HTML - A Life Lived [v0.65] [ZennyDarkstar]

v0.65

I played this for 2 hours. Not a single sex scene happened in that time.

I cheated the money and stats, because the game is absurdly grindy for no good reason, and the controls are among the worst I've ever seen: clicking picture after picture, where half of the pictures look the same.

After not seeing anything worthy after so long, I checked the files and there isn't anything there: just a collection of softcore pictures and one showing a single breast.

I'm sorry for whomever can call this "a life lived", because it's anything but.

Don't waste your time here.

General Review
This is a Game more than it is Porn.... so the expectation here is that you have to put in effort to increase stats for progression with plot. It can feel grindy or not depending on what do you expect out of the game.

Pros: The game is pretty solid as far as foundation is concerned. The characters are varied and its interesting to follow the journeys of each of the characters depending on the playstyle you want and the storyline might change for the character.....

Cons: The Might I used is might... because of the nature of the game, none of the storylines have been completed for any of the characters, thus you can feel like the reward is not worth the effort as you might not get the satisfaction of the effort you put into increasing your stats or not.

Since this game is still in Progress and not yet done, as long as its not abandoned and the updates are frequent, I am positive that at the end of the day the game with its good system and vision would result in a great game with varying Fetishes for many different people. I just hope the promise of the game is delivered and the progress could be faster.

The review might change as the game gets closer to release either increase on decrease in rating so for now Its comfortably good.

While this game is obviously in progress and still being polished. It has a great foundation so far and ZennyDarkstar is extremely active on the forum constantly replying to the forum and is actively developing the game with plenty of updates. There is a huge cast of NPCs that have huge potential to be developed. Looking forward to the M/M content and also can't wait to see the creator continue to tweak stats and add more questlines.

No sex scene's, hours of grinding. The game consist of images & shorts, that dont involve actual sex. The closest you can get too it, is by watching porn on the laptop. I dont recommend anyone playing this to be honest

Review is for v0.55p
There is so much good, and so much bad about this game it makes it very difficult to rate accurately.
Overall the games vision and behind the scenes aspects appear to be stellar. The shear amount of things that you will be able to do by the end is going to be crazy.
Now for the bad. First off, the game feels REALLY empty right now. The characters are all their, but other than just speaking to them, there isn't anything to do with most of them. The quest txt and hints option should automatically go to easy when you start the game, if not you have very little idea what to do in the game. Maybe later, once things are fleshed out, it can be put back on hard, but there isn't enough to do right now.
Second, the game is exceptionally grindy right now. It appears that most of the sexy content doesn't start until the MC has Corruption +50, which can easily take 50+ in game days if you don't know what you are doing.
Third, the interface appears to be homebrewed, and it could use some work. The overall aspects of it work, but some QOL updates for it would be amazing. I'm constantly going to the wrong place because the buttons moved around on me when I went from one area to another. Framing buttons with different colors based on location, and if things changed, could help with this, or you could just overlay the location name on the button so you know exactly where you are going.
Lasty, something that is kind of tied into the first issue, I would love to see a more robust questing system, that implemented a slew of smaller and easier quests to increase the MC Corruption and other stats. There's already a couple of these throughout, but if most of the characters had some instead of just a couple, it would make the early game grind feel a lot better.
Overall, a pretty good start that could use some polish to become great, but a little too much grinding and not enough to do to fill in the down time really brings it down.

Well. It's... ok? As stated, there's a grind. The description describes it as 'hard', which, it isn't hard. It just takes a long time.

Which is fine, those sorts of games have their place and I often enjoy them. The real issue, I think, is that at the end of all that grind there ultimately really isn't all that much content. There's a huge big framework laid down right now, and a vast amount of work between you and content. So you put the time in to get there and you do and... not much is there, most characters are dead ends, It takes a bunch of mindless clicking to get what is there.

Idk. It could be good, and maybe with a few more months of work it will be. But right now it's not worth the effort. Grind needs to be rewarded, if you're going to implement it.

tl;dr, Grindy and boring.

It's a shame, I feel like if I had another 5 years of interest in me, this game might get to a point that I'd enjoy it, but it's just not there.

The basic gameplay is incredibly grindy (as has been pointed out multiple times) and uninspiring. Clicking through multiple screens (even with the shortcuts provided for school and the local shop) to get anywhere and popping back and forth between places.. it's just tedious and dull. There's nothing quite like grinding out the same picture/scene 15 times to get to a point where you can go inside someone's house and then be forced into content you might not enjoy so you can complete another quest that requires yet more grinding out... you get the picture.

I didn't find any of the content that I did manage to unlock particularly interesting and I don't care to play it any further to find out if I was wrong as I've already wasted enough of my life.

My suggestion : Come back in 5 years.

Sad to say the grind its too much.
Story wise i cant get to see much.
Tried a phew times but some how i manage to mess up and didn't get to any good parts if there are any.
Being unable to cheat a little stats and money to make the game run faster the grind is just too much clicking and nothing more.

The game in its current state is worth 1 star on my review list.

So many bugs, missing quest items, missions that have very little information, finding the right time/day is tiresome, Grind is insane. I like the idea / design, but it is just too much hassle to play.

The game seems optimised for an old 15 inch TFT monitor and as such just presents VERY poorly.

The interface is not intuitive at all with far too many rooms and clicking to get to any destination and no real logic behind why there is so much clutter. I can JUST about look past that as the premise has promise.....

BUT the saves are stored in browser cache!!! Seriously? Why is there no option to save to local file? This is billy basics for HTML based games and completely unforgiveable - I'm also pretty bitter about losing 2 hours of play through because my browser updated and cleared the cache when it done so. This is the one immediate thing you can do to significantly improve your game and give anyone a chance at recommending it, until then this is firmly on the avoid at all costs list.

I like the idea and I can guess at what the dev wants to do, the problem is there is no content and we can't even be sure if a game loop will ever exist.

It's probably easier to work on putting in tons of rooms/cells or whatever than to actually write dialogue and put in content/scenes. But having things take many clicks and areas be empty save a lone picture that does nothing doesn't a game make.

There are enough rooms, there are enough characters, the stats are defined. Now start putting in actual content. I would even say hide most of the areas until you can fill them. Consider it more a headstart to the future than actual content today. If you don't have a dialogue tree and conversation for a character, then they aren't ready to be in the game. if a place doesn't have things to do, it's not ready to be in the game. If you're not sure what your gameplay loop is, then you're not actually ready for an 0.2 release let alone 0.45.

Start small and then add, don't start huge and empty, because you run into the problem of not adding anything or it always looking and feeling that it lacks content and progress, which will drive away players.

Try to appeal to players to want to play your game because it's fun, rather than trying to tell players they need to play your game to prove how smart they are to you. Especially since the player's definition of intelligence is unlikely to be randomly clicking around to find some random trigger.

honestly I gave it a 2 because it could have femdom. if not for that it's a 1. this game is near unplayable. idk if it's bugged or stuff doesn't work right. for instance library quest doesn't seem to care how many books I read etc. also way too much grind on other parts. maybe once someone has a clear walk-through that isn't that pos journal and all the femdom routes are made it will be playable.

This game is great and has a lot of potential

The following comments about Grindy are not true. This game is not Grindy at all. In fact, anyone who knows the mechanics of the game knows how to play the game and And for him it is not Grindi at all
But for those who do not know the mechanics of the game, it is a grindy

Writing: very strong and logical, that is, it feels completely different, as if the characters are completely alive

Models: There are a lot of models, at least 80% of the models have a very attractive appearance

The Sexual videos were selected and placed very logically and professionally, which means that they help the feeling of being real.

The atmosphere is great and original

Great and original story and relationship oriented

Its sandbox atmosphere is original and contains an element of diversity

The logic of the game seems very strong

Most of the personalities are attractive

ETC

Something no one seems to mention in their reviews which is a glaringly obvious problem is that this game is 4 pictures away from requiring the "no sexual content" tag. There is a few boring glory hole HJ scenes the classic generic pron on the laptop trope and that is it. No character has a sexual interaction? As of right now this game doesn't meet any threshold to even be on this site.

To echo some other reviews a bit, the grind is just boring. The UI is painful, the quest helper has "hints" that don't work. Its to reliant on meeting a hiding "like threshold" with characters to get anywhere and if you aren't at the "like threshold" when you interact with them to soon it gives you minus "like points" and that can put you back 20 minutes.

Skip this game completely until there is a reason to even play it.

I very much liked the game even at this early phase and started to support the dev for a couple of reasons. It's really open-world, so you get many liberties to follow your own paths - perv, sub, dom, family, school mates, friends or whatever. There are a few missions that give you some structure but there is no main path limiting you. It has serious progression - not like many other real-porn stuff.... uh, you catched me in the shower, okay go ahead and fuck my ass, baby boy. It has on purpose a vintage look and feel which is kinda nice for me even if I had to search for the best TFT resolution first. The dev has filled the environment with enough interactions even at this very early stage to not get easily bored. Of course it's still just v0.3 release and I can't wait to see what 0.10 will look like, so I understand there's quite a broad range of feedback. However, at the very least this is one game to keep a close eye on which clearly stands out from the many, many, oh so many real-porn poor Vine hacks.

The game is a non-standrad school type grinder fest. Interface is not intuitive, but playable. Saves are stored in browser cache, which means if you delete it, saves will be gone too. Game is not optimized for hi-res monitors. I played for an hour and I still have not understood what is the point of the game. Just go to school and talk to people (x100 times).
I see this game fixed if:
1. Grind is lowered by half
2. Interface is more intuitive (so far it has buttons everywhere, often one action happens in upper left, next one in lower right.
3. Optimize for hi-res monitors
4. introduce a story, not just grind, grind, get 10 str, 20 char, etc. There are thousands of such games already and everybody cheats, because they are boring.
5. add some music
6. add a save/load system, regardless of how rudimentary it is.
7. Set a final goal for MC.

This is a really promising start, and it's worth playing if you enjoy the grind (which I do). It's what a sandbox game is about - think "Girl Life" - if you could just click and advance through sex scenes, it would be a different kind of game.

Although not all have content implemented so far, the sheer amount of characters makes for an enticing prospect. There's over 50 NPCs and they're "real NPCs" that will have their own story arcs and quests, not some RNG characters created on the fly for sim-dating. Looks like this game will have depth. I hope the author will also add a main character story of sorts, adding even more depth to the sandbox feature.

The GUI is built from scratch, still needs a bit of getting used to and maybe some polish will make it even more intuitive and require less clicking - but it's tidy and displays all the relevant content.

There's a journal with mouse-over hints that are easy to miss at the moment, perhaps because the mouse-over effect takes a little while longer to kick-in than what should make it obvious. A faster response would be great, as well as some explicit in-game mention of how it works - overcoming that, it's a great "classic" RPG system that suggests that this game won't be requiring an external walkthrough if you want to make sure you're not missing content that might interest you.

The author is very responsive to comments here, hence my five stars - I hope their enthusiasm endures!

Interesting start, but very tedious at the moment and poor design involving a lot of clicking around. Warning (which insanely is nowhere in the game): there is no "are you sure?" verification for the create button, and misclicking on it will completely erase any and all progress you've made (load will do the same, but only to your last save). It's not playable until that at least is fixed. If it is and I care enough to play the grind again from the beginning, I'll update the rating.