In order to play this game: rename the extracted folder to something with a short name and place it on your desktop.
I will defend the previous game as perhaps the only actually good AI game in existence. It eeks out as a good game rather than me being confident with that statement but I'm pretty comfortable saying that the AI artwork saves the game because of the high level of effort in other respects as well as the carefully made artwork. This game has better AI art. That's the last bit of praise I'm giving it. The original title managed to commit to its theme in a visual novel format. Not everyone's cup of tea but as a format they are inoffensive. They might skirt the definition of video game, but there is no argument that game or this one was a game. Unfortunately with this game I was begging the game to let me not play it.
This combat system isn't just terrible, its painful. The card game system was close to being interesting but you are given so few degrees of freedom to work with that you end up just doing the same thing over and over again. This is much better towards the end of the game but I blame no gamer for quitting at the earliest stage. I can't tell you the amount of times I was just helpless in combat. Enemy attack? Use your ONE action point to block. They can attack many times in a row and if you don't want to lose health you need to block every attack with your ONE action point. These enemies attack very very often so the battles take a gratuitously long time to finish. Early on you will find an enemy that starts with one defense point which means they can negate one attack point. Which means that if you have one attack card and spend your one action point to destroy it then you've done 0 damage. So you have to save up energy (which means taking damage in the meantime in this resource tight system), to get 2 swords to deal 1 damage to the enemy, AND THEN DO THAT 4 MORE TIMES FOR ONE BATTLE TO FINISH! Yes you can save up 3 energy for 3 damage cards to deal 2 damage as opposed to one but a) You still need to do that twice sacrificing a significant portion of your health pool to do it and b) you need to get lucky enough for the option to show up!
By 0 means will I say the characters from the pervious game were outright compelling but they were good enough to make me care. Yes the battle system in the last game was unpleasant but I went from 'please let me win' to 'please just let it end', the characters though were good enough for me to pull through with it. I cared about everyone in the game and was invested in what happened to them and vicariously the city. While this game has far fewer plot issues (why in the first game was it that after you find out that the evil cult was operating under your meeting place did you not change the meeting place?) It certainly destroyed everything that made the last game interesting. Characters? One note and without personality. Theme? Relegated down to a couple of characters and one event. Intrigue? Downright absent past the intro. Decisions? Just a difficulty slider and btw 'easy' is still hard and not fun. The leather? Only 1 character is frequently seen in it and the rest are just there for one event despite that being in the name of both games. The madness? Gone is the madness inflicted on the PC and the town especially the cultists and your allies, now the madness is down to just the player (not the player character, just the player)
The AI art in the last game wasn't always the best but it was frequently great. This game has some minor improvements by the way the characters move when idle. Its still very impressive what the dev did with AI tools and even with its use, you can tell the dev spent a very long time making the art as good as they could with the limitations they had. This game stretches that to the absolute limit. The achievement is better in terms of technical ability but the artifacts are far more noticeable and present. Awkwardness in headspace is more apparent, the detail of characters have more noticeable issues and the map has this strange 'continuous' feeling with the objects inside by being very detailed. More of a problem was the art direction. This game has character customization for clothing and poses of other characters. In the last game they frequently wore leather and the game was quite kinky. This game? The costumes are few and far between and a substantial downgrade from the last game in terms of kink value. This game feels like Ubisoft's F team got the rights to the first game and had to be more corporate approved. The art is better but the context of the art is worse. When I got the Blake watersports scene in the last game I was happy because I liked the kink, I liked the character, it was a massive release of tension from the previous scene, it meant great things for his growth as a character, it showed a deeper level for your relationship with him and it worked. What makes Hellfire from The Hunchback of Notre Dame so great? Its not just that the song is a banger, its the visuals, character and context surrounding the song that makes it great. So even if the art is better, when I fuck any of the characters, its just a porn scene because I've not been endeared to them, I've not been invested in the story, the scenes are more vanilla, but at least this is my reward for beating the grind heavy task. The last game didn't use skinner boxes until the end of the game (and I'm being very harsh calling it that) and even then, they added a skip function to bypass it all together. This game only has the skinner boxes and IP as investment.
I wanted to mention these last 3 things before I mentioned dating. Getting through the gauntlet of the combat zone once is not a fun experience but by the time dating becomes available to you, it becomes much more doable. Every enemy you defeat grants you 1-3 (but rarely 2) elder coins to buy things for dates with. It is more likely to be 1 than 3 mind you. SOME characters can be given an item or two to date them with. You NEED to get the specific item correct in order to date them. Each item costs 1-3 elder coins. This sounds annoying right now but there are a ton of items to buy so you need to collect the correct one. That doesn't SOUND like it makes the issue bigger. The items are consistent in terms of preference and the characters don't change preferences for gifts. That SOUNDS like it makes it better by tiny bits but it improves things a lot! Why? BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT OF THE TWO (IF THAT) ITEMS TO BUY FOR YOUR DATE UNTIL THEY AGREE TO GO ON A DATE WITH YOU AFTER YOU TAKE A GAMBLE AND GIVE THEM THE ITEM LOSING IT FOREVER IN ORDER TO DATE THEM! BLAKE HAS ONE ITEM THAT COSTS 3 COINS THAT HE LIKES SO YOU NEED TO FIRST FIGURE THAT OUT AND THEN SPEND 3 COINS (POSSIBLY 3 BATTLES) TO GO ON A DATE WITH HIM. Now at this point you might be tempted to say 'save scum'. HAHAHAHA.
You can't. The game auto saves and you have no save file.
So you make one wrong move and its over. That grinding was worthless other than finding out what your date doesn't like as a gift. 'Hello PC who's saving the town and possibly the world whose done me a favor that I'm obviously attracted to as someone whose very OK with polyamory. Oh you have chocolates for me? Sorry but that's chocolate and not this one very specific brand of alcohol from specifically Red Mart that requires the highest level of grinding available from defeating beings of another dimension that you have to risk life and limb to get (which you did to get the chocolates anyway because they cost the same currency) so I'm not going to go on a DATE with you.' There is a universe where I will call prostitution a life saving career, this might be that universe, because right then I saw red. But OK I push through THAT. Lets have a date. You'll get some info on the characters and they'll have a convo and its nice. What next? Well then you get 3 questions asked and you have to respond to them in a way that the other characters like. I don't know what's the minimum relationship gain, I don't know what counts as perfect, I don't even know if it makes a difference. But I strongly suspect it does make a difference but the issue is that you have no confirmation on if you made the right choice or not for any question. If you can get negative relationship points by going on a date then I wouldn't know. But I'll say this: I've gone on many dates with Blake and I cannot for the life of me tell you when the relationship has gotten better with the dates because of the relationship tracker being a heart inside an empty heart. The bigger the small heart, then the more relationship you have, but I can't tell if its getting bigger or smaller because its so small and after more than 10 dates, I am no longer curious. Our relationship has not lead to anything more for a while in game and we never have sex at the end of it. I like this character in the last game but I'm not going to try to find out anymore what is going on with him. I have tried my very best IC to make this work and it just isn't and after 10 dates with this kinky man-slut, with no sex, a ton of frustration, lots of eldritch money down the drain and a lot of my IRL time wasted...
I'm MGTOW for this game and I'm deleting this game until someone finds a way to cheat. This was a miserable experience from start to finish and I'm done giving the game any benefit of the doubt. Go play the original not this hollow husk of what it turned into.
I will defend the previous game as perhaps the only actually good AI game in existence. It eeks out as a good game rather than me being confident with that statement but I'm pretty comfortable saying that the AI artwork saves the game because of the high level of effort in other respects as well as the carefully made artwork. This game has better AI art. That's the last bit of praise I'm giving it. The original title managed to commit to its theme in a visual novel format. Not everyone's cup of tea but as a format they are inoffensive. They might skirt the definition of video game, but there is no argument that game or this one was a game. Unfortunately with this game I was begging the game to let me not play it.
This combat system isn't just terrible, its painful. The card game system was close to being interesting but you are given so few degrees of freedom to work with that you end up just doing the same thing over and over again. This is much better towards the end of the game but I blame no gamer for quitting at the earliest stage. I can't tell you the amount of times I was just helpless in combat. Enemy attack? Use your ONE action point to block. They can attack many times in a row and if you don't want to lose health you need to block every attack with your ONE action point. These enemies attack very very often so the battles take a gratuitously long time to finish. Early on you will find an enemy that starts with one defense point which means they can negate one attack point. Which means that if you have one attack card and spend your one action point to destroy it then you've done 0 damage. So you have to save up energy (which means taking damage in the meantime in this resource tight system), to get 2 swords to deal 1 damage to the enemy, AND THEN DO THAT 4 MORE TIMES FOR ONE BATTLE TO FINISH! Yes you can save up 3 energy for 3 damage cards to deal 2 damage as opposed to one but a) You still need to do that twice sacrificing a significant portion of your health pool to do it and b) you need to get lucky enough for the option to show up!
By 0 means will I say the characters from the pervious game were outright compelling but they were good enough to make me care. Yes the battle system in the last game was unpleasant but I went from 'please let me win' to 'please just let it end', the characters though were good enough for me to pull through with it. I cared about everyone in the game and was invested in what happened to them and vicariously the city. While this game has far fewer plot issues (why in the first game was it that after you find out that the evil cult was operating under your meeting place did you not change the meeting place?) It certainly destroyed everything that made the last game interesting. Characters? One note and without personality. Theme? Relegated down to a couple of characters and one event. Intrigue? Downright absent past the intro. Decisions? Just a difficulty slider and btw 'easy' is still hard and not fun. The leather? Only 1 character is frequently seen in it and the rest are just there for one event despite that being in the name of both games. The madness? Gone is the madness inflicted on the PC and the town especially the cultists and your allies, now the madness is down to just the player (not the player character, just the player)
The AI art in the last game wasn't always the best but it was frequently great. This game has some minor improvements by the way the characters move when idle. Its still very impressive what the dev did with AI tools and even with its use, you can tell the dev spent a very long time making the art as good as they could with the limitations they had. This game stretches that to the absolute limit. The achievement is better in terms of technical ability but the artifacts are far more noticeable and present. Awkwardness in headspace is more apparent, the detail of characters have more noticeable issues and the map has this strange 'continuous' feeling with the objects inside by being very detailed. More of a problem was the art direction. This game has character customization for clothing and poses of other characters. In the last game they frequently wore leather and the game was quite kinky. This game? The costumes are few and far between and a substantial downgrade from the last game in terms of kink value. This game feels like Ubisoft's F team got the rights to the first game and had to be more corporate approved. The art is better but the context of the art is worse. When I got the Blake watersports scene in the last game I was happy because I liked the kink, I liked the character, it was a massive release of tension from the previous scene, it meant great things for his growth as a character, it showed a deeper level for your relationship with him and it worked. What makes Hellfire from The Hunchback of Notre Dame so great? Its not just that the song is a banger, its the visuals, character and context surrounding the song that makes it great. So even if the art is better, when I fuck any of the characters, its just a porn scene because I've not been endeared to them, I've not been invested in the story, the scenes are more vanilla, but at least this is my reward for beating the grind heavy task. The last game didn't use skinner boxes until the end of the game (and I'm being very harsh calling it that) and even then, they added a skip function to bypass it all together. This game only has the skinner boxes and IP as investment.
I wanted to mention these last 3 things before I mentioned dating. Getting through the gauntlet of the combat zone once is not a fun experience but by the time dating becomes available to you, it becomes much more doable. Every enemy you defeat grants you 1-3 (but rarely 2) elder coins to buy things for dates with. It is more likely to be 1 than 3 mind you. SOME characters can be given an item or two to date them with. You NEED to get the specific item correct in order to date them. Each item costs 1-3 elder coins. This sounds annoying right now but there are a ton of items to buy so you need to collect the correct one. That doesn't SOUND like it makes the issue bigger. The items are consistent in terms of preference and the characters don't change preferences for gifts. That SOUNDS like it makes it better by tiny bits but it improves things a lot! Why? BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT OF THE TWO (IF THAT) ITEMS TO BUY FOR YOUR DATE UNTIL THEY AGREE TO GO ON A DATE WITH YOU AFTER YOU TAKE A GAMBLE AND GIVE THEM THE ITEM LOSING IT FOREVER IN ORDER TO DATE THEM! BLAKE HAS ONE ITEM THAT COSTS 3 COINS THAT HE LIKES SO YOU NEED TO FIRST FIGURE THAT OUT AND THEN SPEND 3 COINS (POSSIBLY 3 BATTLES) TO GO ON A DATE WITH HIM. Now at this point you might be tempted to say 'save scum'. HAHAHAHA.
You can't. The game auto saves and you have no save file.
So you make one wrong move and its over. That grinding was worthless other than finding out what your date doesn't like as a gift. 'Hello PC who's saving the town and possibly the world whose done me a favor that I'm obviously attracted to as someone whose very OK with polyamory. Oh you have chocolates for me? Sorry but that's chocolate and not this one very specific brand of alcohol from specifically Red Mart that requires the highest level of grinding available from defeating beings of another dimension that you have to risk life and limb to get (which you did to get the chocolates anyway because they cost the same currency) so I'm not going to go on a DATE with you.' There is a universe where I will call prostitution a life saving career, this might be that universe, because right then I saw red. But OK I push through THAT. Lets have a date. You'll get some info on the characters and they'll have a convo and its nice. What next? Well then you get 3 questions asked and you have to respond to them in a way that the other characters like. I don't know what's the minimum relationship gain, I don't know what counts as perfect, I don't even know if it makes a difference. But I strongly suspect it does make a difference but the issue is that you have no confirmation on if you made the right choice or not for any question. If you can get negative relationship points by going on a date then I wouldn't know. But I'll say this: I've gone on many dates with Blake and I cannot for the life of me tell you when the relationship has gotten better with the dates because of the relationship tracker being a heart inside an empty heart. The bigger the small heart, then the more relationship you have, but I can't tell if its getting bigger or smaller because its so small and after more than 10 dates, I am no longer curious. Our relationship has not lead to anything more for a while in game and we never have sex at the end of it. I like this character in the last game but I'm not going to try to find out anymore what is going on with him. I have tried my very best IC to make this work and it just isn't and after 10 dates with this kinky man-slut, with no sex, a ton of frustration, lots of eldritch money down the drain and a lot of my IRL time wasted...
I'm MGTOW for this game and I'm deleting this game until someone finds a way to cheat. This was a miserable experience from start to finish and I'm done giving the game any benefit of the doubt. Go play the original not this hollow husk of what it turned into.