I partially agree with you, however, you need to know with what yardstick of perversity you measure other people's actions.
One of the most interesting aspects for me in the story so far is that the protagonists are in that Sodom and Gomorrah for relatively noble reasons, however, for them to achieve these goals, they have to become corrupted. This dichotomy is where much of the eroticism lies in my opinion. Knowing that they (especially Rose) can cross a point where there is no return, a level where they accept the lust that exists within them.
In short, I believe that the developers are gradually creating the circumstances for the story to become darker, they are simply in no rush to get to that moment. You need to have a concise narrative to reach the climax. Making a cinephile comparison: you first have to go through the Von trier level to reach the Gaspar Noé level of sluttiness and desolation.
I will add to this: you need the "lighthearted" moments to set a baseline for the "darker" moments to have impact. Wall-to-wall misery in a narrative is often just spectacle, and is honestly, not the kind of story I want to present.
And, as I've learned from my career as a coomer, one man's darkness is another man's quaint vanilla shit, and that will just keep going until you reach the bottom of the barrel of what humans masturbate to. Like what do people even want? Anything nonconsensual is off the table. The game is, at its core, the character's walking headfirst into corruption. No one's going to get forced to marry a pig, get their dicked chopped off, or turned into an Asagian meat cube. This scenario's edge comes from character's hopes being being dashed, their circumstances being exploited, and the unwitting compromising of their sense of self. Context is king, and in my opinion, pointing to a woman getting dunked in water as an example of "darkness" is some surface level shit.
Maybe someone asked this before... so sorry about that in advance.
But 7 months (!) for just one day ingame?
Calculating this up for a minimum of 4 weeks (Ch4Up4 = day 16, wednesday) means another 12 days... and so another 12 years? Or over 2 years for next 4 days?
Don't misunderstand me... this game is top notch and I love it!
Getting "the day" with my favorite Felicia in this update was just marvelous!
But... another 12 years?
Or 2-3 years until next carnation?
Ähm...
Not every day of the in-game calendar is made equal. In theory, the next update is going to be two days, and we're hoping will be done in less time than this update. Time will tell how that bears out, but it is also an inside joke between GIL and I that we'll be finished in 2030 - in a haha, "oh god please no" way. So hey, maybe you're not too far off the mark.
We do both want to make another game after this, but I look at it this way: if this is, for whatever reason, the
one VN I get to work on in my life, no corners shall be cut and the ending will not be rushed. I don't mean that in a perfectionist sort of way, because we make compromises all the time, but because the enjoyment of our day-to-day work is tied to aspects that simply take time. Like yeah, GIL could reuse the same handful of images for every conversation and cut the image count down by a third, but why even play ball at that point? GIL enjoys crafting life-like sequences, and so that's what he does. For us, enjoying the process is just as essential as being satisfied with the end result.
Copium.
