Review Date: March 5th, 2025
Time Spent: ~6 Hours
Game version: v0.065a
Starting off with some quick comments: I am someone who can respect and definitely appreciate some good old-fashioned hand-drawn assets. Far too commonly, AI is being used these days as a means of replacing what human-driven skills, creativity, and passion can do. I've seen this game, played through several hours of its contents, and I can clearly see the talent, passion, and practice that Dagotto has put into this project. I figured it was going to be another sloppily tossed-together 'Wham-Bam, Thank-You-Ma'am' game or some such. Like rather few other games, I was happily surprised by "Inn Another World"!
Pros:
- There's good writing and proper grammar usage, it's not a quickly thrown-together mess like many other games. The characters' styles of 'speech' gives us the idea of their accents and various cultures. A definite plus. That's refreshing.
- A skillful use of in-game lore snippets, distinction between the wide variety of races you can interact with -- a ton of games forego writing or including lore due to wanting their players to get the the meat of it as soon as possible, and I find that quite shallow and lacking.
- The scenes of the NSFW variety are skippable, it seems, but they're well done. Animation is tricky, but this game does it well. It's an appreciated plus-side! With the available clothing or lack thereof, the you can get a feel for the characters' life before meeting the MC via use of their 'assets' and various positions. It's charming!
- The art is, from what I can tell, handled with visible (Or rather, not visible) care and effort... the smooth edges, a great use of available screen space, a good colour palette and distinct tones throughout.
- The UI is actually good. There's properly-aligned highlighting of scene-change objects like the various doors, stairs, beds, characters, too, of course. There are several handy quick-travel options. Saving/Loading through the UI. the non-default menus, the list goes on. Impressive. 40 Save slots, by the way. (You won't run dry unless you're like me and you save at almost every single scene start/reload to see alternate paths/scenes play out for the sake of thorough content review/curiosity)
- I was genuinely surprised when I opened up a furnishing and Inn-designing environment! I thought this was just a VN but, huh, you can actually design your own highly-customizable Inn. It even saves as you leave. Convenient!
- Frequent Auto-Saving in general. Again, this is appreciated. Far too many other games have lost me due to game-breaking save/reload BS. 'Nuff said.
- Speaking of not breaking the game, not many bugs at all. Along with auto-saving upon exit of the Inn-Building, which is appreciated.
- Understandably, the initial money/relationship grinding makes sense. You're a total random stranger who appeared out of nowhere and now you've got to start an entire business from almost nothing. Many will hate on it, but I won't. This game hands you a several story Inn with a bar to work at, tons of time slots, lots of NPCs to meet and work with, et cetera. Embrace the grind! It's not that bad, trust me, I've seen significantly worse.
- As others have pointed out, even though the Isekai-themed tropes are quite familiar, they don't feel seem too heavily emphasized. So this game gets a pass.
Cons:
- Despite a couple of rather minor visual bugs (The UI can get stuck/overlap but are easily fixed with a two-click trip to the main menu and then reloading a save) but the Dev is already well-aware and is apparently working on a fix/new shortcut to allow a quick UI refresh which is a show of progress and dedication to the project as a whole.
- I would ask for a more isometric style camera or at least an incline/decline camera function for the Inn designing aspect. It can be a little bit wonky to go to place a Bed or a Door and the walls go invisible/not allow you to move the room side-to-side, you can only rotate it clockwise or counter-clockwise and it's centred on the middle of the room. I do assume there may be an engine limitation there, though, but this is me nitpicking, since it's an honest review.
- The assortment of characters - if you have watched some of the most popular anime series, will initially seem pretty familiar. While this isn't inherently terrible (Since we all tend to naturally draw inspiration from sources that are familiar to us), it does detract somewhat from the originality I sometimes crave from a game. This, again, wasn't a total turn-off, since there are still original lines and personality traits and such present once you break through that initial familiarity sensation. Not the biggest nitpick, but it's there, for those who can't help but constantly compare between two different works.
In Summary, I give "Inn Another World" a 5/5 overall rating, since I really did enjoy the experience of the current version thus far. I already intend to play it more fully. There's is evidently plenty of additional content to enjoy as of writing this review, so I will likely update or alter the rating as things progress.
~ Thanks for reading!
Time Spent: ~6 Hours
Game version: v0.065a
Starting off with some quick comments: I am someone who can respect and definitely appreciate some good old-fashioned hand-drawn assets. Far too commonly, AI is being used these days as a means of replacing what human-driven skills, creativity, and passion can do. I've seen this game, played through several hours of its contents, and I can clearly see the talent, passion, and practice that Dagotto has put into this project. I figured it was going to be another sloppily tossed-together 'Wham-Bam, Thank-You-Ma'am' game or some such. Like rather few other games, I was happily surprised by "Inn Another World"!
Pros:
- There's good writing and proper grammar usage, it's not a quickly thrown-together mess like many other games. The characters' styles of 'speech' gives us the idea of their accents and various cultures. A definite plus. That's refreshing.
- A skillful use of in-game lore snippets, distinction between the wide variety of races you can interact with -- a ton of games forego writing or including lore due to wanting their players to get the the meat of it as soon as possible, and I find that quite shallow and lacking.
- The scenes of the NSFW variety are skippable, it seems, but they're well done. Animation is tricky, but this game does it well. It's an appreciated plus-side! With the available clothing or lack thereof, the you can get a feel for the characters' life before meeting the MC via use of their 'assets' and various positions. It's charming!
- The art is, from what I can tell, handled with visible (Or rather, not visible) care and effort... the smooth edges, a great use of available screen space, a good colour palette and distinct tones throughout.
- The UI is actually good. There's properly-aligned highlighting of scene-change objects like the various doors, stairs, beds, characters, too, of course. There are several handy quick-travel options. Saving/Loading through the UI. the non-default menus, the list goes on. Impressive. 40 Save slots, by the way. (You won't run dry unless you're like me and you save at almost every single scene start/reload to see alternate paths/scenes play out for the sake of thorough content review/curiosity)
- I was genuinely surprised when I opened up a furnishing and Inn-designing environment! I thought this was just a VN but, huh, you can actually design your own highly-customizable Inn. It even saves as you leave. Convenient!
- Frequent Auto-Saving in general. Again, this is appreciated. Far too many other games have lost me due to game-breaking save/reload BS. 'Nuff said.
- Speaking of not breaking the game, not many bugs at all. Along with auto-saving upon exit of the Inn-Building, which is appreciated.
- Understandably, the initial money/relationship grinding makes sense. You're a total random stranger who appeared out of nowhere and now you've got to start an entire business from almost nothing. Many will hate on it, but I won't. This game hands you a several story Inn with a bar to work at, tons of time slots, lots of NPCs to meet and work with, et cetera. Embrace the grind! It's not that bad, trust me, I've seen significantly worse.
- As others have pointed out, even though the Isekai-themed tropes are quite familiar, they don't feel seem too heavily emphasized. So this game gets a pass.
Cons:
- Despite a couple of rather minor visual bugs (The UI can get stuck/overlap but are easily fixed with a two-click trip to the main menu and then reloading a save) but the Dev is already well-aware and is apparently working on a fix/new shortcut to allow a quick UI refresh which is a show of progress and dedication to the project as a whole.
- I would ask for a more isometric style camera or at least an incline/decline camera function for the Inn designing aspect. It can be a little bit wonky to go to place a Bed or a Door and the walls go invisible/not allow you to move the room side-to-side, you can only rotate it clockwise or counter-clockwise and it's centred on the middle of the room. I do assume there may be an engine limitation there, though, but this is me nitpicking, since it's an honest review.
- The assortment of characters - if you have watched some of the most popular anime series, will initially seem pretty familiar. While this isn't inherently terrible (Since we all tend to naturally draw inspiration from sources that are familiar to us), it does detract somewhat from the originality I sometimes crave from a game. This, again, wasn't a total turn-off, since there are still original lines and personality traits and such present once you break through that initial familiarity sensation. Not the biggest nitpick, but it's there, for those who can't help but constantly compare between two different works.
In Summary, I give "Inn Another World" a 5/5 overall rating, since I really did enjoy the experience of the current version thus far. I already intend to play it more fully. There's is evidently plenty of additional content to enjoy as of writing this review, so I will likely update or alter the rating as things progress.
~ Thanks for reading!