I mean looking at the first test versions he did have what it takes. This was a case of a co-dev influencing the vision too much and making the game more "marketable" than what it otherwise would have been by being a niche design.
Gonna hold back on my usual anti-corporate spiel right here and how it corrupts art in the worst ways but I'm just gonna voice my immense disappointment and absorb the inspiration left behind for my own designs, hawhawhawhaw >
As soon as they added jumping to the game I started getting worried.
I think Zell hates programming so he's making a lot of concessions to Answerer.
Answerer is a guy that doesn't really like monstrous designs which is why Succubus Affection's girls are very humanoid for the most part.
He's also a guy that leans more into the male dominant side of things which is why Succubus Affection's design leans in to that aspect of capturing girls.
It reminds me of ROBF.
The illustrator for that and the programmer are different sexually. When the ROBF programmer went on his own, he made a maledom traditional rape game with FeMC. Illustrator drew what he usually draws.
The thing is tho, that in the case of ROBF the programmer had full say over the game's core design.
When Zell has ideas on a design level he's able to incorporate the femdom element in the game design. Stuff like the mummy in FOBS where you literally can't escape if you don't do an esoteric puzzle correctly, or the shadow portal demon, or the roach girl pits.
I commented on their ci-en before the twitter post and this is what I got.
So yeah, it seems the change happened when the project became a team project.
And we have extremely humanoid maid characters, and an "unknown" that's basically just a succubus.
Unknowns in FOBS were the creepy things that you couldn't define as monster girls really. The Red thing that walked and forced you into doggystyle for instance, and the mummy too since you never see under the bandages.
So it's pretty clear that Answerer is affecting the game's vision.
Zell is capitulating too easily.
Though it's also true that Zell had no defined vision for the game. In one of SnY's early blogposts on Ci-En there was a question of... "what type of game will SnY be?" Asked by Answerer to Zell. All Zell could do was make vague gestures to other horror games like Clocktower and such. It seems like he never had a firm plan for
how the game would play. He only had an idea for
how it would feel. He's just attracted to the aesthetics of horror and didn't realize that.
Kredyn's Drain Mansion, and Castle of Temptation are carrying the torch he originally lit tho. What's got me most concerned about all this is that the more dependent Zell gets on Answerer on a development standpoint, the less Zell we'll see in his works. Obviously Zell's nature won't disappear, but I personally don't want a mix of Zell and Answerer. I don't agree with Answerer sexually for the most part. Even though Zell goes too far sometimes(for my tastes) with actual hideous girls or Vore, I'd much prefer the game feels more like him than Answerer.