Bewitching Sinners: It started well but then...
I found this beautiful game while lazily coursing through itch.io. Now, look at how cool this character selection screen is.
The art for the game is without a doubt stunning. I was immediately drawn into how the scenes transition and the character sprites get rendered. Maybe it’s because the dev has a background in webtoon, they have incoporated a lot of that in this game. Imagine reading a webtoon that is rendered to you as you go through the story.
It’s hard to describe in words so I will demonstrate through a quick GIF. Do note that this is not the best scene in the game.
If you are impressed by what you’ve just seen, trust me that the rest of the demo will blow this little cutscene out of the water.
Out of the bat, we can see high effort in the amount of CGs that the game has for a simple (trust me that this one is simple because you haven’t seen the rest of the game) scene. I adore this fresh take on rendering scenes in visual novels.
Usually, you get at most a background, textbox and a character sprite whose emotion changes. This game basically goes way above and beyond that old school (still cool, kinda) approach. I felt like I was watching a movie! Absolute immersion in the game!
The developer has also done a fantastic job with the audio and sound effects in this game, too.
In addition to the impeccable presentation, the game is packed with features and interestings mechanisms:
- You can interact with love interests like touch them anywhere, give them gifts,…
- You can do quests that you can complete to unlock more of the story or make Gold coins (which help with the gift giving)
- You can roam the school in different areas (kinda like Fire Emblem: Three Houses but …not really). In each of these areas, you can listen to the gossips and whispers to get inspiration for more options in conversations with characters.
- You can craft things by buying ingredients and unlocking recipes.
- You can shop (there are many shops you can buy from in the game)
- You can go fishing.
- You can build your main character’s stats.
Like you are seeing where I’m getting to with this, right?
High effort, large amount of CGs plus all of the above features if not more are coming.
The story of Icarus flying too close to the sun
It’s obvious that the developer of the game has a lot of ambitions, many ideas they want to implement for their game.
However, this game, in my opinion, is dangerously close to the territory of overdoing it. I was delighted when I played the beginning of the game with beautiful characters and scene transitions. When all the other mechanisms started rolling in one-by-one, it became too much for me and I lost half of the excitement I felt at the beginning.
It’s not that I don’t like completing quests, gifting characters gifts and fishing. I’m still madly in love with Claude best boy, I’m too scared of losing him to play Blue Lion and I bought him so much shit many presents and had a lot of tea times with him.
The extra features, in my opinion, are not well executed and can end up destroying the amazing immersion that the developer has worked so hard to build. And this has nothing to with the developer’s ability to deliver.
What do I mean by “not well executed”? Well…
- The school map was confusing. There was no way to get back to the high level overview in some areas. I get lost so many times and I gave up for a bit.
- The shopping, recipes and crafting experience were quite disconnected from each other. No NPCs told me that I need to unlock recipes, buy ingredients and then I can craft.
For me, there are two things in play that make me worry about the future of this project:
- This is written in Ren’Py and it has all that features.
- This is a solo dev project and it has all that features.
My motto is that one should focus on one particular feature and do everything to make it really good. Unless you have the resources to achieve a lot more.
My verdict
With that said, I will still continue following this game closely. In my first 15 minutes of playtime, I was ready to leave a stellar review, sign up for Miss Xero’s Patreon and be in the tier that includes Beta Testing. Having seen the rest of the game, I’m more reluctant to have faith that it will ever be completed.
If you haven’t played it and you think you don’t want to play it after reading this, I highly recommend trying it for yourself.