An Otome visual novel that follows Claudia, who has to run her grandfather's B&B. She meets the 4 love interests and together they try to find a way to financially save it, all while falling in love.

"I wonder if a place this magical is where I'll find true love?"
-Claudia Chiu

Plot
Claudia Chiu, name unchangeable, is a college senior who is going on vacation to the Gold Coast in Australia. She plans to stay at her grandfather's B&B, but upon arrival, she finds a note that says he has gone on vacation to Europe and she is to run the B&B while he is gone for the next three months. Oh and that the B&B is apparently short on funds, essentially broke. You can decide to leave the B&B and not deal with that bullcrap, but it just ends in a game over. Once you decide to have her work at the B&B, she begins to meet the love interests and side characters. They try to figure out how to save the B&B and join in on a contest that will grant the winner a huge monetary prize that will solve the B&B's monetary issue. This is what consists of the common route.

There are four love interests in the game. Vito, Cornell, Jung, and Dewitt. All of them know Claudia from sometime in her past, but she doesn't remember any of them. Thankfully this mystery is answered in most of the routes that it matters, respectively.

The story for the game is alright at best. Instead of the characters being in college-aged range, they act like they are in middle school. Sometimes it feels like Claudia can make smart decisions and has a backbone, but other times she feels incredibly dumb and the decisions you can make for her are ridiculous. Also the fact that there are options where you can "woof" and "meow" for the love interests to get their affection up, is silly. Claudia also never questions when people seem to know her name before she introduces herself. There is an excessive use of exclamation marks used in this game. The soundtrack is very basic and repetitive and it doesn't feel like there are many tracks at all. I do like that the characters have some sort of sounds at times, like grunting, a scream, cheering, sighing, etc.

Art
The art for the game is fine. The sprites are fairly well done. There are a few issues with them where some of the sprites have an odd white line across their neck, underneath their chin. This is most notably noticeable on Claudia and on Cornell when he is in his high school uniform. At one point there is even an odd skin-colored line across Claudia's neck. I do like that the characters have different outfits, though sometimes they don't always match the description we are given for them. The sprites having blinking animations is a nice touch, but the fact that they still blink when the eyes are closed is a bit spooky. I also enjoy that the sprites have mouth movements as well and the characters all have nice facial expressions.

The backgrounds seem to be photos of real life places with some sort of filters over them. Some of the backgrounds have some 3D art objects in them and some are a bit more impossible to see due to the filters. They aren't really anything special to write home about and it would have been nice to see an actual art background of some sort, even if they would be more simple.

Most of the CGs are nice to look at, well drawn and cute. I actually have a few that I really enjoy looking at. The characters head and eyes are ginormous though sometimes, compared to the rest of them or even other CGs. Some of the CGs also feel like they are a bit more fuzzy than others, which I don't understand why. There also is one CG I cannot find no matter what, even though I apparently have everything on 100% in the flowchart. I honestly can't be bothered to try and find out where I missed getting it. There are some chibi art pop-ups that I absolutely adore, but they are not given a space in the Gallery and that is a total loss.

UI and System

• There are no options to hide the HUD. If you want screenshots of the CGs without text, it has to be done through the Gallery and unfortunately when taking multiple screenshots in a row, the game tends to freeze and it doesn't always seem to work.

• There is no option for fullscreen/windowed mode.
• There are really no options at all except for adjusting the music and sound, each with just one bar for adjustments. The game does pause sounds and the game when clicked out of the window.
• As the player, you do have the choice to skip to the next choice or let the text autoplay. Using the skip to next choice function came in handy when needing to get through a chapter, especially because the save function is absolutely useless.
• You can save the game, though it's a painful time waiting for it to load the save screen, freezing the game. There is no point since when you go to load your save, it loads you back to the start of the chapter. I do not understand the choice in this decision. At this point it's just quicker to go to the flowchart on the main screen and load from there. To have 60 save slots with no real use, seems like an odd choice, especially when it doesn't even tell you what chapter you are on with the save. With that, there is also no quick save and quick load option.
• In terms of the autoplay function, it goes by extremely quickly and I am someone who reads fast.
• Not having an option to choose the load of the text is a minor negative as well. As I stated, I read quickly, so by the time I've finished reading what has loaded, I have to wait to continue reading the rest of the lines and if I accidentally click or hit enter, sometimes it just loads the next line and I miss what is said.
• Thankfully there is a log feature. It would be nice to be able to use the scroll wheel for the log, but it ends up being a click and drag to get through it, along with it starts at the very beginning of the lines from either the chapter or where you skipped to, making you have to move it all the way down to the line that was most recent.
• No way to go back to a previous choice, so that you could see what the other choices would give you.
• No highlight as to what choices you have previously made either, so if you don't remember, it's a guessing game and it may cause you to have to load from the start of the chapter again.
• I don't understand the point of giving the chapters names, when they load by so quickly and some are so long, you can't even read them.
• Some lines where a character is speaking a huge paragraph, the text falls off the text box.
• There are also very many errors in terms of misspellings, missing letters, inconsistencies (during flashbacks, the name area is trying to presumably say that the character is a kid, but instead says "kind", yet with another young character, it says "child").
• The use of different dots is odd. There's "..." and "•••", I don't understand the reasoning behind it.
• Clicking start does not start a new game. It just loads up wherever you last left off. I thought that was supposed to be the point of a continue button or even the load feature. If you want to start a new game, you have to go to the flowchart menu and choose from there.
• No keyboard functions outside of using spacebar or enter to progress the text.

Overall
I really had trouble getting through this game. I didn't really come into the game expecting anything and was looking forward to it, but in the end it took me almost the whole year to finish it. I had absolutely no motivation for it. I've tried to take a step back and understand ways that this game may appeal to others, but I just couldn't.

I could probably write a few more paragraphs on my thoughts for the game, but I feel like I've said my point. I'd still be willing to give any future game made by the devs a try, so if they do decide to make another game I will be on the lookout.

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

Review originally posted on Steam

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