Ren'Py - Completed - A Loving Family [Ep. 1] [Mr. Taboo]

A boring, poorly written story is the root problem here. Everything else wouldn't feel so bad if the story wasn't so dull.

The story is, as I said poorly written, not just in terms of the text and flow, but the structure and grammar too. I first thought this was written by a non-native English speaker, due to the often non-sensical grammar, the way it jumps around without making sense and the short sentence structure you often see from people using translation tools. Also, removing the menu option to skip unread text is just a d**k move that it even more painful and even more boring. If this is your best shot, you're not a good enough writer to force people to wade through such turgid prose.

The animations are ok, in that they are no worse than a lot of other poor animations in adult VNs these days, but they don't add much.

The 3 option choices feel kinda dumb, because often two or more of the choices don't really relate to the words written just before or after them.

One of the few 'games' that I just have zero interest in coming back to .

Sorry but I pass.
Too static and slow.
Nothing happening after several minutes playing the game.
And songs make me loose my focus over (lots of) text to read.
P.S. : so boring to have to reach 200 characters in reviews
So I have to keep writing just to reach that amount.

In a single sentance, " Not worth your time, try another game"
Most of the scenes and senerios are portrayed through words but if you are into reading then you will still find it boring as hell because the writing is lame as fuck. I downloaded the game because of the good character models and the incest tag, but it turns out to be stepcest. Normally it doesn't bother me but in this case you can see that they look the same, they are clearly blood related yet the story tells me they are step family. It infuriated me even more when I find out that it's a sandbox game yet you can't interact with the characters as much as a sandbox should. The home layout and ui is so bad and small, I could not figure out any good reason for this game to be a sandbox. The only good thing about this game is the lack of any significant bugs

People are right here. MC is just a man whore who doesn't care if He has to rape someone to get them to have sex. I don't like games where the characters are just pasted on the screen in some fake movement.

V.complete

the "L" plates are on for this dev

a quick throw together artistically, so the visuals are not great. static images pasted onto scenery causing constant screen flicker. as basic as it gets.
sex scenes are described not shown. imagery is weak with this one...

there is free=roam but it is completely stupid. you can only activate content in a single order so why this was added to the design is anyone's guess. it adds nothing beyond pointlessness. a poor attempt to hide the linear nature of the content.

the premise is run-of-the-mill and not well delivered. take a screenshot of the latest updates page and turn it into a poster, pop it on your wall and throw a few darts at it, there you have found something that matches pretty much all this offers.

the writing......oh em gee.
the MC is a twat and the other characters are cut and paste cliche.
this writer is not old enough for the content, which is in abundant evidence.
dialogue is early-teen angst in maturity and does not improve and quickly becomes mind-numbingly irritating to read.

i hit an error in the free-roam section by just clicking where it shows to click so not the best coding either. the dev also actively removed the skip function so more evidence of not being the sharpest tool in the shed.

i recommend buying two bits of raw liver and warming them on a radiator before using them to masturbate. you will undoubtably get way more pleasure and not lose as much wasted time.

use chilli sauce if you feel adventurous

The good
- girls are attractive
thats it

The bad
-dialog is flat and corny doesn't match the scene and often forgets what it said one scene prior
-MC is a douche for no reason and border line sped
-animations are extremely short loops with no change or orgasm
-the plot is too simple dad dies go home inherit money fuck his family
-the sandbox is small and adds nothing layout is poorly done
-no skip unseen text to power though the shit story for lewds

Review for A Loving Family Episode 1:

Overall: 2/5 - If want to punish yourself with boredom for a couple of hours, this game is for you.

Story: 2/5 - It's unoriginal and it's boring. The MC is a douchebag. There are several WTFs: e.g., one of the MC's father's will conditions was for the MC to help bathe his stepmother and stepsisters. Was this conceived by a 14-year-old?

Writing: 2/5 - No human thought was put into the writing. The MC's thoughts and dialogue and flashbacks frequently contradict each other. I would almost bet it was written by AI.

Renders: 2/5 - This has to be the cheapest rendering job I've ever seen. During every scene, all characters are displayed as sprites against a blurred background. Each character sprite has only 1 pose for the entire game. There are a couple of different clothing outfits for different scenes plus the sprite can have the mouth open or closed (to indicate when that character is talking or not). The first 2 preview pics in the first post of the discussion thread are what 99.9% of the game looks like. There are less than 50 unique renders in the entire game that are mostly used during lewd scenes. The female models are pretty, at least.

Animations: 3/5 - Animations are very infrequent (around 15 in the entire game). There is only one or occasionally two animations per lewd scene (the 2nd animation is always re-used from a previous scene with the same girl). The animation quality is OK. Loops are short, but motion is fairly smooth, although somewhat unnatural.

Content: 1/5 - There's not much actual content here. Scenes are boring because they repeat the same renders over and over and over... They mostly flip between 2 renders for dozens or even hundreds of lines of dialogue/narration. The text is always describing something that isn't happening in the renders. This game should have the [text-based] tag. The only exception is the lewd scenes which sometimes have 3 or 4 unique renders and one or two animations. It's pure laziness.
Additionally, the quality of lewd scenes is very low. Most of them scenes are the same sprites that show the MC and girl as sprites standing next to each other in the same pose used in the rest of the game, except they're naked. Some scenes have 3 or 4 unique renders, but the text describes the sex scene. Poor visuals. Very short scenes. Poor buildup. Not erotic.

Sound: 2/5 - The music alternates between lullabies and wannabe rap.

Gameplay: 1/5 - As if everything else wasn't bad enough, the gameplay is terrible.

• Most gameplay is visual-novel style choices, but they're so poorly written you have to guess what effect they might have. Many times, choices that look the best end up being the worst in terms of the subsequent dialogue. Sometimes, it feels like the choices only allow you to choose between being an asshole, a douchebag, or a dick. Honestly, though, I would be surprised if the choices have any impact on the story at all, since no effort was put into anything else in the game.
• Other gameplay includes free-roaming where players find a character in the house, click on them and start a scene. The free-roam navigation is tedious because the arrows to navigate between rooms are hidden until you hover over them.
• Many of the standard Ren'py settings are disabled, most notably "skip unseen text" and "skip transitions". I guess the goal is to torture you by forcing you to read the lifeless writing. Get ready to spam your left mouse button, spacebar, or Enter key.

Bugs: 4/5 - The only bugs were very minor. I found a few places where the MC's thoughts were shown as spoken dialogue. There were also a couple of places where I saw some encoded strings in the middle of a sentence of dialogue.