Okay, I gave it a shot. People here compared it to Disco Elysium, but it's more of a clone of Princess Maker.
It shares the same core gameplay. Each month you pick one action, either learning some skill, working some job (for social credit, because the commune believes that capitalism is evil) or going on an expeditions. These actions also increase your stress level, and once you hit the cap you need to rest to be able to do things again. You can also talk with characters and collect respawning consumables in the tiny village without ending the month. So a lot of the focus in the game is trying to figure out how to max as many of your stats as you can in an efficient way.
The challenges are resolved using the card game, where you try to to maximize the value of your played cards to meet the challenge value. Aside from the values on the card, you get extra points for poker-esque card combinations: Having multiples of the same value, multiples of the same color, or have a straight (a series of increasing/decreasing values). You can also use consumables to influence the state of the board, some items let you draw extra cards, or increase the value of the cards or change their color.
The card minigame sucks, and it sucks hard. You'll be going through hundreds of these minigames (usually at least one per day, and can go as high as 20 during expeditions and the game has 100+ days). I have literally never lost a single one of these challenges and had to use consumables only a few times, ending up with hundreds of them. You have a choice to remove the card minigame and replace it with a rng roll based on your character's skills. But then you end up sometimes failing, so I stuck to playing the annoying card game.
The setting is exactly what it says on the tin. You are a teenager living in a commune colony, which departed from Earth to be free from evils of tyrrany, capitalism, meat eating, industrialism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, cultural divisions, cultural appropriation, supremacy thinking and religion. Now, you are free to colonize the new planet under the fascist regime. You can either join it, try to overthrow it or become an ecoterrorist among other things.
The important characters are the typical free thinkers, liberated from the systems of oppression typical on Earth, able to freely express their gender and sexuality. As are you, the player. Your gender and sex are two separate sliders that you can adjust freely at every point in the game. The colorful cast includes the classical archetypes of a burly farmer, tomboy, weirdo quiet guy, caring girl next door, tough soldier guy as well as wannabe transhumanist intelligence-supremacist, animu nonbinary fanperson and a furry, most of which seem open to the idea of polygamy or noncommittal relationships. Strangely enough, though, your parents are a straight couple in a committed relationship who decided to have a child in an old fashioned way of gene exchange.
The game has a fair share of choices and consequences, while the card minigame challenges usually don't matter because of their trivial difficulty, many events and decisions are locked behind skill requirements, event flags, narrow and arbitrary restrictions or relationship requirements, so you probably won't see a good chunk of content and will see many variations of events playing out depending on what you do decide to do, so there is a significant replay value. The game does in fact, encourage you to replay it, through the use of its mechanics, but I honestly couldn't be bothered. The gameplay feels tedious in about the same way Princess Maker did, but maybe it's enjoyable if you like the genre.
I can't say I enjoyed the character writing (most of the characters are just the walking stereotypes and you can tell where their character is going after a single conversation) and their development is so completely devoid of any twists or unexpected elements that I found it hard to care about them, but the storyline felt pretty engaging with good pacing. There's a good mix of mystery, action, impactful moments and quiet scenes, as well as a good balance between long and short term goals and objectives. There's always something interesting happening or about to happen.
I didn't enjoy the game personally, but I could see someone more attuned to the setting and gameplay systems liking it a lot. The gameplay of card battles works really badly and eats a lot of time and I wish it got removed. Expeditions are another thing that takes too long and feels too tedious, as much as exploration even sometimes feels fun. There are multiple endings, and the game seems to account for a decent chunk of your actions when determining what happens and your end career (again, Princess Maker stuff), but they are mostly all ending on a negative note - and the good (golden) ending is a walkthrough bait, but that's also something typical in the genre, so what do I know.
Not a game I'd recommend, but I can see where people see the appeal.
