Red String Club has a lot of intersting ideas it touches on, both regarding characters, themes, an the world it's trying to build. The problem is that each of these are quickly churned through in favor of pushing forward a plot that's less interesting than almost every other aspect of the game. While most pieces of media try to cover 1 or 2 thoughtfully, Red Strings club breezes through about a dozen in it's 3-4 hour runtime. Sometimes it bringing some interesting new ideas/approaches to cyberpunk, but the majority times feeling like it's running through an unedited checklist of things the game wants to cover. The core game mechanic of serving drinks to customers to alter their emotional states & influence conversations is interesting, and works as a pretty solid puzzle-y mechanic that does a good job of making you heavily engage while doing it. This only represents about 1/3 of the interactive game, the other 2/3's are much less interesting and easily fall into the "try everything with everything" method of tackling puzzles to determine what the devs want from you. Talking about game mechanics of a visual novel would be irrelevant if the writing & story was spot on. At the end of the day though, this game is a complete mixed bag. People range from being comlpex characters with multiple competing internal priorities, to talking points for what the authors wanted to say about the topic of the minute. Some of the dialog as a results ends up being incredibly unnatural feeling to the world, enough to draw you completely out of the experience.
Really can only recommend if you're desperate for a strategy game and can find nothing else. The combat is sub-par compared to most games (cover mechanics that only apply to ~10% of in-game objects is mind boggling), but the worst part was they were working for paid DLC while there are still many game-stopping bugs in it.
