. Knowing the names of these things helps a lot with gameplay. I found through gameplay that the game is pretty well balanced, which is a pretty big feat for such a game. Different runs presented new challenges, while prior challenges were no longer an issue. The gameplay has gotten more complicated, as later in the run you get both girls to use, but that's not too big of an issue.)
I buffed my review from 3/5 to 4/5 with these changes. The game still needs a bit more to be considered a 5/5 for me, which is the rating of those best of the best games that you would recommend first. The UI design is still a bit messy, but that's mostly for aesthetic reasons. The game also needs some more content, as with only two girls there is only so much you can get out of them. There are some bugs in this version, but the dev seems quick to fix them. I'm optimistic about the future of this project.
