Cyanotype Daydream is a fantastic and beautiful visual novel, with a fascinating story, fantastic music, a gorgeous artstyle and wonderful characters.
I also really like how the UI and setting of the first three acts corresponds to the respective first three visual novels from Laplacian. With that, this VN kind of feels like the culmination of what Laplacian has put out until this point.
So overall, this VN truly was a great experience and, in my opinion, definitely the best VN from Laplacian so far.

I think Cyanotype Daydream is good... but with A LOT of asterisks.

On a technical (I guess what some might call "objective") level it's pretty solid with likable, developed characters especially around the main protagonist and the main love interest of each of the 4 linear romance stories. The way everything is tied together, especially the setting, is pretty cool.

CASE 1 through 3 are generally above average pacing wise for unique interesting love stories. All of them plus CASE 0 are interesting tragedies that are in some ways an improvement over many popular emotional nakige. Unlike titles by KEY, Cyanotype doesn't go too hard on being overly melodramatic to try to make the reader cry, with better proper buildup on having the characters' emotional scenes be more authentic and less "anime-like".

While all the main heroines are interesting, Yonagi is pretty easily the standout, but it's admittedly unfair since she by far has the most amount of screentime. But when the "genki nice girl" can be popular even to people who don't like that archetype shows what happens when, once again, emotions are more authentic instead of just trying to be a bunch of anime archetype checkboxes.

So where do all these "asterisks" come from to 'only' give this supposed masterpiece a 7/10? I'll use literal asterisks to explain:

- Two of the cases having age gap romances made those stories more uncomfortable AND predictable, and therefore less personally enjoyable. It's especially bad with CASE-1 with a 30 Year age gap, and it got WORSE when you realize the context of it in CASE-0.
- Some of the humor (what little there is) was pretty lame and repetitive. No, a femboy asking people to touch his weewee, a busty woman "femdom slapping" you and calling you a slave, and a 30+ year old woman calling people candy, peaches, and bitches isn't funnier the more you use the joke.
- While I did mentioned Yonagi is the standout character her personality sadly got slowly shafted to be more and more of a plot device so it made her not as great as I'd hoped.
- While I did mention it didn't fall into the trap of other nakige of being overly melodramatic... many times the emotional moments didn't hit as hard as they could have? Many times my reaction was more "oh that's interesting" instead of... feels.
-- So while the characters' emotions I said are authentic, sometimes the emotional scenes end a lot quicker than I was expecting despite all the buildup.
-- Similarly a lot of the emotional scenes don't hit for me since... a lot of the scenes were told through narration and monologues instead of... character dialogue. When all the main protags are not voice acted that also hurts.
- Speaking of the writer Ono Wasabi relies too often on pace-breaking monologues, narration, and exposition in general. You have interesting characters, why not do the worldbuilding more though show over tell, instead of paragraphs of boring lifeless narration?
- It's especially bad with a character called Asama in CASE-0. Any time he wanted to do his long sci-fi 'lessons' I wanted to be like Michael Scott from The Office (US) and yell "AAAAAhhh I'm gonnna KMS!!"

It's unfortunate, I wanted to consider this a masterpiece like many do. It does a lot of unique things, has likable and/or interesting and authentic main characters, actually properly explains "nakige magic" in its own sci-fi way so the latter twists don't feel cheap, and overall has a solid message.

It's just too much of the actual storytelling techniques annoyed me enough to only consider this a "fine" VN but nothing great. Still something I'd recommend but I would have include all the caveats I mentioned above.

On a meta note, I think Ono and Laplacian got a little too much of a rush and arrogance trying to go all-ages as a company after this 1 title did pretty well. They should probably make another masterpiece title before trying to be the next modern KEY.