Recent reviews by Bonnford

Not reccommended, sadly. A monster raising sim is exactly what I wanted, but the gameplay here completely destroyed my hype.
Game is unnecessarily punishing for no apparent reason, almost everything has a random chance to instantly end your game and all the negative items keep stacking up so you're wrestling with fifty different things to just try and survive each turn. And there's also no form of save system! It sucks so much to get one turn away from an ending and then have to start all over from the beginning.
I know that other games lik Long Live The Queen exist in the life sim genre that are deliberately difficult on purpose as part of the appeal. But none of the description or marketing here hinted that this game was one of those, so I feel that's a bit unfair.
The monster designs are still really cute though!

Better alternatives out there.

This is a "competitive visual novel" style game similar to games like The Yawhg and Monster Prom.
The art looks lovely like those. It has loads of possible random events like those.
However there's one thing it lacks: literally any control over those events!
It's absolutely baffling, every single choice in the game is just three options, two out of three will lower your points, with no indication whatsoever which is correct! In the other games your stats would have an influence on what events you got and which option would be beneficial to you, here it's essentially just a game of rolling the dice over and over until somebody wins.
It makes the experience honestly really unfun despite the adorable visuals, I don't think even children would enjoy this because kids tend to be even more impatient with game systems that are unfair like this.

I was wondering why the average play time of this was only 15 minutes and well.. now I know. You play it once, you win or lose entirely at random. You try another game, you still have no effect on whether you win. You look at the massive list of achievements and think about how long it'll take when you have no way of choosing which 'route' to go on. Then you put it down and just replay The Yawhg.

I hope perhaps the game improves in future because a child-friendly alternative to Monster Prom is a great untapped market and if this was just a fairer play experience it could make a lot of kids happy! (Adding online multiplayer would also help.)

Great little slice of wholesomeness! Surprised me a lot with unexpected depth!
I really liked how the character being a monster girl wasn't either left undiscussed or used only for fetish fuel. They gave us angst about her being mistreated for being different, and finding confidence and a reason to live thanks to the kindness of her new boyfriend.
I wanted to cry at all the sweet little scenes of her experiencing normal happiness for the first time, she acts as if just walking alongside her without feeling ashamed to be with her is the kindest thing anyone's ever done for her. I was cheering for her to realise she deserves all this and more! And the protagonist was surprisingly endearing for a mostly blank slate guy, just from the sheer enthusiasm he had for making her happy. He saw a person in need and was immediately determined to do everything it takes to make her see how wonderful she is, and how she deserves the love he has for her!
The friend characters were also adorable and I really liked Tomo with his unusual take on the tsundere archetype where instead of being overly grumpy he instead pretends to be bored and not care about his friends but whenever they need him he's always there with great support and advice. And it was such a lovely idea to have the two advice friends end up dating too in the end! The double date at the crepe shop was so cute, what a lovely ending!

However, I do have a few things that detracted slightly from the experience:
* This isn't a visual novel, its a kinetic novel. Personally I enjoy both, but having it incorrectly labelled might lead to confusion, I'd reccommend fixing that.
* Music quality is spotty, some tracks are great but the track for tense moments is like five notes repeated over and over.
* The art is a little... uncanny? The combination of very exaggerated cartoony proportions with overly detailed realistic shading makes certain poses look odd. (Akemi's pose with the giant hand) Sometimes Sachi's eye looks like you just grabbed a regular anime eye and stretched it with content aware scaling. The game was so heartwarming that I quickly tuned it out though, it didn't detract from the emotional moments.
* The fetish content. I'm not objecting to the inclusion of it, even though I personally don't have those fetishes and didn't enjoy it at all. I think the problem is more that it's poorly executed. The entire tone of the game is extremely wholesome and the couple's relationship is very chaste with no actual sexual content. You don't even actually see them kiss in the end, you only see them leaning in for it. So it seems completely inconsistant that there's sudden random scenes of feeding each other food or touching bruises which are described in extremely intense sexualized detail when nothing else is. It's just very obvious it's the writer inserting their own fetish appeal, rather than being written to make sense for the characters.

None of this stopped me from enjoying the game though, I just thought it was worth mentioning in a review if like me you'd prefer to skip those particular scenes. But if that's a thing you're into, then I hope you enjoy!

Overall, it's extremely impressive to hear that this game was made in 2 months and I'd love to play any future games by this developer!

Sad waste of an interesting premise...
Despite being so short it was a slog to get through. Spends way too long on an absolute jerk of a protagonist blabbering on about blempyblomp trade sanctions in flimbleflorp, and then actual plot events get one sentence. Within three text boxes I'd remarried my wife, spent months with her then found out she became evil entirely offscreen.
THEN IT JUST ENDS
Then you have (I kid you not) go play new game plus in a heckin kinetic novel. Play through the same unchanging choiceless story again, because the skip button doesn't work. Now, for no logical reason, saving an unrelated person's life at the start of the game means your wife reveals her evilness earlier, and you can get the good ending. Which is just one sentence that you married the angel instead, and had a child.
At no point in the game does your protagonist ever remember he had children with the other wife in his other life, or express any concern he just retconned them out of existance for someone else. Happy unresolved questions, and to all a good night!

What other game lets you chug vinegar for 5 hours? Thank you for validating my terrible life choices.

That alone is worth the price of admission, but also the whole plot involving Arthur made me Extremely Emotions and he is absolutely the democratically elected Best Boy
Appreciate robot wizard today!

Absolutely loved it! I befriended a sad grandpa by throwing leeks at him for three weeks straight

This game is SO GOOD I really don't have many other multiplayer rpg experiences to play with friends. We've already kinda exhausted all the robust content in this thing, and had loads of fun adventures! I kinda wish there was mod support so we could add our own custom stories and lengthen out the replay value. I just think there's a lot of potential in this engine being used for other things, there really aren't many competing games in this specific genre. Most online co-op rpgs are like MMORPGs, where its a not very story focused thing thats all about grinding and partying with strangers. I like this style of co-op cos its really just like playing a normal RPG with your friends! Literally the only story-focused RPG i've ever found that let you play that story with your friends was the obscurely hidden and badly implimented couch co-op mode in Final Fantasy 9. The steam port missed a big opportunity to add an online mode, so Moon Hunters is still my friend group's number 1 game for tabletop-esque shenanigans~!
Once we got the weird luck to keep getting different pig-related events all in one session, and got absurdly attatched to the holy orchard pig friend we found along the way. And the event about the singing old man and the smitten merman king was really surpisingly cute!

Description and screenshots don't give a full impression of the game- it's a 'lolicon' dating simulator with lots of panty shots, sexual scenes and stuff that scirts on the borderline of being classified as 'nudity' by technicality alone.
The 'all-ages version' censorship patch is incorrectly named, this is very much not suitable for under 18s. The 'censorship' literally just whites out the screen during sex scenes, making them dialogue only. (With full voiceacting!) And it does nothing to remove gigantic cameltoe scenes or bare chests on these seemingly-underage characters.
I have nothing against people who enjoy that sort of game, but I'm asexual and this was a horrible surprise! Don't waste your money if you're expecting something like Recettear instead of Huniepop.