Others - Abandoned - Areas of GRAY [v1.1 BETA] [NOTvil]

This game is a hidden gem, albeit with a tinge of sadness due to its abandonment. It's a rarity in the gaming world, offering a refreshing departure from the typical tropes. the female characters aren't portrayed as mere objects of desire. Instead, the story unfolds gradually, offering a slow burn that allows players to immerse themselves deeply in the narrative.

What truly sets this game apart is its exceptional writing and narrative style. There's a richness to the storytelling that draws players in, keeping them engrossed for hours on end. The abundance of content ensures that there's always something new to discover, with plenty of text to delve into.

Visually, the game doesn't disappoint either. The models and renders are of high quality, adding another layer of immersion to the experience. It's evident that a great deal of care and attention to detail went into crafting the game's visuals.

However, the bittersweet reality is that this gem has been abandoned by its developers. Despite this setback, there's still a fair amount of content to explore and enjoy. And perhaps there's a glimmer of hope that the developer may someday return to breathe new life into this captivating world.

Definitively an unique game, worth to try if you're bored by the classical VN story you see everywhere.
Not perfect but everything is running fine, not much to say except porn scenes could be a bit improved and longer.
The navigation is sometime not very intuitive, the design of the house doesn't help, but it still ok.
Graphics are very good, story also, but a lot twisted and sometime hard to follow, but it's not bad it add some complexity.
The girls are... stunning, but I think it's subjective

This is certainly not among the best games I've played on this site, but I love it nonetheless. It certainly won me over with the human-robot interactions I've always loved. I can see that the dev is trying to bring something new to the table both gameplay and story-wise. So far, neither has succeeded completely, but the spirit of experimentation is very much appreciated. I encourage the dev to keep exploring in this direction, keep taking risks and move up the bar one step at a time. Eventually, it will reach its potential.

Man this game was all over the place.

I mean, it is functional, competently made and plays okay. And if you don't care about a good story to go with it this would probably be up your alley.

Story:
However, its story and presentation is far too pretentious for me. My biggest issue are those weird mind shift and reality mixing with fantasy, drug induced stimuli and the supernatural that completely threw me off and out of the world.
Plot threads come and go, mysteries are built and they never end up anywhere. Nothing is explained and I suppose you're to figure this all out Evangelion style. It's like they began with a vision, got more and more feedback about when the good stuff starts and just dropped everything else.
From the description I was hoping for something more digestable. Or at least something I could follow and wouldn't have to come up with my own interpretation for each and every plot point that is raised and immediately forgotten about (neighbour? neighbour's wife? sister? sister's workplace? The balcony cube? the second android? first android's sense of self? ...)

The progress of the corruption felt... weird? The game has these clear stages in which you complete a set of events, you wait for night and the entire screen fades with some time having passed and you're back with more stuff to do.
Inbetween you deal with the one-time events, which also starts and stops your progress at a weird pace. Girl 1 can get the hots at one point, you'll be presented with her quick thoughts and now you're supposed to deal with girl 2 and her progress and you have to wait for the ominous "a couple of days later" transition again to progress Girl 1 further. It just doesn't flow very well.

Tonally it is all over the place.
On the one hand your MC is all against those forbidden fruits and de facto forced against his will to isolate and become drugged / mindcontrolled into f*** his daughter and niece all while being surveilled and presumably watched by... the players? the audience? ...something? (they don't explain anything).
Then there's... creatures and weird dreams that come out of nowhere and have a certain horror vibe to it. There's even a couple of quickcuts (light jumpscares if you will).

But on the other hand you have your relaxing music, the giant house which comes off as rather bright and relaxing, your android maid that's generally rather pleasant to be around and both girls who have that carefree attitude.
Honestly, I'm still not sure what to make of it. Am I supposed to feel bad for two characters getting it on? Should I only be opposed if I force the issue using... whatever sleep-mode I can put them in and their evil sides come out?

Characters:
The characters are all so very feature-less, so forgettable. They lack any defining character nor do they have good chemistry with each other because they never have much establishing or developing scenes with each other. Scenes that could develop their bonds are skipped, e.g. the dad and his niece warming up to each other is only mentioned in passing.
If the game didn't tell me girl 1 was MC's long known daughter and girl 2 his never before seen niece they might as well have been swapped.

There are some plot threads being hinted at (the MC, his sister and her workplace for example) that could make them more interesting but they do absolutely nothing with it.
All of this meant corrupting these people never felt impactful.

Gameplay:
This is somewhere between a typical CG collector and VN with extra steps. You have the described apartment as your hub and you switch your room views to look for white event bubbles that tell you there's something here to progress. You get your hint of what to do, look for the event and progress in a mostly linear fashion. Some rooms are bigger than others which require you to scroll your view.
It's relatively easy to find what to do even though the HUD tends to get in the way in the smaller rooms (e.g. Bath, Abigail's room).

Once a while you'll also get some minigames to deal with. Most are fairly simple, but the noise amplifier game just left me confused what to do (I still don't know what what button's supposed to do) and the final energy routing puzzle was just confusing to figure out, annoying to deal with and took entirely too long. Kinda killed the mood.

You have some bi-choice options in the early stages of the game akin to "Choice that progresses your corruption" and "Choice that doesn't". I would love to tell you if these actually change something but the game only allows for a single save and I'd seen plenty after my playthrough.
You also have a gallery with replay feature (I never tried it), so there's that.
I was missing about 8 scenes or so at the end, a couple of which are probably the hypnosis variations.

The HUD is rather big and intrusive and its purpose is still not that clear to me. You have an (affection? lust?) meter for your MC towards every other character that's only relevant for some extra hypno / sleep mind control scenes (I think). And there's a bar of the mind altering substance in your character's systems(?) which I presume has no purpose other than a total progress indicator and world building fluff. Your quicktravel menu is quite slick and nice, your designated "release aphrodisiac gas into the room if you have a task for it" button is excessively large for its limited purpose.

There's a couple of video style transitions you can't skip and which go on for a bit. Nothing too terrible but I'd rather have the option to skip these than to wait for an e.g. extremely slow pan across the city with repeating dialog to finish.

Visuals:
Visually it is quite good. The animations could be better but even having them isn't a given. The hub and its bird eye perspective is a nice touch.
I'm not really a fan of the whole glowy eyes means "evil" thing and the android aesthetic they got going here, but that's preference.
I think the whole game works with DaZ models and if you've played a couple you're probably going to recognize a few.

tl;dr:
Overall the game was definitely good as an erotic experience, but it left my thinking brain completely unsatisfied. The gameplay was okay for what it was though I wish we had the option to skip some of the transitions and minigames.

This game's waste of potential made me write my first review.

The game has some problems when it comes to gameplay - after a while it feels like you're navigating a gloryfied cg gallery instead of actually playing something - but that's not the reason behind my rating (and review).

I was disappointed in this game purely because of personal taste.
I find the idea behind the story really interesting and the author manages to create a creepy "big brother" vibe that hits just right, all accompanied by beautiful models and assets.
The way that the relationships between the characters are written, though, is where my enjoyment dies.

The story is all about corrupting the protagonists and freeing their lust, which is a classic and loved concept, but this process of corrupting them comes off waaaay too aggresive for me.
The characters quite literally switch personalities, becoming something completely different without the proper build-up.
There is no real connection forming between them, no romance or healthy sexual interest at all; they become primal and perverted without any regard of who they previously were.

I don't think it's because of the developer lack of skills, by the way, it's just how the game was intended: absolute corruption and warping of the personalities.

In my opinion a softer approach where the characters gradually come together during this forced quarantine, dancing around the boundaries and exploring the morality of it would've made this game brilliant.

Their personalities are shallow, no depth to them: they are just meat puppets pushed to sexual overdrive.
If that's your thing, though, this game is perfect for you.

Good art, good game, but it should haven been done on Ren'py to have a better save system and skipping.
The unskippable 10 min long slideshow cutscenes are completely unforgivable. I can't understand why the dev did it like this.

its cool but i need to understand what its leading to and where is the sister and whats the wife gonna do after the neighbor gets done with her , whats with that crazy ass clock monster and the brother in his dreams

Sorry , I can't give this game anymore than 1 star and that's because the interface is horrible and the developer, for some outlandish reason decided that it was a ''good idea'' to NOT GIVE the player any 'save game' option !! I'm sorry but that to me is infuriating , just as some other developers who give the player very limited saving options in their games. It is also sad because this game in particular seems to have great graphics and I heard it also has a great story, but all of that goes out of the window (for me ) when a game interface is horrible and when you are given (on purpose by some ass*&%# developers) limited save game options or even worse: ZERO options to save your game progress ! as in this case with this developer, who probably thought it would be "a great" and "unique" idea to implement the ''no game save option'' for some ''artistic'' purposes, it seems. I downloaded it and deleted it within 5 minutes as soon as I realize there were no save game options.

Models are great - story is trying to be more clever than it is and the whole thing feels drawn out and barren in the end.
Dad, mom, daughter, niece and robo-maid are in a huge-ass apartment where some gas is being pumped that slowly makes them go fuck-crazy. The whole thing has a lot of hallucinating/dreaming about the nature of lust and other philosophical nonsense that links it to the other GRAY game. It's trying to be artsy but, for me, comes off as annoying and extra padded

Areas of Gray is art. So, I'm not so concerned with how often is updated, how good is the story, or whatever other things I care about when it comes to other games.

Just saying it has good graphics and good atmosphere doesn't do it justice. It's just beautiful cyberart, and not a normal game. I hope the dev will know when to stop and start a new project.

And I forgot to mention how awesomely creepy is Mary.

This thing's been goin on for awhile, although the format of the game has changed a few times as the author developed, the artistic style has been consistent and absolutely top tier in quality.
The dialog, story, and absolute tone of every chapter is such that it WILL draw you in. The whole thing feels like a melancholy mist is covering it all.
Once more, I'd reiterate that the art is FANTASTIC. Taking canned assets strait from the storefront and turning them into something unique and interesting is no small task. I'm curious to know what kind of post-work was done on each image after they came out of Daz, or w/e.

The intro was decent but as the game progressed it got to be boring and I lost the desire to finish it.

The renders, visuals, and animations are good but the rest of the game is poorly executed.

The game is a click fest. Every screen only shows a few words before you have to click to see more. Most screens only had one to twelve words on them. I almost got carpel tunnel just from playing this game.

The navigation is painful at best. The top down overview just doesn't work well for me. It was hard to get used to and wasn't very intuitive. It was also often difficult to advance the story. You have to click on everything sometimes more than once before you can leave the sandbox/free roam mode. I was pulling my hair out a couple of times, trying to find the one thing I hadn't clicked on, or the thing I needed to click on more than once (such as a locked door that later became unlocked after you clicked on everything else).

The game could really benefit from a graphical drop down list of rooms like many other games have which makes navigation and clearing out rooms much easier.

The game fails to list the person's name who is currently speaking. The player is given a side view of the person's head only. It takes too long to figure out who is who using this poor method.

The writing was painful and dry sadly. The characters behaved oddly and said things that a person of the opposite gender would only say. For example, I finally got Olivia into Abigail's room to hang out and then Olivia says like six words to Abigail and then says she is leaving to go watch TV? Who does this?

I didn't make it through Day One before I lost all interest to continue. The author failed to keep me interested and I had no idea what was going on and finally had no desire to find out.

I'm giving the game two stars but that is very generous.

I did not enjoy this game and quickly lost interest. I've played lots of other games on this site that kept me interested for dozens of hours. I gave up on this game after two hours.

Not my cup of tea and not recommended.

A glorified slideshow. barely any agency is given to the player. characters are introduced but then never seen again even though a lot of these characters are great. Renders are obviously amazing. but most games nowadays have amazing graphics. Story is all over the place.

An outstanding slow burn 'bottle episode' style with gorgeous art and a built-in walkthrough.

I really wanna knock a star off because it's a Windows-only proprietary Renpy-like thing but it's otherwise so good I don't think it deserves it.

Consider my 5 stars a rounded up 4.5.

Really good. It is creepy, weird, and very sexy. The mood in the game is very intriguing. I played the first two chapters and so far enjoyed it quite a lot. I am looking forward to see where it is going.

Graphics are good, but not a game for me. I didn't like the story, the gameplay and stuff like that. So I had to choose between 2 or 3*, but gave it 3 for the graphics. But I'm certain others will it 5*, as we all have different opinions about things.

v1.0s BETA
Summary:
The game is about the corruption of a family in a futuristic world where humans build androids. You the MC, your wife, daughter, niece gets corrupted by a third party for questionable reasons, to have sex with each other.

Extraordinary aspects of the game:
The rendering, models, camera work.

What is good:
Almost everything from the audio to the models.

What is bad:
Almost nothing.

What can be made better:
Idk.

My opinion:
There are almost no complaints about this game, this is an incest/corruption(daughter and niece) game that have a build-up of two chapters(still with sex scenes just less interesting in my opinion) and the big finale is the third chapter.

The corruption part was built amazingly as a third party tries to corrupt the family and not the main character, with rarely done correctly. Usually, if the main character does the corruption it can leave some feeling of guilt or you just ask yourself about his motives, here you don’t need to.

Most of the scenes are so breathtaking that you ask yourself if they were made in photoshop. Never seen before camera play that surprised me, the kind that seen only in movies and not in games.

Again if it’s one of your first games I don't suggest playing it as it can place your expectations a little bit too high as it’s so goddam good.

If you want more reviews/recommendation check out my list [Link]

This is a really beautiful game that would be a lot better as a VN imo. The story fairly interesting and the writing is fine though the characters don't seem particularly 3 dimensional. The real thing keeping this from being a 5 star game is the engine and gameplay. The interface is needlessly clunky and the mini games are pretty pointless as you just have to keep doing them till you succeed they serve no real purpose to except to make the game feel gamey and they actively detract from the narrative by impeding the player's progress through the story. All that being said it is definitely a game worth playing and experiencing, it would just be a much more pleasant experience if the narrative and visuals were packaged differently.

Edit: Okay i played the 3rd chapter and that is what all three chapters should have been like. It removes all the annoying bits. It is much smoother and more enjoyable to play while retaining all the good stuff from the 1st two chapters: interesting story and amazing visuals

great game design and game play concept, great 3d character design and wonderful story with good character development. love stories like this with a dedicated developer and active community. I Look forward to this games updates and other developments from this developer.

Its hard to rate this "game" honestly. On one hand its a tedious click-fest with zero choices, pointless character development, and no actual gameplay. On the other hand it has undoubtedly some of the best artwork and animation of any game out there, Oli is an absolute gem and the reason post people download the game in the first place.

Pros
> Beautiful Girls 5/5
> Beautiful Animation 5/5

Cons
> Gameplay 2/5
> Story 3/5
> Character Development 0/5

The story of this game and the background of the characters are really good when introduced, until you realize they don't actually matter or play a factor, nothing changes, there are no relationships or character development throughout the entire game that actually matter.

If this had been just a VN instead of forcing tedious follow the dots to get to the scenes I would easily give it a 5 just for the artwork.