I've written a review for this game over and over in my head, which (oddly) is kind of how the game plays!
TLDR: The game has promise. It's not developed enough for detailed long play, though the engine would allow you to play it for hours upon hours. It gets repetitive in how it approaches all the interesting bits. It has a defensive play style so far, at least I haven't found an offensive component yet. It's also fairly formula at this point, but I expect further development to flesh it out more completely.
Okay, so the normal 'in development' routine is to have a game that starts out with an initial drop of game and develops more story as it goes. This isn't that kind of game. This game is built around a turn-based engine that seems to let you play basically forever. It does this through a turn 'cycle' of events and choices that let you develop your harem of ladies to defend you and your citadel. If you love games with a sense of 'building' and repetition, this is your kind of game. If you don't like that, you aren't going to have a lot of fun here.
The engine is somewhat bare-bones but fully functional here. It needs about 5-6 times the development on the random event texts and far more random events. Get used to that word... random. RNG is the backbone of the game. It literally creates the girls off a template of constrained random stats/descriptions. This makes the girls very boilerplate. Once you figure out how to deal with them (their personalities are RNG based initially and that affects the RNG turn effects, if you get a pain in the ass girl, she somewhat stays that way), all the girls are the same to work with. They don't have any true individuality and your actions with them don't seem to have much of an overall impact on them. Yeah, you can screw up and they become less devoted to you, but that's really about it. They can be super devoted to you one moment but some RNG 'oops' and they can call kind of turn on you so there are some critical dice rolls as you progress in the story.
Where the game seriously needs some TLC is the sexual aspects of it. This area is literally scripted so tight that it's the same for every woman and your choices of how to go about it are fairly limited. This section is one of the areas where there IS NO RNG, so beyond a few text cue changes, it's very vanilla. I like vanilla, but other options are not available at this time... at all! My suggestion to
NovusOperandi is to re-do this area entirely. Choices in sexual situations need to be based on some active involvement in the action, like the real thing. Your writing should tell the story of what your partner is feeling, or what she needs/wants. The choices on what to do next should include those things along what she wants with maybe an opposite thing to stymy/frustrate/surprise her; something that leads her down a different path she may not have explored yet. Those kinds of 'choices' where they are context sensitive (to use a User Interface term) not only force you to write better, they force the player to READ better or pay the price (Seeds of Chaos is a good example, screw up there and it can kill you!). The idea is, successful sexual encounters should really improve a given supplicants devotion, and a bad encounter should drop it almost as much. People like it when you think about them, as the MC you are their GOD... you need to act like one - for good or bad (yes, this side of being a God should also be in the game to attract those with darker tastes.) Also, the inspect option needs to have full sexual encounters possible, just waiting for a sex event is random and not taking advantage of the whole 'week' of engagement with your ladies. Strive for Power does sex text encounters very well and has a similar vibe to it, look into that to stir your inspiration, especially along the time tracking line, you do have a full week!
Story-wise the game has significant issues at the moment. It's got a decent main structure to the story and I've played it for a good 4-5 hours now. My issues with the story are that as the MC, you actually have very little control over things and your own personal intervention in day to day life around the Citadel is non-existent. You are a God moving your chess pieces around but you are always on the defensive. You can't control your own Citadel, you can't make offensive actions (YET, anyway. After 4 hours you'd think you could do something on the offense!) and worst of all, you don't have any impact on the story. Your job is to build up your defenses and wait for each 'wave' of story to attack your Citadel. If you script this out on a whiteboard, it's very loopy and not many loops with not many story interactions.
You have freaking time travel and portal use at your fingertips and all you can do is wait for the enemy to come and bug you? Where are the spies, your courtesans should be actively looking for the influence of the enemy in the time stream (ala Star Trek: "Enterprise" style) your knights should be putting down 'Anvil' attacks (if you don't know the reference, play the game dammit!) in the time stream. As you get stronger, the enemy should be more and more afraid of you, making mistakes that could lead you to directly attack their Citadels. This is how games work, you get reward if you risk it, nobody likes to play turtle forever- no matter how strong the turtle.
All in all, I'm being a bit harsh on an early version of a game, my apologies, but there is considerable possibility here in the game it could be a classic much like CoC and TiTs. It needs a lot of work but is very playable at this early stage... more so than most early release games, because the main engine is there and ready to take you quite a way down the path. The problem is the scenery is somewhat random and bland at this point, but that's easy enough to fix. I'll watch and play this one.
