The Restless Sheep & The Lone Wolf -A Tale of Cutthroat Lovers- Steam Charts & Stats

So... this is a difficult one. Throughout playing this game, I ranted to my friends about this that or the other thing. This is marketed as a 'dark' story, and maybe I'm simply desensitized by both my reading habits and my own hobbyist writing, but the only thing terribly 'dark' is the sex scenes, which unlock with The Patch. God, the sex scenes. Okay, one thing at a time. The main narrative writing is fine. There's some typos, some weird sentence structures (either the translators are not native English speakers or they forgot to refine some lines after machine translation or something. Either way, I find myself falling back on my good ol' "Hire a goddamn proofreader what is wrong with you I'd do it for free if it meant you'd stop doing this to me"), but for the most part the bulk of the story has some decent enough writing. Which is the point. The CGs are good. The main character, "Me," is so hilariously damaged I want to put him under a microscope and then vivisect him. I can't figure out if I want him to get hit by a truck or go to therapy. This is a good thing. The characters in general are pretty decent enough. They're not good people, but the handful that feature prominently are interesting, and I would probably kill a man for Azami so I guess it's all a moot point anyway. It's a decent enough story that's difficult to talk about without spoiling it, but I did enjoy the narrative presented to me, even if I thought some plot threads could and should have been handled better. The voice acting is good, too, if a little overwrought at times. I'd argue the [i]lovers[/i] part of "cutthroat lovers" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though. The main couple, "Me" and Azami, are really only romantic in Azami's head, with some hints otherwise throughout. "Me" is a bad boyfriend. Like, a really bad boyfriend. That's fine, storywise, I just felt the need to emphasize that if you're looking for a romantic story, this isn't one. Not really. Now. My main complaint is the sex. The kinks are what's dark here, really. Yeah, there's Triad and yakuza nonsense going on, technically (which you will forget about, probably), but the kinks are definitely what they're referring to. The story is otherwise pretty basic, outside of the plot MacGuffin. If you're not into dubcon/noncon, don't bother with the game's sexual content. That's what most of the scenes are (with one guro scene). Honestly, I'm actually disappointed, because when you launch the game, the first thing it asks if you want to filter the scat content. I think that shows up... once. Twice if I'm being charitable. Three times if I'm reaching for any reference to feces at all. (Lists of the kinks contained within are mentioned in the other reviews, but I found them to ultimately be incomplete. Unfortunately, I don't have the energy or inclination to make my own list. I guess if you really want to know, message me or something, but let's be real, no one is reading this review.) I am not a Puritan. You do you. I downloaded the patch of my own free will expecting to see sexual content. I'm not exactly a monk myself. [i]However[/i], there are two main points of contention I have with the sexual content. One: frequency. They happen... I dunno. Every ten minutes, it feels. I had to take breaks because they happen so often that I literally had to go stare at a wall and question what I was doing with my life. (I will elaborate in point two why this was necessary.) We would get POV shifts just to watch more sex. And again, the CGs are well done, the art is good, fake people can't be hurt, all that good stuff. But it just happens waaaay too often. It becomes pointless. I only kept reading through them instead of trying to skip because god forbid a hint of plot leak in. There's maybe... a handful of sex scenes I would call plot important. There's about forty of them in this game. Help me, good Samaritan, help me in my time of need. Two: it's bad sex. The music that plays for most of them is typical, the sound effects are terrible, yada yada, but the writing immediately tanks the moment people's clothes start coming off. It's not even laughably bad. It's not funny to watch. It's just [i]bad[/i]. If you want good dark erotica, please, for the love of god, just go to AO3 or something. Find an indie author who posts snippets on their socials. I don't know, but there are better options. This combined with the former is why I had to go question my life choices. My ability to handle erotica this bad has a cooldown these days, I guess. I'd love to review what the game is like without the patch, but the story isn't really a rereadable experience to me right now. Maybe I'm still traumatized. I'm just going to assume the majority of the sexual content isn't in the game out of the box. Basically, TL;DR, I recommend the game [i]without[/i] The Patch™, and maybe on sale. Unfortunately, if you want to access the CG Gallery (which I think is also the only way to access dev commentary once you 100% the game), you will need to install the patch. Also when you click on anything in the main menu it plays a bitcrunched gunshot sound effect that's worse than the one in [i]Shadow the Hedgehog (2005)[/i] and that isn't relevant to anything but I need someone, anyone, other than my friends to know this. It's the best. It's stupid. I love it.