Recent reviews by Maladal

Well done indie, investigation game that tries to be very realistic with little to no mechanical assistance in your discovery. Probably only one instance of moon logic I would complain about.

Relatively short, but very sweet puzzle platformer with the most endearing regularly shaped AIs you've ever seen.

It's generally good for a relatively chill and not very long metroidvania with a pinball overlay.
Some parts are finicky, the sootling leash most notably (use the inventory pause to make your life easy), and at least 1 achievement is just silly and I refuse to do it.

Not amazing, but a decent game for the asking price, and unlike pretty much anything else you'll play.

Meh.

Good.

I found the performance issues unbearable, it takes so long for things to load when moving between areas and when saving.
If that were fixed I might look at it some more.

Otherwise, nothing terrible, nothing amazing. I found most of the Princesses too lacking in purpose and character. Just not enough for me to invest into any one of them much.
The open world component is decent.
The pixel art didn't work for me, which is unusual. I usually really like pixel art. Could just be dissonance between the pixel art of characters and the that of the environment.

1/5 with the performance issues.
Maybe 3/5 without.

*Edited review for new information

So if you like low bit, top-down RPGs in the style of Golden Sun or Dragon Quest, this game will scratch that itch something fierce.

There's a lot to like in the gameplay: different enemies encourage different party compositions, optional dungeons that will push you to utilize the buff and debuffs of your characters, quite a few fights where you WILL use your potions to survive, and a very, very beefy storyline. It's dozens of hours of gameplay even on in-game time, nevermind resets/reloads for fights or changing decisions.
The characters themselves, at least as far as I played, were all unique and interesting in both personality and function. Some characters are combat, others act as systems.
There's some nice QOL in that your characters will always share experience, even if they're dead or not in the main formation.
Also, you can see the world visibly change as a result of certain actions you take.

Now, all of that said, there's a few major annoyances for me:
1) Hidden numbers. This game has SO MANY hidden numbers. There are so many events and decisions that will nudge a number in the background that then alters how the game plays out. And these can have unexpected and far-reaching knock-on effects. For example, there is a certain character who has an affection score, if that score is not at a minimum number when you reach a specific chapter, then it will be impossible to acquire a unique item.
2) Complicated with the hidden numbers is just how much content the game lets you miss or accidentally lock yourself out of. Some decisions are obvious, others not so much. Sometimes you can unknowingly miss meeting entire characters.
The ultimate expression of this is probably the Investment system. There are more investment options than you have money to ever fulfill. So you have to pick and choose.

I'll note that the intent was clearly to try to encourage RPG style gameplay by making choices meaningful. Theoretically people will end up with different playthroughs based on how they treat those decisions and characters. Not inherently a bad idea, but I question the replayability of the game to support playing through again to see different choices. Especially because a lot of the changes, while notable at a story level, don't really change how the game proceeds. Personally, as a completionist, I don't see myself playing the game more than 1 way.

At the end of the day though, it's easily worth paying for.

I'd like to recommend the game. But it's hard given the nature of its development.

There is a fair bit of content, but most of it isn't in the main story. Furthermore, the rewrites to previous sections mean that there's a host of continuity errors where characters show up as if you know them before their introduction events. The lack of a main story also means a lot of events only trigger if you randomly grind and test for them, there's not a very logical flow at the moment. And of course there's just the fact that it's not complete yet.

It's a slow development cycle, mostly due to what seems like an ambitious scope and feature creep.
The non-Visual Novel sections don't feel particularly meaningful--there are more events to trigger by leaving the castle than there are reasons to actually bother leaving the castle.
The inventory and leveling system just feel tacked on, barring a few, rare events they do almost nothing. Beyond the introductory event you can't even buy things from the merchant for said inventory system.

Once it's story and feature complete I may change my mind, but at the moment it seems like it would be better to just scrap the map and leveling systems to focus on the VN storytelling.

I might look at it again in a few years to see where it's ended up by then.

4/5
Absolute lunatic open world and it knows.

4/5
Even more ridiculous, maybe not quite as fun as SR2, but still good.