Ledgerbound

I bought Ledgerbound to be an insurance adjuster and only learned that it was smutty after HR violated like 10,000 rules in less than a minute, so that was an experience. Moving past that fun surprise, the whole thing was a real mixed bag, mostly a mix of different kinds of bad, making this a solid Do Not Recommend. The voice acting was really good, some of the best I've heard in a game...ever. The artwork is also really well-done across the board. Portraits, chibi combat avatars, backgrounds, everything! I’m a big fan of the save system and being made to live with my choices but they kind of undermined that ethos by adding in battle replays and bonus objectives. Without forewarning or crazy luck, there are many levels where you have to replay a battle because a mid-battle surprise made an objective impossible. They should’ve committed to living with your choices or to being smutty tactical breach wizards, straddling the middle did not work. Items in Ledgerbound are an absolute mess, so many of them read like they were designed for a completely different game. A plurality of items had conditionals based on characters or a combination of characters with specific attributes (male/female, human, specific element) being adjacent to each other. This is not that kind of game. At no point did I ever need to position characters near each other outside of healing, and the bonus stats were certainly not worth the wasted turns getting characters lined up. This is checkers, not chess and definitely not smutty tactical breach wizards. Many of the items had descriptions that were unclear, like a buff when attacking characters that pay taxes. I don't know what that means. There's no information on character sheets (or anywhere else) about paying taxes. Same goes for shareholders being pleased. One of the four "swag" item slots always had items with stats for physical damage characters and another always had items for magic characters, so there was a whole lot of equipping useless items for secondary stats that was really just grating. Switching items around costs "time" when you're in camp that adds up a lot when you're juggling 8 characters with 4 slots each and 50-60+ swag items, so getting a neat new item is completely ruined by the loss of a quarter of your camp time shuffling swag around. You get items by winning tickets in battles that let you roll the dice on a loot box (really really annoying and big thumbs down for loot box mechanics). The loot box mechanic has minimum quality levels based on how many tickets you've gotten, but the last three or four levels are just crossed out when you get to Executive (I think that's what it was called), and the next level requires 999 tickets, which don't exist. Makes it seem like they cut content sloppily, and it is annoying to find out if you were saving tickets for higher levels. On top of that, there's a second set of items called liabilities that seem like they were developed in a vacuum, so they've got no connection to swag or the loot boxes. Liabilities grant you...abilities...ha...ha...On a character's "liabilities" tab there's a stat that has some level of insurance "coverage," and two different categories of item slots (separate from swag). The slots are supposed to be separate for liabilities that are passive or active, but none of that is actually correctly labeled (see the latest patch notes where they acknowledge this issue), so it's just a meaningless mishmash. Each liability costs some amount of your coverage to equip. You get additional slots and coverage by "bonding" with your team. You get liabilities from game progression, "bonding" with your team, and one of the dumbest design choices yet: In battles, there are apparently random bits of background scenery that are actually clickable zones where you can pick up extra tickets (inexplicably labeled as treasure) or liabilities not available anywhere else. Like I said earlier, this isn't that kind of game. It's checkers not chess. Battles move too fast to be spending time browsing the field to pick up hidden items. Swag and liability management was an absolute chaotic mess that you have to ignore because you're here for smut or white knuckle your way through because you’re here to deny a family’s life insurance claim. Lots of little things that kind of flag to me this wasn't made to be a game, it was made to be a vehicle for a CYOA smut novel: - In the liabilities tab, if you have open slots and you equip liabilities, it just keeps replacing items in the first slot instead of adding them to the open slots. - In the swag and liabilities tabs, if another character is wearing an item and you want your current character to wear it, when you click the item it de-equips the item from the other character and then scrolls back up to the top of the item list, so you have to scroll back down to equip it to your current character. - When you complete the game and exit the credits the main menu is blank. - There’s no exit to main menu option. - If you exit the game mid conversation you return to camp and can’t talk to that character again so it’s not clear if you just missed out on those character flags, or they all went one way or another…or what. - No information anywhere about how and when you get coverage increases or additional slots, just random based on bonding. You can only reset turns or the battle on replays so if you blow an objective early it’s an annoyed rush or death march then annoyed clicking through dialogue before you can try again, - The objectives and turn management UI during battles shrinks to a ludicrously small size that is unreadable. I shirt you not I pulled out my phone magnifier app to read battle objectives. Just really silly, roll-your-eyes dumb UX issues that should've been caught on day one of play-testing. Content-wise, I'm not a huge fan of furry art but they dressed it up with in-universe lore so it was (mostly) ok. Team members include a ragged man with a bag of rats that I imagine was supposed to be a caricature of an unhoused man, and a suicidal sub. I was not at all amused by the caricature or the suicide jokes, which included an item created when the team is trying to get the suicidal sub to kill themselves because they're annoying.