Broken City

Editorial Meh

Broken City is an ambitious crime-drama VN with solid character writing and genuinely engaged developer feedback, but it's tangled in a design contradiction that's already dividing its audience. The core issue: the game promises a challenging "absolute harem" ending while simultaneously warning that rejecting or neglecting a love interest will show her moving on with other men—a setup that feels like NTR-adjacent punishment for player choice, not organic consequence. The developer insists this won't be forced, but the wording ("atm no LI have sex with other men") has set off alarms among players who came for monogamous or true-harem routes. Separately, the build is rough: variable bugs (dialogue saying MC refused money when he accepted), broken choice branches that lock players out of scenes with no indication, and code structure the dev himself admits is "meh." Community praise focuses on the writing, character potential, and the MC not being a pushover; criticism centers on route confusion, character design (some find several LIs unattractive or "flat"), and whether the game's actual design matches its marketing. Early enough that patches fix real bugs, but the design philosophy underneath remains unclear and controversial.