Signed and Sealed with a Kiss is Reine Works's fifth visual novel in Steam, featuring a customizable character with raising sim elements. In the story, the protagonist receives a mysterious package containing a Beta Boyfriend from Reine Works. With no option to return the boyfriend, the protagonist is forced to allow the boyfriend to stay at his/her/their house and get to know each other better.
Game trailer on YouTube by Reine Works
As with Reine Works's other games, they tend to have good artwork and decent amount of sprites and CGs. There are four routes altogether at the time of this review (Bad Boy, Base Boyfriend, Flirt, and Prince) with a good ending and one to three bad endings in each route. The game has a helpful summary to explain how the raising sim aspect works, and the developer has made a post in the Steam forums to help players with the stat management and also how to obtain most of the game endings and achievements.
A free uncensored DLC is also available in Steam for players to download with the additional option to toggle adult content on and off at the beginning of the game.
Unfortunately, this game suffers from a major drawback where each route is very short, and the character development in their relationship is too rushed with little connection between the scripted events and random events that pop up over the course of the boyfriend's route. Although there are differences in the storyline and dialogue depending on the player's choices, they are not compelling enough to start a new game with a different main character and boyfriend route outside of getting certain achievements specific for that route. The Base Boyfriend route has some promise in shedding light on the boyfriend's past and previous owner which could have made the story more interesting, but it wasn't expanded enough.
After spending a little over 5 hours to read through the text and dialogue and complete all achievements, I have mixed feelings with Signed and Sealed with a Kiss. The script length, artwork, background music, normal Steam profile features, and developer support for the game and its players are good enough for me to write a review for this game. However, the rushed pacing and non-compelling narrative caused me to mostly speedread through the story where I focused more on obtaining Steam achievements. Therefore, I struggle to recommend this game unless it is at discount to be more proportional to the playing time or if the additional routes in an upcoming DLC have a more interesting storyline.
Initial gameplay video with author narration and commentary on YouTube by Brian's Sandbox
Nutaku game page (Website may contain NSFW content)
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