Others - Completed - Ascension I: From Rags to Riches [v1.0.3] [The Pink Penguin]

I would have loved to give this game an excellent raiting.
However, bugs and not well thought through game mechanics can make this game become a horror and may even stop you from completing it.

Regarding the positive things:
- Immersive story (it would have been nicer if MC could be named tho)
- Generally good / hot ai images (while it should be noted that the dev did not have a great focus on correcting / inpainting eyes so that they don't look like ai trash)

Why I dont grant five stars for an overall very entertaining game:
- If you do not heavily skill sexual acts in the first part of the game you will end up in a very bad situation in the second part once you have to do "near impossible" or "impossible" skill checks for e.g. kissing and may have >no other way< to increase these skill if you do not use the patreon key (please note: it is a game over if you cannot convince a key character with sexual skills in a specific amount of time at some point in the game) - overall, the skill check game mechanic is a horror - if you did not grind your skills to a specific level at a specific time in the game the "skip" button will become your best friend - there is no way to abort the spam of text after a failed skill check of a repeatable scene - you have to go through the entire scene every time.
- There is still a severe bug, that if you failed the Lord Black quest and had to reload the save directly before meeting Lord Black, the nymph may be already there and you will get the scene where you are killed in the restaurant despite not even knowing Lord Black yet. If you do not have various saves, your complete game progress is gone and you can start a new game (thats where the game ended for me after playing and enjoying it for hours - I was very disappointed).

The art is amazing. The gameplay is pretty much a sandbox management type of game with RPG elements (levels to gain in several skills). The management is fun. The biggest challenge is a shortage of save points and options to go back. You cannot decide yourself when to save. It does add to the challenge. Means you need to pay at least a little bit of attention to the story.
I give the game 5 starts because it was a lot of fun despite the save options

Wasn't expecting much initially, but absolutely enjoyed this game. Looking forward to the sequel. Maybe even enough to drop a one-time donation. A bit rough around the edges, but absolutely an excellent game by all standards.

Cheating is a bit difficult due to the way the game runs (electron? with a local NodeJS server running in the background...?). Should probably dig a bit more there, but despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed the game.

This is an okay attempt for a developer's first visual novel. I say it as a visual novel mainly because the management part of the game is quite bland and not necessarily meaningful considering the overall product. You pretty much set up shop with the same template and move on with the story which is pretty much 80-90% of what you will be doing.

The story is pretty kinetic, you have one final heroine that is mandatory, one that is optional, and a bunch of side story heroines that you can skip/miss or mess around with. The plot is very Dumas‘ Count of Monte Cristo-esque.

The art is AI generated; because of the lack of a gallery viewer in the novel despite what was claimed by the developer to have generated ten hundreds of images their accessibility was very limited; bar a few repetitive ones you will only be able to see majority of the images once in a playthrough. So it kind of defeats the purpose as a visual novel to begin with.

Finally, the game was built on Narrat, and an early, buggy version in that. Despite what the engine claimed it was good at, Narrat is atrocious in handling dynamic variables, something other narrative engines like RenPy and Unity managed with ease. This means save scrubbing is necessary to ensure you don't run into a gamebreaking bug without a backup, but even that might not save your progress if the variables were already messed up. The developer also seemed to not able to properly QC the game before a final release and was already working on the sequel of this product using the same engine so I am not sure if he/she would have picked up lessons from this one and if the sequel will also be a buggy mess.

Comparing to the other skin patcher/puzzle solver type of games that are no different from their generic puzzle style slapped with a couple AI art, this game at least has a story and some degree of flavour in it that can be considered engaging, as well as the observable effort by the developer both in terms of art generation and storytelling dynamics. So I am giving this a 2 - 2.5 solely based on those attributes, because everything else this game falls pretty flat. More importantly, not being able to build the game to workaround the game engine's limitations is to me personally, the sole responsibility of the developer. The game at its final release is still very prone to gamebreaking bugs, so even if I am to be considerate it is hard to rate this product higher than what is given here.

Overall 4/5. A fun resource management game with a simple story that overstays its welcome

Gameplay 4/5. Its a text based resource management game, this generally includes management of your stats, businesses, and relationships. What's interesting is that gameplay changes a bit from the first part of the game the "training arc" and the rest the "revenge arc". The training arc is actually good, the revenge arc however gets repetitive and was overall unsatisfying

Story 3/5. Its a riches to rags to riches revenge power fantasy story, nothing special, it is exactly what you expect it to be

Characters 2.5/5. In the "training arc", you meet a crew of woman who take you in at your lowest point, and along the way you get better and earn more of their respect, this was the best part of the game. On the other hand, the "revenge arc" was just horrible, you are overloaded with so many characters each with very little personality, screen time, or growth, i even forgot some of them. The final thing is the FMC, you spend the most time with her, but their relationship felt so fake, you 2 either speak in poetry or fuck.

Visuals 3.5/5. its good lucking AI art, nothing more

Adult Content 2/5. Each scene has some AI art with lots of text to compliment, got sick of it early on.

Completed game with lots of AI graphics and text, and a very long playing time. Runs on the narrat engine, which is relatively unknown. NTR is avoidable, mostly it's you cucking the other NPC's. xxxxxx

Great game. The story and management gameplay kept me interested, and I finished it in about 20 hours or so. You are a lord who gets his lands and titles stolen from him and then spends the rest of the game, as the title suggests, going from rags to riches. Tons of sex in the game, but other than some great AI and still pictures for sex scenes, it's nothing to write home about visually. The writing and story are pretty good. I did see a few grammatical errors, but overall, you understand what is going on, and the sex scenes are pretty hot in the text, if not a bit short sometimes. To be honest, there are almost too many sex scenes in the game so you won't be craving for content. The management is well-designed once you start buying and owning buildings. Once you figure the game out, it is pretty simple. There were some things I could never really figure out, though. The game kind of throws you into the deep end of these management-based activities and doesn't explain what your goal is or how to achieve it. Thank god for saves. I had to experiment several times to figure out how to start earning money. But once I did, thankfully, the game wasn't super grindy and had a good reward system of progress for each management-based activity. The biggest thing I can recommend is once you start owning buildings, make sure you hire and assign your girls in those buildings. If you miss one day of this at the beginning of the management, you can seriously slow down your progress or, worse go bankrupt in just a few days. The game tells you that you own a building but doesn't explain anything further, so assign those girls immediately. Don't be like me and start interacting with random things and go bankrupt in 3 days. The ending was pretty good, too, but I think there are different endings based on how well you prepare for the endgame using money and influence.

Now for the bad aspects of the game and why I am only giving it 4 stars. One, I ran into several bugs, one even stopped my progression during the first chapter that made me reload to earlier on int he chapter to get past it. Fortunately, there is a skip button, so it didn't take too much time to get back to where I was, but I almost quit when I ran across it. Secondly is the skills and dialog-based decisions. I do like how the game incorporates skills into dialogue options, and it gives you the illusion of free will, but that's just it. It's all an illusion. Most of the time when you fail at something, you succeed anyways, but are either saved by someone else or succeed differently. Never is this more apparent than in the end. One try at the ending, I was failing every check, and somehow, I still won. It had me scratching my head and wondering why skills were here in the first place if they were this difficult to pass with maxed out skills, and yet you still succeed even when it tells you that you failed. The only times when skills seemed to matter were in the middle of sex scenes and the occasional side quest where, if you succeeded, you would get a better ending or reward for succeeding. There were many times I failed a sex skill with someone and had to come back the next day and try again until I succeeded. But mostly, as far as the main story goes, fail or pass the skill checks, it's all an Illusion, and you end up at the same place in the end. My last and final complaint is the achievements and it kind of ties into my first complaint. I completed several achievements in game that did not register under the achievements tab as completed. So naturally, this bug was irritating as well when I got to the end of the game and saw that many of my achievements were not complete.

In summary, I found the game very enjoyable and worth a one time play through if you do not mind AI art and No animations. There is Audio, though, with most of the main girls you have a scene with. Moans and such. If not for the bugs and minor issues with the skill system, it would be a great game. I am giving this one 4 out of 5 stars and hope the developer keeps putting out new games and improving his skills. He is already talented, blending management, story, and AI into one entertaining game. I look forward to seeing what he can do once AI gets more advanced and his skills improve all the more.