Ren'Py - Apocalust [v0.07] [Psychodelusional]

Pros:
-High quality models and animation
-Animated Scenes
-Unique story
-Nice scenery

Cons:
-Astonishingly slow development speed with inaccurate descriptions for what the next update will include
-Overused music that ruins the experience; the sex scene music is the same track and it doesn't fit most scenes. Its like the soundtrack a 12 year old would imagine appropriate. I seriously hate the sound after having to listen to it so uch
- While the story is UNIQUE, I wouldn't call it good. Its not that compelling and it feels more like a loose web created to fit the characters he created rather than characters stemming naturally from a story
-Character development is meh. I don't feel any sense of attachment to any characters outside the main woman MC lives with. Granted some of the characters are interesting, but not tremendously so.
-Lack of freedom. Not only is the menu highly restrictive, but the game just feels more powerpoint-like than your average Ren Py Virtual Novel

Overall I had to rate this a 1 considering how long it has been under development. I can applaud the developer for taking a risk to make this project, but a risk isn't always a good thing - it doesn't always result in something good, and in this case the risk the resulting project has taken too much time to be something that is overall just average for todays standards. If this was a brand-new game, I may give it a 2 verging on 3, but as it I just do not see this as 1) a project that will first of all even be finished, and 2) a project worth remembering outside of a few good scenes.

great renders, models, lightings, animation.
everything about this game's visual are top quality but the game it-self or story wise it really is behind so many other games out there, hope to see them focus and come up with some better story lines and use their game's full potential.
5/5 keep up the good work.

Version: 0.03

Graphics - 3 years ago the renders would have been astounding for me but now; other devs/animators have caught up with as good and even better rendering

• the game still captures a very appealing style with the great lighting and added visual enhancements
• all women have the same body type, hourglass big tits but with at least some variation in size and skin
• Ava and Evelyn have the same face - the blonde friend to an extent as well

Animation, is qualitatively inconsistent:

• some scenes (such as Evelyn showering) bring out the natural softness of an ass but others (the ass slaps); is lost by having no jiggle
• some animation ends too quickly, particularly the ones with action, resulting in a jarring intermediate cut, e.g. when Ava turns to show a better angle for 3rd dress
• ejaculation looks like a wet sneeze
• there should have an option to lower resolution for the lower end pc users

Gameplay:

• lust points are useless
• interactive tool is unnecessary since it's literally clicking a button as you would normally click a button to progress the scene
• no save option

In terms of the adult content factor - the game is primarily focused on it and you do get a lot of tease for how little of content you get overall... however;

• scenes lacked eroticism for me despite being well made due to there being no character relationship building experience prior - so it's just a bunch of attractive dolls.
• Evelyn had some good moments in v0.02 due to there already being some existing relationship demonstrated between her and the MC
• Ava's scenes was only as good as one enjoys ass and tits which wasn't enough for me this time around

Sound

• body sfx like slaps and touching don't match the space - too much reverb and not enough frequency smoothening (basically dulling the sound will naturalise it)
• the music is good if a bit repetitive

Some inconsistencies:

• for the Ava tanning scene, the initial lighting and texture on the MC doesn't match the rest of the composition
• MC saying he is "pitching a tent" but no bulge is visible in the animation afterwards (only at the very end we see it)
• Ava sitting up facing forward but was prone right before

Glitch/bugs:

• tit slap sfx persists after animation during Alien-Evelyn tempting MC scene
• Ava's distorted back (left of screen) while MC hotdogs her ass (on closeup) rapidly

Game feels like it's a tech demo with a terrible story slapped on, years waiting for a video of it, another year for the first version that was about 5 minutes long... now 3 updates in and the game has no proper menu or save and it's just plain bad. The models are great and the animation is really good but that's all that's going for it.

I have played over a hundred games in this site for many years and I can easily say this game has some of the best visuals I have ever seen in this page. By version 0.3, it already looks like a high end game with tremendous potential. I really hope that this game continuous to develop further in the future.

This is a very high and top quality game, with loverly and very inspiring characthers, fluent and easy gameplay, very amazing and subtle visuals, all scenes are purely great to play, hotdogging in the 0.03 version is TOP OF THE ART pleasure and fun. Full support to the game dev and designers, they are pure genius and made nothing else than PERFECTION GAME.

I would give it 2 stars for the good renders but I have seen some games with the same or even better visual quality that have more content and are even at least a year newer than this one, so for me it doesn't even deserve 2 stars

I have absolutely no idea why access to the menu is locked. I HATE slow appearing text in a ren'py game cause I read faster than that and the dev went out of his way to disable your option of making text appear faster. Why???

Dev should be absolutely ashamed of this type of milking. The renders are amazing but the previous project the Dev worked on was completed in a reasonable amount of time while this one exists almost solely to milk people for money. The progress on this game is embarrassing considering the talent that is involved.

While the animation is great, if all I wanted to see was animations and such, I'd pull up Pornhub or something. The game is a monumental pile of hideous bugs, I'm seeing more renpy exceptions than Not, and the fact that you locked out menu access with this shitty music you've included, making us unable to Save, unable to shut off that shit music, and unable to turn off skipping?

The level of production quality on this one is hard to beat (pun unintended because fapping is easy) Not a fan of forcing me to have no control over the sound options but a huge fan of the content of this game. The dialog is well paced and not boring. the visuals are super duper. animations on almost every single screen and all of them are crystal clear clarity renders. a decent excuse for chicks to be super horny around the mc but I hope the story doesn't detract from the faps like most VNs that have similar plots. I'm not really interested in overly dramatic bs for plot sake. Just leave it as the main character has powers to seduce and the shadowy characters and subplots of pharma labs can fuck off. No one cares they just want to fap to the ladies. I'm eager for more but will skip anything too talky.

This cant be called a game. There is nothing in it just some animations that are not connected. I mean man 3 years and just 10 min of demooo. There is no menu no save no load options, not that you need it because there is no content. This is like someone give you book but with 10 pages and you connect the rest. I am confused is he giivng us demos till he finish the game or is this really a game. This cant be called a game, there is no way that this deserves to be called a game and to have this high rating.

I don't normally bother leaving reviews, but this game is something else , and it will be on my top list on here , Excellent renders , excellent character models which def my cup of tea , all females off the chart " perfection " , Genuinely The thing that struck me about this game is the structure. Although the game is in very early stage to judge but it's a pleasure to see a well-structured game with Such Good Graphics and animations Like that , in my " personal opinion " im a huge milfy city fan and i was amazed by the design of the game till ofc we all know what happened to that game , after milfy city almost no game caught my interest till i saw this one and i think this game has a great future and great potential , it can even compete with milfy city and even over top it , if the ppl working on it listen to players and put real effort in this game , and i hope It doesn't suffer from the problem that other games has , where there's way too much redundant dialogue and you end up spam clicking to get through it, or throw sex scenes at you left and right with little buildup. but overall The flow and interaction of the game is smooth, the scenes are extremely well done , very enjoyable game with surprisingly unique characters, with a fair bit of comedy sprinkled here and there , so I am really excited to see future updates of apocalust Highly recommend.

[v0.03]

This rating reflects just the content of the current game, ignoring all the obvious milking and scammy behavior by the dev. Keep in mind the content so far is the result of ~3 years development with very high patreon revenue since before the first release even dropped. It would be disengenuous to review this game without at least giving the proper context of the development even if it doesn't factor into the score.

So what we got so far... is a standard set up for a love vs lust magic power/"succubus helper" game. It's nothing original, but people who like this type of story could be interested.

The writing is pretty much at the standard low effort porn level. The characters have no depth to speak of, and to be frank, I don't think the dev even attempted for it. That's not really a problem, conceptually. We should generally rate games based on whether the dev pulls off his intended vision or not. That said, even the most cringy porn level script should at least have some semblance of reason. The mother character is pretty much a literal retard. She is unable to function in everyday life because she cannot get up from a sitting position, bend down to pick up something off the ground, and gets stuck in a dryer.

Anyways, let me talk about the visuals, which this game is banking pretty much its entire worth on. Yea, models are great. Renders are great. The clothing are super sexy and draped pretty well over these absurdly large tits. You can see that there was some effort to reduce the boob socket issues. However, the overuse of idle animations is a flawed design decision that seems to have the opposite effect of what is intended. Let's assume that the intent was to create immersion or bring the characters to life by animating almost all conversations. The problem is, people don't fucking sway back and fourth in a loop. It makes things look more unnatural while talking to them. Some animations certainly help, like when you see them shake the ass for you or when they are doing some type of action, but not the majority of these animations used for idle chatter.

For comparison, you could look at some games that use a large amount of still renders during conversations to add realistic dynamics like gestures, eye movement, expressions, mannerisms, etc. That is much more effective in creating the immersive experience.

Oh, I almost forgot. After 3 years of development, the game still has no UI lol. You can't save. The MC doesn't have a name.

As a fan of corruption based incest, the game did pique my interest somewhat. That said, I know this project will never get anywhere with this dev. It's a classic case of building up a patreon base and coasting while doing the bare minimum to string people along.

Played version 0.02:
-the renders and animations are excellent, better than almost anything else
-the audio is very good too
-the characters are sexy, especially the mother even though the dev chose to make her very "thicc"
-there is little story so far, it's mostly several sexy scenes with the MC and his mother
This game has a great potential if the developer manages to deliver consistent updates.

Review for Apocalust v0.06:

I believe that Apocalust is showing us the future of audio and visual capabilities in adult visual-novel-type games. The animations, specifically the frequency and quantity of animations, are incredible. I expect similar animations will become commonplace in a few years. When I first reviewed version 0.02, Apocalust was just a demo of cobbled-together scenes that lacked even a basic user interface. Version 0.04 and up have shaped into a proper visual novel with a functional user interface.

Story: 3/5 - So far, there isn't much of a story. There's a stereotype MC living with a MILF "caretaker" and the stereotype moral dilemmas they think about. There's a sci-fi aspect where he gets some "power" from some meteor and some secret government agency somehow knows about it. Kinda meh, but we'll see how it plays out.

Writing: 4/5 - The writing is better than average. I'm unsure if the author is not a native English speaker or is a native English speaker that isn't great at writing. There are lots of spelling and punctuation errors plus other mistakes that could easily fixed with proofreading by a native speaker. E.g., the government agent says, "He's getting frisky with the woman, she must be half his age." Another case where the MC thinks about "the mansion my uncle left me before he past."

Animations: 4.5/5 - The animations are outstanding. Almost certainly what makes the game unique is the idle animations where characters are subtly moving during conversations. I've seen a few games with blinking eyes, but here the entire body moves to imitate the movements of real people. I'd really like to give this a 5/5 but the resolution isn't really that great and there are some things that are weird and annoying. The background moves in some still renders where there aren't any characters. Why? Sometimes the background moves during other scenes too, and it looks strange. It might make more sense if the scenes are from a first-person point-of-view, but the MC is in the scenes. The screen shaking to emphasize surprise/shock/etc. is way overdone. In the beginning of 0.6, it was every 2 or 3 renders and it was so annoying it made me want to punch something.

Renders: 3/5 - The renders seem like the resolution is too low or they look intentionally blurred. Maybe this helps speed up development time.

Models 3/5 - The love-interests are generally pretty, but the huge boobs and butts are over-done. I know it's on purpose, but it gets old when every woman is unnatural-looking and every woman is the same.

Gameplay 3/5 - There isn't a ton of gameplay. Players appear to get love points or lust points for fairly infrequent actions, but it's not yet clear what the effects of one or the other might be in the long term. I also consider that gameplay includes clicking through the renders and dialogues while viewing/reading them. Here the game falls short because there is a lot of dialogue that is spoken and a lot that is just thoughts. However, the game doesn't often differentiate correctly between them. It appears that the game is supposed to put thoughts in parentheses, but it doesn't most of the time, so they all appear to be spoken. It makes players scratch their heads. The character avatars that pop up during every dialogue are super annoying especially when that character is already in the render. It's like the developer is just going nuts showing off stuff he learned to do in Renpy rather than make the game more enjoyable.

Content: 4/5 - There appears to be more content than there really is because players tend to look at the idle animations longer than still renders, and there's nothing wrong with that. Updates are coming 5 months apart, but that's pretty long for the amount of play time. Given where the story and the relationships are at, I'd guess it's at most 25% complete after 6 updates, so around 15+ updates remaining. That means it could take about 6 more years to complete, which gives me low confidence of the game ever reaching completion.

Renders, animations and the overall visuals are amazing but it is an unplayable mess. Concept could get interesting but there isn't much story yet. Writing is cringey as shit and any attempt at "hiding" the i*cest lines sound so fucking retarded.

There is menu of any kind, no saves, no volume controls, nothing.

Bugs and misspelling all over the place.

It's basically just a buggy slideshow.

Character Design 8/10
Render Quality 10/10

But that's literally all there is to this "game". Don't let Apocalust fool you guys, cause it already happened to me.

Trust me, this game has outstanding renders and looks absolutely incredible, but if you actually play the current version, you can see that there is like 0 UI, not even a Save/Load Function (Keep in mind the Renpy has this from default so the dev wouldn't even need to create one!) and can be played through in about 15 minutes.

Now one might think "Well it's still just v0.03 (As of today when i'm writing this), the next updates will have more content". You're wrong. This pathetic dev worked more than 3 years on this, and all he has to show for it are a few scenes with naked ladies and not a single sex scene yet (or anything close to that as a matter of fact)

Please don't get your hopes up guys and also please stop supporting this dev on patreon, it's a pure money waste...

Overall: 2/10

Demo:
this is only the demo... but you can already get a good sight what you will play later. the renders are looking pretty good. all the characters look beautiful and the animation are well done too. and this game has really potentionel to be good. very good. i hope the 0.1 will soon arive.

Pros - The gifs are seamless within the short and the models are spot on. Compared to their previous completed work, you can see a real improvement in the animations, model quality, clothing textures, and lights.
Cons - Too short to be considered a Demo, more like a teaser release. Some dForce has been implemented, but it's not very impressive. Sock boobs, were fabric just clings to breasts in unrealistic ways instead of draping.
Advice - Change the title from Demo to Teaser. Utilize dForce in the renders. Would recommend Marvelous Designer for fabric draping and D-Former (within the DAZ tab) for collisions to up the realism.