VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Alive [v1.0] [CSkin Games]

Good solid plot. Maybe the story feels a bit rushed, but just a little bit, it's absolutely bearable.

Well written characters with their own personalities, each with their flaws and perks, including MC. You actually believe them, feel for them.

Also I really appreciate good music in a games, and music here is really good, suits the story very well.


In general, I liked the game, it has high replay-ability (at the very least 7 endings), mini-games kinda actually added some charm to the game as well, I liked it too, characters are loveable. The game also provokes you on different emotions as well, which in my perspective means - it's done well.

Pretty decent for a first time Dev.

Obviously heavily influenced by another AVN that shall not be named. This one has more sex and less emotional trauma, so I might actually like it better.
Sex scenes need erotic sounds and better/varied animations, also could stand to be longer, but they are not terrible.
Girls look nice, and writing is passable.

If dev can step up his lewd scene skills, and polish his writing a bit, his next game could be great.

Tis decent enough of a game.

But it's a pick your ending kind of game.

The girls are okayish.

The one that left you cold turkey zero explanation +context leaves, has a perfect boyfriend who proposes before she remembers and feel like shit for what she did. Then she comes back and I guess you can have her. . . though it still felt like zero context was provided. Not that I was going to playthrough again to see that for sure.

You can have your best friend's girl if you don't tell him how much she's holding back. Though he first catches you. Then get's shot and conveniently looses his memory. This path leads to loosing the LI that made this possible though. She gets shot and dies.
No bueno,

The horse inseminator girls is not a horse inseminator but she's weird and crazy. She'll get with your bestfriend if you end up with his girl. If not you seem to have a non-commital ending with her.

You can marry the tall chick. Not that I would ever recommend starting a serious relationship that involves anything longer than regular half weeks away from each other let alone months. But that's your ending so neither of you cheat on each other yet.

You can be surprised with the very open, maybe promiscuous neon blue haired chick. She pops the question and I don't think anybody expected that. But that's there.

Then the girl that apparently has to die for you to end up with your best friend's girl. She has an ending to. And for some reason, the most perfect girl doesn't have a proposal. Just your mc saying "she's the one."

Games like these remind me why I prefer harem or pass game.

Edit: Oh yeah! I do not recommend

Any 1 star rating is just insane and wrong.

This game is a really good story with some great characters and no downsides to it,.

My reviews hardly go into story since i hate spoilers but i have played a lot of games on this site and i can say for certain this game is a solid 4/5 star game.

I did play with the mod to see all scenes.

I wish the game had at least one more ending with a certain character surviving and with you getting to be with the red head.

Story. 8.5/10
Characters. 9/10
Sex. 7.5/10 Animated scenes are a plus and some anal.
Renders/art. 8/10

TL;DR: It's an interesting game with likable characters, with lots of work put into it and overall good quality.

If you don't like 5-star reviews, excuse me, but there's nothing to justify giving this less than 5 stars.

Let me correct Sherm29 with their 1-star review. If you don't approach Nikki in the cafe, you'll have an option to not enter her house after the date. (Even if you acted perfectly during the date). And anyway there's an option to end the night with her by going home to meet Stacey. Afterwards, you can choose to date Mary (or Erin, for that matter) which will end your romantic relationship with Nikki. So everything you have to "suffer" is one date (with one of the most gorgeous women in this game).

+/-

Perhaps this is the only drawback: choosing branches can be a bit complicated a few times. However you can easily choose to end up with Mary or Erin or Nikki or Tonya. I'm not sure about Gabi as I was not interested in her, but you can also have Stacey or Abby (though those two might require some trial and error, or even resorting to walkthroughs or looking into the code).

The renders aren't sharpest but good enough. Most of the sex scenes are nothing special, but not that bad either. And there are some really good (Mary+Stacey).

+

The girls are beautiful. I like Stacey and Nikki the most, but Mary and Erin are quite lovely too. Tonya ain't that bad either.

The story is interesting. The dialogs feel pretty natural, sometimes pleasantly heartwarming or funny.

It might be not a perfect game, but I can recommend it if you like loveable characters and interesting story.

This is not a harem game by any means, if anything it's the exact opposite, which I have no problems with, I really enjoy these sort of games. But I do have a problem with the writer forcing players to go on a date with with such an extremely uninteresting character that the MC had met only once in his life, especially when just a few slides prior it was revealed that a character that MC had known for much longer had a liking to him. Seriously, what the fuck was the writer thinking? It's not only that, it would be understandable if after the date we could chose not to continue things with her, but that's not the case, the only way to not progress on the relationship is if we select all the "wrong"options during the date, basically act like an asshole. Despite that it is still not a very good game, I'd have given it a 3 star regardless but this made me drop it to a 1 star.

Decent game with some good animations/renders and a serviceable story and writing. Nothing special or never seen before but it is good enough. The characters are mostly likeable and consistent, they hardly ever act irrationally or out of character, sometimes you would want the MC to be a bit more assertive but that is an issue that most other VN also have so you just get used to it.
One problem that it has is that you will struggle to get certain specific endings (mostly with the side chicks Stacy, Tonya, Abby, or the bad ending of Mary), as they are not very straightforward and you will need to look at a walkthrough to know what to do, which imo is always a hassle.

How should I put this. This review is solely a rating based on my personal preferences not an objective review of the quality. And thus I did not really like it that much.

Nice animations for sure. But that's about as positive as I am going to get in this one.

Characters. Both models and personalities were an instant turn-off for me. Either psychopaths or used goods on a level that I wouldn't touch with a 5 meter pole if I had a choice. I am obviously not saying that every single female character has to be an untouched virgin. But this is an escapism/fantasy...I don't need a perfect projection of the currect real life moral standards of the tinder generation there. Protagonist was semi ok up to a point where he just let a redhead bitch threaten him without telling her to fuck off. I hate that. Now for the models they were just...so...boring. The same perfect body nothing human just plastic doll that I've seen before. Some variety in pubic hair helped a bit but still...and no real variety in ages on the other hand did not help at all. Great animations wasted on models that just did not do it for me.

Story well...I stopped caring the moment all the characters were introduced and I just kinda skipped till the end.

All in all not a game for me considering what's inside of the package. Outside is great and I really hope that the author makes more games. Quality was great but with characters like that I just couldn't really enjoy it. Not my cup of tea.

Good luck in the future! CSkin Games

So generally speaking, this game is pretty good. The dev is talented and the story is complete. Thankfully it is not a harem or incest game so that alone earned it an extra star.

The good: Decent story with a clear beginning, middle and end. The renders are solid and the scene blocking is pretty good. All the characters seem unique and well written and again, the story is complete.

The not so good: The story... Like so many of these games, it starts off pretty strong, but it soon devolves into a sweet story where everyone is happy. The ending, while complete, just feels like it happens kind of fast. Almost like the dev just wanted to wrap things up.

It's possible this is how the story was planned, as the dev certainly likes sudden transitions. One moment it's night and then next it is morning... but the ending seemed too soon for me. I think there could have been more interactions with the antagonist and maybe a bit more drama with some of the other characters. Instead it all happened in a shoot out. Even the MC says at the end, when talking about how everything was wrapped up neatly, "that's convenient". Yeah. Convenient, sweet and drama free.

I am being a bit hard on this game. I know how hard developing these things are, especially as a one man show, but this could really have been a great VN, but for me, it fell short of the mark. The dev is clearly talented and knows how to put a production together. I am hopeful, as they work towards making this successful on Steam, they make some changes and work to tighten up the story a bit, but just my two cents.

The bottom line is it is worth a download and doesn't take too long to get through.

Great game! The story is not a spectacular epic, but it is tight and well made. It is well paced with no parts feeling like they lack. The characters are interesting and well made. Even though the characters are exaggerated they are still believable. The choices have real consequences, which can be very severe. There are a fair number of endings and they have lots of variation.

Renders aren't the best but they're just fine. It's not that they're low-quality, it's just that everything about it feels kind of awkward.
I actually like the dialogue. I'm not sure why I like it. Maybe that it just feels natural and it seems like some actual thought went into writing.
I haven't played far enough to really see much of the actual story because the mod kind of confused the hell out of me. The game seems like it's leading you to only pick one girl but the mod is basically telling me to go for everyone when I can. Not sure whether that has consequences or it's just a matter of closing paths earlier on.
That's not on the dev but I'd rather redo my saves and come back to it later. It's good enough to keep playing but maybe after some time has passed. I feel like I if I see the same scenes for the 20th time while redoing everything, I'm just going to get burnt out and I want to play this properly.
For a first game, it's not bad. I like it. Looking forward to future games.

Side note: How does his back door work? I mean is there no door? Just a giant hole in the wall that anyone could walk through? How did he even afford such a bitchin' house? Can't imagine him being paid THAT much. Not really an issue I had with the game, I just got kind of distracted by it every time I saw his interior lol.

Good stuff you can disable the minigames.
Now the bad graphically it is outdated if it had come out in 2016 I accept it but today it is very ugly we also have a horrible and predictable story that I really almost fell asleep 3 times now the worst thing and that is decisions with an option or even worse decisions that are useless and that you should only follow the author's default script if not game over.

Pretty good game i gave it a shot because the dev posted in one of the posts i made looking for recommendations and honestly i didn't know what to expect.

Writing 8/10 : Overall its good no misspelling that i noticed i guess its just the beginning makes the story be a little confusing until you play through about half of the game (As v0.4 that is) maybe add a little context or story to it explaining it. But overall pretty good so far.

Renders 9/10 : I did some looking and i am pretty sure this is the devs first AVN if so i have only seen a few other devs with with render quality like this on their first game even if its not his first game they sill are great. Overall awesome renders didn't notice any errors in them.

Animations 8/10 : At first looking at the f95 post for this i didn't think it had animations because the tag is missing (at lease it was at time of review) but to be honest i was pleasantly surprised it has really good animations. There is actually a little boob jiggle in them which i like usually they are stiff and don't move any during animations because what i have seen from other games they like clipping through things during the animations but this dev has done a pretty good job of that so far in all aspects there is only one weird (in my opinion) clipping thing i noticed in them and it was when Stacey was masterbating in the shower it looked like her boob was clipping through her arm. Overall great animations.

Overall this is a pretty good game i look forward to seeing where it leads.

Note for the dev: I do recommend making a new Banner/main menu image as the one it has (as of when i am writing this review) looks a little off to me and it doesn't do the games actual renders justice also I haven't seen a game with a opener like this one before as far as i can remember but to be honest it is a little confusing to me i get that's going to be where the story leads after playing through the game but first starting out you don't know if its a memory or to be honest a dream since the mc gets out of bed right after that but after going back and looking at it i think you tried to explain it but it still was confusing when i first went through it. (could just be me but that's my thoughts on it)

As i have said in my other post/reviews i have done i am sorry if all of that doesn't make much sense i am not the best at making posts like this but i try.

I tried out Alive because the dev asked on the forum why noboby is playing his game. And sure, the basic description of the game and the banner are not exactly highlights and probably nothing that really stands out from the thousands of games available here.

But I tried the game anyway and before I talk about things in detail I can say this: Alive is a perfectly ok game, you can have some good fun with it, some of the writing, and here I mean the banter between the love interests, is really good and fun too. And the basic story is ok, there's some drama here, not so much (yet) on the romance paths, but in the background things are brewing.

So what is the game about? It's mostly a slice of life game. The MC is a jobless programmer, he has enough money saved so that he can do whatever he pleases, at least for now. He is more or less drifting aimlessly through life and you get a feeling that he really needs a good kick, a major change, something that gets him out of his (mild) depression. He is still suffering from a breakup with his ex-girlfriend three years ago. So the MC has some depth to him.
The MC will then meet several potential love interests, it's the usual setup mostly.
An added twist is the glimpse into the future you get in the beginning of the game where the crazy stalker ex-boyfriend of one of the potential love interests threatens everyone with a gun, then you hear how a shot is fired. So the stakes are potentially quite high here.

But the actual game itself is about getting to know the women (and to maybe find a purpose in life again, probably through love and having a meaningful relationship again). There are (so far) three or four major love interests in this game.

Mary - the somewhat shy and really cute blond barista with a wild past, she has a crush on the PC who's been a regular in the coffee shop for a while now. He's been totally oblivious about Mary's crush

Nikki - a photographer who had a difficult time as a child because her parents died and she grew up in foster care

Erin - a really wild child, as the description says, but she's still pretty sweet. As it turns out she's kind of a sister in spirit to Nikki, the two of them both grew up in foster care and knew each other when they were kids, and they were best friends back then but lost contact later. Erin and Nikki reconnect in the game. Erin has the crazy stalker ex-boyfriend who doesn't let her live in peace

Stacey - not yet a love interest, but chances are high the MC may get his chances with her, very intense, somewhat crazy current girlfriend of the MC's best friend. She's a literal nymphomaniac with a crazy sex drive. She's Mary's best friend and she will not take kindly to anyone who breaks her heart, this of course includes the MC. So beware

Tonya - apparently someone you can have sex with several times, however, I chose not to play her route, I only played the Mary, Nikki and Erin routes

The character design in this game is pretty good. All the love interests are attractive in their own unique way. Mary looks sweet and wholesome, Nikki looks super attractive, Erin is a bit wild and has blue hair, but she's cute in her own way, Stacey is a pretty redhead, and she's plain crazy. I haven't encountered Tonya, so I can't say anything about her.

There are no super busty characters in this game, Erin has a smaller chest, everyone else has a decent, but normal chest size, there are no exaggerated body proportions here. I always like that approach, I prefer natural looking characters.
The game mostly uses a POV perspective, sometimes you can see the MC, but his face is almost always mostly obscured, you don't see his face during the sex scenes.

The sex scenes are animated, and they are solid. Nothing extraordinary, but pretty good overall. The sex (at least the sex with Nikki and Erin) is of the wholesome vanilla variety, always a big plus for me, since I absolutely prefer wholesome romances without any wild kinks.
So far there are no sex scenes with Mary or Stacey (the latter has a masturbation scene you can watch). There is a one night stand with a woman from the club and then Tonya who apparently has a few sex scenes.

So while Mary may be more of a slow burn character here (and Stacey may only become available depending on certain choices and much later in the game), Nikki and Erin have both a more or less realistic progression, and since Erin is a bit of a wild one you can even fool around with her pretty early, but maybe don't take advantage of her when she's drunk, this can have negative results.
There is no endless teasing here, no cop outs, ok, Erin will fall asleep the first time the MC wants to have sex with her, and two dates with Nikki are cut short because of circumstances, but the next date goes all in with either Nikki or Erin.
So Alive won't test your patience, it will not insult your intelligence, the women here in this game behave more or less like adults, they know what they want, what they need, they don't need endless handjobs or blowjobs before they are "ready".
Unfortunately Mary's crush on the MC has no explanation in the game and her infatuation is entirely unexplained... but that's the only downside with her really, Mary is otherwise really sweet (and her past is interesting) and I found Mary, Nikki and Erin very likable. Stacey just scares me, which is of course the intention here, it may be fun to pursue her if you want to live very dangerously.

So I think the love interests here are all ok, pretty interesting and there's something for almost everyone here. Only if you want milfs you are out of luck.

What else... Alive is not a harem game. You can try to date several girls, but chances are extremely high it will blow up in your face and end in total disaster.
You have to make a choice pretty early. For example, if you are interested in Erin then you cannot ask out Nikki for a second date, since Erin won't steal Nikki's potential boyfriend away from her, they are best friends (now reconnected). I like that approach and I appreciate the fact that (apparently) the girls are not super easy sharing fanatics like in so many other games and that a love interest will not hurt her best friend by going on a date with the MC behind her back.
I have also not detected any bi-curious tendencies yet. Another thing I appreciate since I think that trope is overused in most VNs.
And finally, if you want to pursue Mary you cannot and should not go out on a second date with Nikki. This can break her heart. You don't want that.

So if you want a carefree "gotta catch 'em all" game, Alive is not it. I do actually appreciate the approach here though, while I can enjoy harem games I think games with meaningful solo routes are generally more rewarding, offering somewhat deeper characters and romances that feel more real and meaningful.

The goal of the game, so far, is to spend a nice weekend at a beach house to celebrate the MC's best friend's birthday.
And the MC will, no matter what you choose, spend his time with three/four major potential love interests there. Mary is invited by Stacey by default, but even if you are on a Mary path the MC will always suggest that Nikki also comes along, for no reason I can really understand, if I were head over heels for Mary I would certainly not invite some other woman to spend time at the beach house... and since Erin is Nikki's sister in spirit Erin will also come along, now that she and Nikki have reconnected.

And that brings us to a few things you may not like.

There is choice in the game. You can choose your favorite love interest here pretty easily. However, sometimes there is no choice at all.

Early in the game you can decide to go to a club or eventually to a bar. If you go to the club you can hook up with some super easy woman (a fling). Or you can deny her and go home alone.
If you go to the bar instead you will meet Tonya and this will result in unskippable sex. I don't like that at all, which is the reason I avoided the Tonya path completely and went to the club instead. Also, I had already decided to go for Mary first (my favorite character so far), but along the way I found that both Nikki and Erin are also worth getting their own playthrough.

And as I mentioned, there is no choice at all when it comes to the guests at the upcoming beach party. Mary, Nikki and Erin will always be there, no matter what path you are on. But I can excuse this since the story apparently requires it. I can live with that, it's nothing that would entirely prevent me from playing the game, but I still find it very odd that someone who is about to fall for Mary would invite other girls to the weekend at the beach house. Makes no sense to me. I feel the story should have found a more compelling reason to invite Nikki & Erin if you are on the Mary path.

Another thing you may dislike are the minigames. However, you can disable them , so they are entirely optional. If you do enable the mini games you get the button mashing variety for stamina and strength stats. Apparently those stats can affect the endings (maybe when you try to wrestle the gun away from the crazy ex-boyfriend?).
On Nikki's path there is a skeet minigame. I tried to win a few times, I failed miserably, but the game lets you skip the game and win by default.
Thus mini game haters don't need to fret, you can ignore them.

As of chapter 4 the game is not too long yet, you can easily play through all the routes in one session (if you use the CTRL key after the first playthrough to only see the unique scenes for each path). There is quite some variation here though and I haven't seen all content, for example I never broke Mary's heart or pursued Mary and Erin at the same time, so you can have some fun here and experiment.

So... who will like this game?
If you like slice of life games with vanilla romance and with solo paths for the handful of potential love interests... then I think Alive can be a pretty fun experience. It will not blow your mind, it's in many ways perfectly average, but also pretty good here and there.
I think the banter between Erin and Nikki is pretty well written for example and all the love interests I have encountered (excluding Tonya) are pretty interesting.
The scenes you get are sweet and also quite sexy (at least with Nikki and Erin), you can do no wrong here if you like games with just one love interest you can choose and if you also prefer wholesome romance.

If you hate to choose between love interests, if you want a more exciting story or some unique twist, if you want a variety of kinks, if you prefer super curvy women or milfs... chances are you may not have much fun here.

Overall I think that Alive does some things a lot better than many other games.
Most major love interests are not sluts, they are also (as far as I can tell) not bi-curious by default, everything is pretty wholesome, and the three main attractions here, Mary, Nikki and Erin are all really likable. Stacey is the super crazy character you may want to pursue if you hate your life and want to die young, but I can see how that too can be fun. She's certainly alluring.
The writing, overall, is also pretty competent, dialogue sounds natural, and as I mentioned before, the banter can be really fun at times. However, I did encounter a few typos, "receive" is consistently misspelled.

Where Alive kind of drops the ball is with some (occasional) forced choices, and depending on what path you are on there can also be forced sex. But that is a non issue if you want Tonya. There is no forced sex with any of the other love interests. And if you are after any of them just don't go to the bar early in the game and you're good.

All in all I feel that Alive is a 3.5 star game, above average, since there are several good things in this game, but it's not really 4 or even 5 stars either because the slice of life story is a bit unspectacular (so far) and forced choices are never a good thing.
I still rounded up to 4 stars, since I feel that 3 stars can give you a wrong idea. Yes, the game is not super spectacular, but I think it has its heart in the right place and I always appreciate games with wholesome romances and meaningful solo paths, of which there are way too few.
So if you like games with single love interests and wholesome romances, if you like this genre, then Alive is absolutely worth your time. I actually liked it a lot more than I initially thought.
I certainly enjoyed my 3-4 hours I spent with this game. I think chances are high you will enjoy your time here too, if you are into wholesome romance and games that focus on just a few love interests.

I'm torn between a 4 or 5 star rating.

I like the story so far [v04].

Renders are good. Models are good.

I quite like the writing as well.

The one area where the game falls short is having meaningful choices. Since the path I chose essentially lined up with what appears to be the author's intended path, I didn't really notice anything was amiss until the arcade, where I tried, unsuccessfully, to lose the bet.

So far the game is fun and liking the choices and love interests and also the choices on which girl you want to pick.
Looking forward to future updates on where this story goes as well as the characters.
May change depending on future updates my rating

Where's the rug?

Time to be succinct. When I open a book I am at the mercy of the author. After reading 10 pages or 100, I'm following along hoping what I am reading will be intriguing, insightful, entertaining, etc. I don't necessarily mind if what is written doesn't jive with how I think the story should go. But when it comes to playing an interactive game that offers input and guidance from the reader, then I expect my choices to matter and if I make a choice I want it to stick.

But here we have a situation where I have the rug pulled out from under me. I make a choice, only it's not a choice because the author overrides my decision. Why then offer said choice? Why not keep the story linear and lock the reader out? Every time I run into a game such as this I will always put the smack dab on a review.

Pros:

Decent composition. A few misspellings.
Renders are a bit above average.
Addition of a sound track that helps reflect mood.

Cons:

False/faux choices.
Forced sex (Big Negative).

[v0.4]

Not gonna say it's perfect (what game is?), but definitely deserving of the "Excellent" mark.

This is a character driven story with some amazing dialogue writing. It checks all the boxes for convincing dialogues. Distinct personalities and speech patterns, realistic conversation dynamics and topics, and natural flow that resembles spoken dialogue.

It seems like the game length isn't set to be super long, but it makes up for it in width. This is not a harem game. There is a broad path that is shared on most routes, but you gotta pick a girl earlier than what you might be used to. To be frank, most games that let you play the field before settling do it to an unreasonable degree for the sake of porn. This one opts for a more realistic approach to dating.

While you have to pick a girl, the road leading up to it and the myriad of other choices create a whole bunch of variations. Some variations are large, others are flavor texts, but they all work to create a sense that your choices matter quite a lot.

I could talk about other aspects of the game that are good or slightly lacking, but personally, I just found the character interactions and dialogues to be engaging. It's well worth checking out.

An underrated game I think I only even heard of it because the dev told me to try it out. Good looking girls unlike a lot of games I tried they don’t all look the same. It seems obvious where the story is going but since it looks intentional that’s ok the characters are good enough I still want to see where it goes. Main complaint is that sometimes the phone is annoying and you have to click a bunch of times to open it but that was changed so it’s not so bad now.

Alive [v0.2]

Normally, the first time I play these I go contrary to what I'm supposed to do in a porn game and don't go for any girl.

I was supposed to go to the club I declined. I end up in a bar anyway with the MC having at least a BJ without the players consent. BAD.

I didn't "approach" Nikki in the coffee and I end up being forced to date her. BAD.

Could say no to the woman in the club. GOOD.

Girls are different and good looking. GOOD.

There is good music. GOOD.

Renders are decent.

STORY: So far this is another one of those games where, for some unknown reason, every girl/woman wants the MC. In a what, 15-20m of play time, there are 5 woman that want the MC. BAD.
So far nothing new that stands out in this story. Pretty standard.

Thank you and good luck.

P.S. Sex without consent takes one star alone. I'll keep an eye on the next update this review accordingly.