Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator

Looks like a newgrounds game to me very 2016 or 2018ish

Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator is more or less a visual novel/E-book, although it's punctuated by mindless minigames and lightweight RPG stats that really don't make much difference, if any, to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure outcomes in this badly written book. There's enough elements of gameplay I suppose you could call this a game, but that's hardly deserved, because the focus here is on, you guessed it, reading really badly written text.

So, there's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.

We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. My gaming rig is not a Kindle. And even if it was, I'd read decent books instead of this. We all know that when someone wants to be an author but isn't good enough, yet insists on trying, Steam E-books/Visual Novels are where they turn their efforts to. After all, if they could write professionally, they'd be published authors instead of having to self publish their garbage books for $100 through Steam Direct.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.

For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Studio Namaapa has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Mirror's Edge" or "Rust". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator has the almost unethical price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Ten bucks for something that barely qualifies as a game. The public library is free, you know, and so is Project Gutenberg.

For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Mirror's Edge" or "Rust". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

One of the best

on Windows 11, the black screen (before the opening movie) will cause the OS to lock up

I can't deny I spent a lot of time here and enjoyed the game quite a lot.

Initially.

Unfortunately quite a lot of that enjoyment was the anticipation of various possibilities awaiting.
I'll spoil it for you: this game has pretty much no replayability whatsoever.
You can reach all that matters in one run and already in that run you will experience how ridiculously tedious the activities get.

Add to that a mediocre ui, horribly inefficient game engine and the worst control system since Gothic 1 and here we are.
Usually for a game like this the redeeming parts would be various endings, interesting conversations, flavour text depending on the choices you made...

Endings sadly are nothing special and you have to sit through unskippable end scenes and endtitles almost 20 times to complete all of them. Conversations vary very little and of course there is no "skip unread" option. Instead there's a ton of unskippable transitions and extremely slow animations.
Oh, flavour text? You can sit in military for a year and then you'll still get a conversation where the main heroine states she has no inkling about what's happening in military.

A great game with a nice story and an interesting cast of characters for all that like raising sims and stat-raiser.

My only complaint is the length of a playthrough, with my first having been around 20 hours.

writing and worldbuilding is decent but the gameplay itself is slow and painfully boring

While I understand this is an indie game, it is not without its flaws.
I'll start with the positives:
-Addictive gameplay: Another reviewer wrote about this and I would reiterate that it's very easy to get stuck in a loop of just doing one more week. A week can take as little as like 30 seconds, so you won't feel as guilty for the 'one more time' mentality as in some other games.
-You get your moneys worth. I spent 27 hours with this game and only spent £9.

Onto the negatives:
-While it's easy to get stuck in the 'one more time' loop, that doesn't mean the experience is fun. I got to year 2 or 3, and I thought 'oh god, I've got to do this for another 8 years.' It's a real slog to get through this game and I did frequently end up skipping dialogue if it didn't directly affect the overarching plot.
-A lot of the characters are boring, or annoying. And I get that Ciel is a child so why would the adults tell her anything, but when no one reveals anything for years, it really starts to grate. One of the characters turns up near the beginning of the game, in year one, and is oh-so mysterious for the next 7 years, then refers to us as a specific word (spoilers so I won't say the word) and then doesn't explain what they mean by that for another 2 YEARS. By the time she has her big reveal, I just don't care anymore- and even worse, the reveal is just like two lines. But it's the same with all the adult characters; they say "oh you're too young to be told about this" so everything is left until the last minute. If you're going to drip-feed plot, actually drip-feed us ANYTHING.
-The mini-game is really boring. Maybe it was super easy for me because I heavily leaned into military as a career path, but near the end of the game, if the goal was 'survive' I could not press any buttons and still win.
-Career paths- this one is more of a nitpick, but some of the things you had to unlock to progress your career path were convoluted and I really needed a guide to help me, or at least forewarning that I'm going to need certain things unlocked by the time I get to chapter 3. I didn't finish my career path because once I got to chapter 3, to advance in military, I needed x stat at level 7, which meant I needed to go back and unlock y job, which meant I need z stat at level 5 etc etc. It was just really frustrating to find out that, to unlock the highest path in Military, I needed to do a certain amount of dancing.

Therefore, I cannot recommend this game, unless you like being frustrated!

Its a good game for killing time with a good amount of features.

Pros: you get a gameplay experience that isnt short and with lots to do
You get a daughter

Cons: long gameplay makes the game almost tedious at times
The father (player) seems more arbitrary and would be better if there were father and daughter minigames.

I really wanted to like this game. It seemed right up my alley for time management and stat management. However, this game is all over the place. Here are the areas that didn't work for me:

1) The narrative tried to jam a whole bunch of things together where the sum was less than its parts. The reveal of Eli just left me going, "...but why?"

2) The narrative and the game play had zero relationship. You could have literally done nothing but sleep the entire game and I don't see how that would have impacted the overall narrative. There were no points in the story that checked your INT or STR or whatever to impact the narrative.

Because of this, I spent the entire game wondering what was I supposed to be doing and dreading the fact that I had 2 years left on the game play. The game play only impacted what profession Ciel is in the credits

3) Even if you're good with the complete separation of narrative with game play, the implementation of the game play was frustrating. Like other players have commented, you don't see what you need in future steps of the path, resulting in wasted time and anger when it's finally revealed what you need. I went along the military route only to find at the end I needed to take Hairdressing and Classical Music to eventual get activities that gave you Medical and Charisma (and yes Hairdressing is the one that you needed to unlock Medical - go figure)

4) The mini game was frustrating because there would be random mouse inputs that would not be recognized. It also got very old very fast (keep clicking three of the same colors and if you need to, match combos you need to execute technicals aka special moves)

5) I don't know what to do with half of the items that I received. There were some items that you could eat for stat gains once you learned cooking. However, there were other items that noted it could be used for tailors or craftsmen, but didn't have a similar line to "culinary mastery required". However, other items clearly noted that they weren't useful and sold for high amounts. Sooooo what were these other items for?

6) During the second chapter, you're supposed to clear out the bosses of certain dungeons. Could not figure out how to unlock the last tier - they automatically unlocked in chapter 3, but by then you miss out on the goals since it needed you to clear out before the end of chapter 2

7) Buying items require you to spend a day shopping - which can ONLY be done on day 7 which is also the ONLY day you can do "fun" activities / socialize. So even if you want to do stuff to balance your mood / discipline / stress, all of them can only be done on day 7 except for sleeping

8) You can't see what a shop sells until you click into it, which wouldn't be a problem except that you can only shop at 3 shops before the game says time's up

9) There's no place in the UI that I could find where you could see exactly how far along you were in a friend's social meter - just the overall level. You also had to leave the calendar UI and go back to the focus tree in the status menu to find the level instead of just having it in the calendar UI like you have the stats

10) Affection is super critical to the game - moreso than the actual stat raising. It's pretty much the only thing that has any impact on narrative so would recommend just getting Ciel a job and spoiling her the entire time so that her affection is maxed. I got the worst possible ending (which was actually not catastrophic) because I focused primarily on stat raising. I'm kinda curious about what the other ends may be, but not enough to actually sit through a new game+

11) Also if you're wondering what a new game+ includes because it's not mentioned anywhere, you keep your items - which would've been nice to know before I sold them all at the end in a fit of boredom

Honestly, I'd recommend playing Long Live the Queen, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, or The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante.

Recommend game. It hooked me for some time.

The story is great, and some of it are based on popular sci-fi works.
Game consists of few elements: a Visual Nover, an RPG and a management.
Most of the things in game are quite logical.
It is quite emotional.
I was able to grow lidl Youmu :)

As a con it may be a bit artificially slowed down to extend playtime, but with enough grind and a little help from Community Hub Forum I was able to complete it in 2 days.
Would be nice if this game had some kind of wiki, as it is quite... maybe not complicated but overwhelming with mechanics and choices, where it's often not explicitely stated how it may change your playthrough.
In this game, there are, for a moment, 23 endings.
Well, I would say that it's unlikely I'm replaying this game up to 22 times, (maybe with cheats) but i still consider it a masterpiece.
Now for developer, I'm not saying your next title, if any, would need to have just one ending and be linear, however idk what to recommend...

And thank you!

It's a game with many issues, but It's still great.
The story of Ciel takes place in a distant future.
A girl is found, she doesn't remember anything.
But she obviously needs a parent, she is young.
And so the officials place her into your custody.
Your job is to take care of her for next 10 years.
One full on playthrough takes roughly 25 hours.
You manage the weekly schedule of stuff to do.
There's actually many activities to choose from.
And also many career choices. Which is perfect.
It's quite enjoyable, for the most part, but yeah.
A lot of crashing, a lot of glitches, a lot of bugs.
Certain dialogues felt unnatural, that's not gud.
I think some awful translation might be at fault.
The eventual ending feels a bit underwhelming.
Sure, there is many different endings to be had.
Maybe some of those are much better, I dunno.
All I know is: The ending I got was rather rough.
I didn't do the new game+, It's time consuming.
One playthrough feels like enough, It is so long.
Most of the activities do feel like a chore, sadly.
But I do like the combat system, It's mostly fun.
I especially love the Earth's surface exploration.
But yeah, It's a slog to get through, I enjoyed it.
Despite all them technical issues, I just had fun.
Could it be better? Yes, absolutely! But oh well.
I think It is a decent game, with a decent story.
Still ways better than most visual novels today.
I just wish it was a bit more polished, bug-free.
Definitely have to give it a positive review, tho.

All right, finished the game on one runthrough, don't think I'll have the patience to do another. There's some feedback I have, since it looks like Studio Naampa is working on a sequel:

-First off, the schedule, which has a whole bunch of issues. Detailed information on each activity should be provided somewhere for the player, because a lot more planning is required in this game due to the chapter stat caps and labyrinthine unlock requirements for a whole plethora of activities. I want to know the numerical costs/benefits of the activity in question beyond just stamina and credits (so discipline, stress, mood), and the expected gains in stats before modifiers. It's very disappointing to assume that a one-gain activity like, say, teaching which does scholastic, actually gives less scholastic than going to university which is a four-gain activity when the reverse is true in other multiple activities that target the same stat.

-Other parts of the schedule make no sense, such as adding skills where they would be obsolete in and of themselves: a good example of this is geometry class, which raises logic despite it requiring 5 logic to unlock and being unable to raise logic past 5. What's the point of that?

-There being no spillover xp from one skill level to another -- why? Skill xp up to the level is lost, and the next level starts from 0. What reason is there for this?

-The labyrinthine web of requirements for unlocking activities, followed by the chapter stat caps make for extreme minmax playing. I understand the concern during dev that you didn't want Ciel to get too strong too quickly, but the side effect of all this is that players going in blind without a guide will simply waste a lot of time getting up that one skill which can only be acquired by a multiple-gain activity which already has been maxed out. The focus tree benchmarks for level 5 and 10 encourage maxing out skills ASAP, only to discover later on that it means wasting gains down the line.

-Minigames. they're fun the first, third, fifth times. After that, they become a bore when all the player wants to do is to grind, and yet skipping them isn't an option because, well, grind. After the player proves that they can reliably complete the minigame (maybe 3-5 consecutive wins), just let them have an auto-success because it's clear that it's just busywork at that point.

-Storyline: it's fine for the most part. Not amazingly stellar or moving, but it does what it needs to. There are several minor points which make me go "why?", though -- some of the character changes in the adult characters feel forced and there to be "there", like Zhara and Amira cutting their hair short and Juno growing a beard. Not everyone needs to update or have a change, in these instances it felt forced just to keep up with everyone, since apparently there's no deeper meaning behind the cosmetic makeovers.

-Becky's story really feels out of place and incoherent with the setting. The tired "muh parents want me to be a laaady" trope which is more than sixty years old in popular speculative fiction aside, the world of Ciel Fledge is presented as one where people don't think twice about women in roles and professions that we would consider masculine (Amira, Nieve). It really felt rushed to me, as if the storywriter was phoning it in and just picked out a stock character plotline off the shelf.

-Exploration. Oh, exploration. Just about painfully useless. Adventure in PM-esque games is the high-risk, high reward task, and yet exploration is painfully and awfully unrewarding in Ciel Fledge. The stat gain isn't amazingly stellar, monetary reward is middling at best (from enemy drops), and worst of all, you don't build skills, which is the main bottleneck to advancement. There's no way to cancel exploration midway, there's no spillover for extra days, and any items you can find really just don't cut it.

Comparing this to adventure in PM games - huge gold gains, special events, powerful items which can't be found anywhere else and have effects that aren't mirrored. The most Ciel can find in her exploration is just a bunch of items that she doesn't need anyway, and even the creature meats are of limited use because, again, the main roadblock to progress is skills, not stats which cap out well before.

Exploration feels weak and any time spent on doing it wasted. I only did it where mandatory in the story and never bothered with it again because it was just a straight-up loss.

-There are two skill raising items for str, img and spi, but only one for int and cha. What's up with that?

***

I don't begrudge the money spent on the game, it was entertaining enough for the price tag and satisfies the need to grind. However, as pointed out, it has numerous weaknesses that make me unwilling to take advantage of the new game +, because honestly it feels too tedious. The lack of transparency when it comes to activities coupled with the chapter caps makes it feel like the devs are intentionally trying to trap the player into wasting time on their daily schedule, the repetitive minigames which just waste the player's time after they've demonstrated competency...

Other raising sim games can get away with just an approximation on their activities, but Ciel Fledge can't because it has these caps and requirements.

The game punishes players for poor planning, then refuses to give players the information they need to make that planning; I would consider that the core problem of the game that leads to frustration. Ultimately, the poor execution of ideas means I can't honestly recommend this. Play Lullaby Days instead if you want a similar experience with shorter runs.

This is a stat-crunching game that is reminiscent of Princess Maker 2, however, I wasn't impressed with the first hour of play. The writing was not good. The tutorials felt like a chore, and there weren't very many interesting parenting decisions.

Oh boy. I was rooting for this game even tried the demo some time ago but the result was just "meh" like really just that.
EVERYTHING is slow like for real it took me ten hours to finish one playthrough and by the end I was just skipping everything and told myself "get me to the end already".
The characters are so boring that I found myself skipping every dialog that was not part of the main story.
But the main problem here for me is how lifeless I found this world. That just it lifeless.
Also a particular "defeat" make me rage quit.
So in the end it was a nice idea poorly executed.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get this game to work. The game will not support any mouse input. Spoke with devs, but they were unable to replicate the error. I hope it will be fixed in the future, because I would really like to play this game.

I think this game is a lot better than I thought.

Some good perspective
1. it is burden less. There isn't too much complicated events triggering, plenty time to play casually without pursuit.
2. plenty option to manage things
3. I really like the green color theme and character design



Problem for the game is mostly in the combat mechanism.
1. it is confusing by having too many useless visuals.
2. it is supppppeeerr laggy. I have no idea how did the dev managed to make a simply candy crush like gimmick so laggy.
3. stun lock -- I think dev run out of way of design interesting experience so they just went with 'lol you cant do anything unless your NPC friends clear the enemies'

Not the best child raising game, I'd still put the princess maker series ahead of this (at least if you started on a good translation and know how they work). But a decent enough take, lots of options and directions for you to go and with a few halfway decent twists. It does have a few problems thought. Not the most exciting visually (although I thought it had a cute enough style), takes a little long to get started and also feels a little too drawn out in general. Also has a nasty habit of occasionally springing events on you that you should IN STORY know are coming and be able to prepare for, more than once I had to reload an earlier save because I was too low on stamina when an event finally came around.

More than decent enough for it's price point though. Recommended at full price if you like the genre and figure you need a new one of these. Recommended when it's in the 20% off range if you're not usually a fan of one of these or want to try one out for the first time.

Have you ever played princess maker and wanted a longer, more fleshed out version of it, maybe with more story and cutscenes?

Then this is the game for you. Absolutely love it and really wish it was more widely known than it is, because it's an absolute jewel of a game. Cute animation, and fun game mechanics. Only thing I didn't like too much is there was a lot of lag during the fight sequences, other than that it's a fantastic game with tons of replay value.

I really wish Steam had a 'neutral' option here, because I feel really neutral on this game, but I'm ultimately going to not recommend it. I think this game has a lot of promise, but it's not executed very well. The game can't decide if it wants to go the route of Princess Maker or be more like a VN. It's like a real hybrid of the two, but they don't mix well together.

First off, this game is long, but I feel it's due to the grinding. Princess Maker 5 had this problem too, cept it was only 8 years and this game has 10. I feel like this game could've been easily condensed into 8 years. Even with 5 times the speed, the game still moved too slow and had way too many dialogues interrupting game play (Mostly every time you did a new job or schooling, you'd get a dialogue, and if you hit a certain stat with it, there's another dialogue).

The mini games, while creative at first, get really repetitive as the game moves on to the point where you want to skip them all together, because you just want to get to the end of the game at this point, extra skills be damned (The last year, I skipped every mini game cause I just wanted to get to the end, at that point). Also, the way stats are distributed in this game are off balance (Crafting and Grooming, for example, only have really one or two activities to grind them, so you can lock yourself out of paths or you have to go back and spam lower level education/jobs to raise it to move onto the next level).

I feel like the game can be a bit too easy as well, I ended my first run at all S ranks and almost all my stats were at 1200 by the time I was finished. There is no real reason to have your daughter anything but Spartan, mostly because it gives her more stat/skill gains. I heard going spoiled lowers her stats, but who would do that??

Exploration is really good for leveling stats very quickly and the items you get can be sold for a lot of credits, or if you unlock a certain skill, you can raise stats that way too. It became way too easy if you went a more 'stamina' build and took the right characters to the surface (Seriously, one character was one shotting everything when their turn came up and their turn came up very quickly).

Your daughter has no real personality, which is disappointing. Depending on how you raise your daughter, her personality should change or what field you go down or what skills she earns should change her personality.

The one positive I'll say is that the main story itself was good and some of the side characters were interesting and charming. But I feel like the end I got from the main story didn't really tie everything together well, and it was a disappointing conclusion (Ciel's true orgin don't really resolve either).

All in all, this game has promising ideas, but I think they should've ditched the Simulation aspect and made more of in the veins of a visual novel. Or instead, do it like PM2 and make the schedule monthly instead of weakly.

I really like the idea here. The music and art are cool too. And there seems to be hints of an interesting story, and world. But it's all rolled out to you way too slow. It almost felt like grinding, trying to get to the next bit of story. I didn't complete a playthrough before I felt it got too tedious.

Great game for people who liked Princess Maker 2 or any other life-simulation games! The devs are responsive to feedback and questions as well.

Just as a warning: it is EXTREMELY anime. NOT anime as in Princess Maker 2's "would you like to date your underage daughter and maybe give her some breast expansion pills ho ho ho????" but very anime as in "we live on a flying city one thousand years in the future in our eternal war against the Kaiju aliens who threaten to destroy us and yet somehow our aesthetic is entirely 1980's Japanese suburbs"

Still lots of fun tho

Great idea, but flawed execution.

The mini games need their timers doubled at the very least.
Your special attack is suppose to freeze timers but never does.
Your shuffle attack is supposed to give you new cards but you will always have between 1-5 seconds left when you finally get it doesn't matter and cannot make any difference, enjoy the defeat screen.
The forward and backward keys keep changing. You are constantly swapping between different sets of okay, cancel, left & right that you'll trip over your own fingers, the controls need to be simplified.
Abilities don't trigger when you activate them and you can waste 10 - 20 seconds mashing the combination before anything registers.

No matter what you do you'll lose the mini games 2/3's through the game, either get used to seeing:

Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose
Defeat - You lose

Or set the game to skip all the all battles you can.

Next even if you train nothing but strength, endurance and stamina allies you will run out of stamina and fainting every exploration after the third event. Then the game locks these stats from growing and throws you into hunt events that you cannot win because of these capped stats.

A game like this should be fun and relaxing, not a hassle and battle against bad mini games, untested timers, stat caps and bad UI.

I love this game. I've been searching for a Raising Sim ala Princess Maker for years, but none of the games I tried had quite the same charm and fun. The game is very reminiscent of the PM games while still being original and bringing new ideas to the table. The translation is also so, so much better than the official release of the PM games. The gameplay is actually more difficult, although I see that as a plus; in PM it was so easy to raise a god-like daughter that you would have to purposefully handicap yourself to receive anything but the best endings. In this game, reaching the best actually looks like a challenge, which is something I enjoy. Plus if you ever get stuck, the developers are currently running a thread in the discussions where they have personally offered to help players with tips and advice!

I would recommend this game to anyone looking for a fun, challenging game with high replayability.