Level up your love life while working alongside your new found co-workers to produce a hit indie game!

The Story & Gameplay

In this story you play as Alice (name changeable), a customer service rep by day and a popular web author by night. Your real dream however is to write a story-based video game. You get your chance when you meet up with childhood friend Kris, who is starting up an indie game company. You join up with the crew of talented co-founders aiming to produce your first hit game in the indie game environment, and maybe find love along the way.

An indie otome about being an indie otome dev, they say write what you know :)

There are four love interests to pursue. Kris, your childhood friend and the CEO and producer. The twins Souma and Sousuke, composer & programmer, and Harry Dominic Claude, the game’s artist and a major flirt.

The story is told partly through texts, screen time with the team, phone calls and through a writing skill mini-game.

The first hour of gameplay is the prologue and at the end after playing the mini game to determine your route, you then start that route’s story going forward.

🌶️ Spice Level – mild and I only put mild for some swearing. The relationships are pretty wholesome and based on friendship and caring.

How the mini game works

🦋 The Writing Skills mini game involves no actual writing. You are given a theme and from a list of words that pop up you pick the most appropriate ones that fit the theme.

🦋 The first few writing skills mini games are at the end of the prologue and determines whose route you get. Each character is attached to a colored butterfly and certain words (not random) are associated with each butterfly. Words repeat and you’ll be able to get your chosen route once you learn what words mean what color.

Charcters & what butterfly represents them – Cyan-Harry/Red-Kris/Black-Souma/Yellow-Sousuke

🦋 You can skip the mini-game but you’ll get an ending based on whatever points you have.

🦋 Select to follow the tutorial for your first run but BEFORE deciding save at this point to skip the prologue for future runs.

🦋 The remaining mini-games determine if you get the bad, normal or good ending. If you fail you get a bad ending. Each game accumulates points, your point score determines a good or normal ending. It is pretty hard to fail the mini game unless you’re purposely trying to.

Settings & Extras

Settings & extras include; display options, skip text, reset data, text speed, audio controls (includes separate channels for the voice acting).

Extras include a cg gallery, endings, music room, credits and bonus content (after you unlock the true ending first).

There are plenty of save slots available and you can hide the hud for screen captures.

The Visuals & Audio

The art style is anime-style sprites with a vibrant colour palette. There are a lot of beautiful cg’s to collect (over 50) with the English voice acting fully voiced for the prologue and then partially voiced for the full game. The voice acting is top notch across the board, I really love how expressive the main character comes across. An extended job well done to all the voice actors in the novel.

Overall Experience

I am really enjoying this novel. The voice acting is top notch, the cg’s are beautiful to collect and I really enjoyed how the main character is portrayed. Kind, upbeat and passionate about her interests. The writing is exceptionally well done and the story has fluidity. I also love how the male characters express emotion and vulnerabilities, not just the main character.

The mini-game is a neat feature but I will be honest that control over whose route you get, as the player, is really left up to chance to start. Until you learn what words correspond to what route. I ended up enjoying all the routes I experienced but I would have liked to have more choice to pick the order.

Note that it will take you quite some time to get all the endings, there are a lot to collect. Each character (after the prologue) has their own unique story so the text skip option is really only valuable in the prologue, at least until you’ve done each route once through.

I am still working my way through each route (took me about 5 hours for two routes but it will vary on how fast you read) but wanted to get my review up to support the developer and give everyone a run-through of what to expect and my thoughts. 💗

Otome Lovers wishes to thank Izumi Games for providing a free review copy of this game.

Review also posted on Steam ➞

Please follow our curator page, Otome Lovers, if you’d like to see more reviews like this one!