Ren'Py - Astral Lust [v0.3.1c] [Victorius]

Reviewed version 0.3.1

Puhhh, this will probably be my hardest to write review for any game on this site yet.
Expect a huge ranty wall of text below, but TL ; DR for the impatient:

A game with neat potential and worth checking out if you are into exploration type games that allow DARK choices, but expect undecicive overall tone from devs in the game. Sprinkle in some overall cthulu horror mystery without actually "horror".

Now on to the details, ohh and also beware spoilers in spoiler tags cause I need to vent a bit too.



This game starts off very nice. Classic track-kun kills you on the spot and makes MC skip a year in dream land where he meets 1st big bad god entity. All very cryptic and filled with mystery with the whole Pronoune talk ("He", "Them", "His"). Later down we learn that that's cause if you use any of the gods names they notice you and might smite you right away, kinda ala Lord Voldermort.

Then MC wakes up randomly in a hotel and learns from girls living there that world has gone to shit in the year he skipped and monsters roam the city and overall it's basically a post-apocalyptic scenario but with random monsters instead of zombies as a threat.


Now let me first go into the gameplay side of things, there are generally less issues here.
The gameplay consists of map style exploration for random encounters ranging from finding resource spots, repeatable scenes with generic characters and combat encounters, sometimes mixed together too.

Combat is a slay the spire style card battle. 0.3.1 is the first version I played of this game so I have no idea since when these systems are in the game, from the patreon i guess they are new additions, so it somewhat makes sense that the combat is not very fleshed out nor polished.
The balance is all over the place with many cards being simply flat up upgrades to already existing cards, which reduces the depth of the already shallow system further. The limits on card counts also goes contradictory to the idea of finding out awesome synergies in a deck. If I first have to upgrade a card multiple times to MAYBE be allowed more than 1 instance of it in my deck then my motivation is already very low to care about it.
So yeah, it's good enough to not detract from the score, ie. be annoying, but it is also far from polished enough to alone hold up the game and increase the score.

This brings us to the resource aspect. Similar to MIST you can find build materials, but also monster parts and sometimes alcohol/food. You can use these in multiple spots like expanding/upgrading the hotel with rooms, performing rituals to the chthulu esque characters you meet and crafting cards.
Early on resources are a bit limited, but later down you are drowning in them so personally I would say the grind on that front is not insane, though I am a person that tends to enjoy the grind towards game-omnipotence so your mileage might vary here.
The biggest issue, especially early on, is that you lose all items when you lose a combat encounter and that the room in the hotel where you can safely store items (vault) is waaaay to expensive/holds waaay to little items for the build costs. You get 25 items in the first level... You need like combined 50 items for one vault level upgrade alone!
Later down nearly no combat encounter is a true threat to you except for forced deaths (which i will come to later...) so the only point in the game where vault would help you, the vault is completely useless. DEFINITELY needs more polish spit here and a rebalancing of things. (i.e. atleast allow Stacks of build items e.g. 50 wood = 1 vault slot or something).
What surprised me the most was the lack of survival aspects. You never actually scavenge for food/water that could run out, that is done by one of the LI from the hotel, ... who goes out alone into a post apocalyptic city roaming with bandits that are already known to kidnap, rape and enslave girls... but we will get to that <.<

Let's first go over the encounters in the world. Some of them open up other spots in the world like a mercenary type camp with a brothel and traders, a martial arts trainer with magical abilities or side characters the main plot. And then there are the sexual encounters, which once again split into the MC=Hero for damsel in distress that either wants to or gets bought with resources to have sexual interactions, or into the MC=Villain and rapes the girl he finds.
And now finally, dear reader, we have reached the main breaking point of this game. The grand fissure that runs through the wall of this monument and creates cracks all over the grand tapestry of this mosaic. The flippy flappy nature of the MC.
The dev is simply NOT willing to pick a side in where he wants this game to go. On the one hand the MC can run around the city and:

<spoiler>
- rape a scavenger in a warehouse and sadistically enjoy her pain or force her to give bj
- rape a women chained up that got abducted by orcs infront of her husband and have fun and the pain it causes both parties, and then simply let them stay in the chains to die.
</spoiler>

but basically right away trigger a story event:

<spoiler>
that boils down to:
< buhhu why do you also have other love interests besides me, but I love you so much, why do you hurt me, I hate you, but I also love you so I will stick with you still >
type soap drama, where the MC himself thinks he is such a bad boyfriend and that he doesn't deserve all these girls.
</spoiler>

Like pick a fucking side already!
Don't get me wrong. I LOVE dark, villain type protagonists. That's the main reason I play these settings, to have actual freedom from morality games and where I can let loose.
The first time I encountered one of the dark events I was elated to see that the dev went all the way and truly allows player choice.
But the crash in tones gets worse and worse the longer the game goes. As if the dev forgot what he wrote the last couple of chapters ago.

One last quick move back to the random encounters before I finally get to the LI-Hotel events in full. While there is a healthy amount of encounters already and the sex scenes are nice, they are also rather repetitive. See the scene once, you have seen them fully. Not at least a random hair/outfit replacement for generic characters, it's exactly the same character, saying the same things and doing the same stuff. Why even use a character creator engine like HS when you not use it's strong points? The scene is already setup, adding random changes would take like 1 hour for 10 girls max and increase the longevity of the exploration tenfold.


Alright, let's come to the LI's.
You have 4 from the start, 1 classic horny girl, one big sister responsibly girl (but not bigboobed), one mischievous little sister (that is a lesbian, but also bi, maybe, maybe not...) and one actually fresh character, a schooled at home, mentally held back, hyper naive girl that was told from her mom that all men are evil.
The harem roster later get's filled out by a nympho angel (but not what you think), 3 fox girls of varing degrees of hornyness and 2 succubi you can hunt and hold in your dungeon.
Oh and one last official LI a biker chick that's rough but with a golden heart. Atleast I guess that cause she is the least fleshed out yet and feels very non-existent currently.

All in all a nice roster and it would generally work well if the dev had actually fully committed to harem idea without pushing too much drama realness into the story.
The relationships progress not instantaneously but still in a nice pace. The use of different level of horny girls allows for a nice pacing between actually having sexual content evenly distributed in the whole playtime, but also not make every girl insta jump on MC's dick once they see him.
Could be a perfect balance... could be.

But again the MC kinda ruins it. While I would accept a handful early scenes of doubt from the MC if going full harem is a good idea, I don't want to hear him whine 10 hours into the game...
Like do it or don't, there is no try.
There is one really hot scene where horny girl:
<spoiler>
pulls MC with his dick in her hand through the whole hotel to show held-back girl and one fox-girl what "her territory" is by fucking MC in front of them. Hot setup, awesome orgy scene. Everything is perfect. But then it ends when all other girls are gone how horny girl get's hurt by MC through the fucking around and that she want's him all to herself but ohh she loves him so much so she can't leave him. And again, worst part is MC goes all soyboy on her and whines himself how bad he is and why he makes her suffer so much... after which he bangs 2 succubi that where living next cell just waiting for masters dick...
And mind you this whole scene happens LONG AFTER the horny girl knows about the "cheating" MC is doing. Either talk about this stuff sooner or stfu and deal with it girl.
Like how can I possibly be taking this seriously?
</spoiler>

The second terrible event is the date night with the bigger sister. But ironically not because it fucks her character up, but rather the little sister character.
<spoiler>
Up to this point I liked the little sister lesbo/bi wingman dynamic even if the turn to love MC route wasn't gold standard it was fine and passable.
But just as a random aside backstory in the date the big sister talks about what her little sister did in school.
Basically teacher proposed little sister better grades for sex and felt her boobs up once.
Then she calls him monkey next day and he calls parents. Sister gets punished with ass slaps. (Guess we are simply ignoring the fact that the parents are still using archaic terrible parenting methods and LITERALLY ABUSING THEIR CHILDREN which is all well and fine...).
Because of that little sister of course had no other choice than to punish this demonic teacher by completely destroying his live by first blackmailing him into doing some drug stuff because of a relationship he has with a student at the school, then first giving him hope and then leaking all the stuff in public, so he loses his job, his family and ends up in jail.
WT-actual-F!
What kind of psycho-bitch am I having in the hotel right now? Get that crazy bitch on the streets asap! I don't need a backstabbing, revenge seeking semi-yandere in my harem!
In one simple aside remark the dev was able to COMPLETLY destroy a character that I had started to like for LITERALLY NOTHING. Not only does this story go against everything the LI had shown up to this point, the reaction of the MC as it beeing justified reactions is even more insult to injury. THE SAME FUCKING MC THAT JUST RAPED A WIFE INFRONT OF HER HUSBAND IS OKEY WITH A WOMEN DESTROYING A MANS LIFE OVER A SIMPLE BOOB GRAB??? YEAH SURE SUN!

Don't get me wrong. I am not against the LI reacting to the teachers actions. The teach was shitty to her, she is allowed to be shitty to him. Leak his relationship right way, perfectly fine. Play a prank on him so he stands naked in the school yard for everyone to see, perfectly fine.
A year long revenge plot for a one boob grad and a FREE PROPOSAL without any blackmail coercing mentioned what so ever? NOT PERFECTLY FINE!

Especially because again, the worst person in this entire story are the PARENTS THAT SLAP THEIR CHILDREN, not the fucking teacher that has sexual relationships with teenagers on a semi-concensing basis.
</spoiler>


Now to my final verdict.
It could have been so good. Really. The whole game could be so nice, allowing a friendly vanilly way and a dark and twisted way to play. The actual gameplay elements could elevate it from just another VN to a very meaty and nice porn game.
But currently the game simply feels just as confused as the MC sometimes says he is. No clear direction of the dev. Lackluster, unpolished content. Terrible story decisions later down the line and a main plot that sounds grand and mysterious, but already shows signs of being so overly complicated that the dev will never be able to actually tie everything together (chuthulu gods, angle-chief having religous cults, hinted at time-travel/multi-dimension theory for the MC?, like pick one mystery and do that well first instead of a giant hoge podge of stuff).

There where times where I was at 4 stars for this game. There were times I was at 1-2 stars for this game.
There is only one reason why it will be a 3 star rating instead of lower. Because I pray that the dev get's his shit together and either actually picks a side he wants this game to develop towards and fixes early content to be in line with that side or adds a major amount of conditional MC reactions towards his internal state so he reacts appropriate depending if he is dark/corrupted or vanilla/hero.

Though to be honest I have very little hope this will ever be realized. There was already a one year long hiatus from the dev on patreon and now i read in the comments that the promised next release is already delayed again with silence from the dev? Not boding well for the future.
But hey maybe we will be able to pickup the scraps in a few years, throw it to our new AI overlords and ask them to make a competent game out of it.

Not the best harem visual novel, not the worst. Several elements of Astral Lust are very derivative. This wouldn't be bad, but it's in many ways worse than the sum of its parts. I like and empathize with many of the characters, which is why it's worse that the main character is mysteriously an asshole to them. Combat feels tacked on. Fetch quests feel like arbitrary road blocks.

The supernatural elements are the biggest disappointment. There's one or two really good scares there, but ultimately the rest of the game uses the concept of eldritch horror in an uninspiring way. The atmosphere is just not rich enough when you're chilling out in the hotel, which is 99% of where the game takes place. Random encounters in the wild are either repetitive or feel like ass-pulls with very little in between. Sanity is too easy to recover, scavenging (a mechanic seemingly borrowed and expanded upon from MIST) is not very engaging and you can go the whole game without doing it if it weren't for arbitrary blocks put up in several story quests, like finding alcohol for Mina or antibiotics for Alice, or being required to build additional rooms in the hotel. This means that going outside is mostly a chore, and that moments there that SHOULD be tense aren't.

The protagonist's relationship with consent is bad even by adult harem game standards. Grace is infantilized to a degree that makes her scenes deeply uncomfortable. I don't know if she's supposed to be secretly more self-aware than we're shown, or if the protagonist is sincerely molesting someone with an obvious mental disorder. Mina's romance route has the player sticking with her purely on the pretense that once her lesbian crush gets rejected she'll have no choice but to pick him. The kinder option is friendship in my opinion, but being given that choice at all feels a little skeevy. Lexi is clearly not as okay with polygamy but the circumstances force her to accept it anyway. When NOT dealing with the main group of girls, the protagonist is okay with doing some pretty monsterous stuff. Blackmail, emotional manipulation, paying for sex with women who are clearly not in a healthy spot. This would be fine if we were playing a game with a villain protagonist, but nothing else seems to indicate to me that he's supposed to come across as ruthless or evil.

After all that, why a three out of five? Well, despite all that, this game never reaches the depths of eroge shovelware. It's consistently interesting, even when the story is offensive or the scares are bland. Most of the worst of it fades to the background. And, it's still early in development despite being over three years old. I think there's room for it to balance the grind and bring back a little spice to the day to day activities, it just needs the will to change a few things.

The story is kinda confusing at first but as progress when I think I understand now it also adding more mysteries that capture my attention and also been played this game for 3 days streak.
The gameplay actually not really bad but the random encounter and card leveling system kinda suck for me but its ok.

The spooky ominous atmosphere, weird and hideous monsters and creature? I can take it, but I just woke up and decided to write this review.
Damn just getting one of the worst nightmare I ever had and I guess I don't want to continue playing this game.

I did like the main story but i hated the lack of freedom, its a sandbox which ticks all the worng boxes making it more kinetic/linear then it should be, i love having choices which is why i never play kinetic or linear storylines i just hate that kind.

Where this fails is like so many other sandbox games, where your forced to do all the LIs storie lines which means you have to fuck em all at some point or even worse forced to do sharing which im really not into, i liked Alice and i sure as hell dont want to share her with a LI i dont like, but questlines forces you to turn her into a BI/Lesbian so Mina can be with her? i dident like Mina at all and sure most defently dident want to help her to have sex with Alice... its just idiotic to force shit like that on the players, even the main story is tied into LIs questlines so you cant even skip anyone, its just the worst way of making quests.

Dont understand why devs cant figure out how to put in a no choice if you dont want a sexual relationship, it would be so easy to do just pick friends only and you could still help them with everything else in their questline just without sex or turning them into a lesbian/bi character which ruins the game and story.

Then theres the virgin scene? lol that was a joke, MC slams hes dick in Alice has 0 pain, 0 blood and she dident even put a dildo in before MC since she dident want to do that while being a virgin so yeah....and theres 0 talk about her being a virgin in the first sex scene ether its stright up a pure standard sex scene like any other.

As for the girls they look ok, they are pretty standard for this art style which hurts it as well since faces arent unique other then haircolors and such and to make it worse theres no real diversity in builds either its pretty much all the same, it just feels a bit to lazzy not having diffrent tit sizes and skin colors and so on.

Animations are also a bit meh, they are not bad but its the standard HS stuff where it looks more like dick going through skin then a hole in a pussy.

Music is a bit bland and boring but atleast theres something instend of nothing.

Choices you might as well forget about its a pure linear sandbox making it a kinetic story, the fake choices also hurt the game alot and they shouldent be in there at all.

Even with the story being pretty good, everything else just drags it down to much which is why i cant do more the 2 stars, one of the biggest reasons was when main story forced me to do Lexis quests and Lexis questline forced me to do Minas questline which went to forcing me into helping her getting to be with MCs girlfriend, im just not into sharing or lesbian stuff so i just couldent play on from that point, game even gives you 3 choices where 2 of them are fake and cant be picked, it simply just forces you to pick help her get with your girlfriend....

And even if you try to avoid it you cant since questline wont advance before you pick the choices dev wants you to pick, in other words forcing the shit, so your have to do the truth or dare game untill you pick the "right" choices which i only see as the worng choices.

Maybe this just isn't my game but I am usually much easier on games than most people are, I don't see how so many people are calling this a masterpiece. It's dull, it's very long, drawn out, and a lot of grinding and going nowhere with story. I like slow burners but not when every day you pass in game feels like filler. Nothing happens, everything is inconsequential, it's just grind grind grind, sleep away the game days doing nothing but getting better cards and hoping that you get lucky. Once you get past the first wall of interesting content it's an extremely long drought. The girls are interesting but it's just not worth it. This game would probably be a couple hours worth of content tops without all of the grinding and just useless days.

This is an unbelievable game. Apart from the renders. which are not exeptional, but they absolutely do their job, The game is simply great. The story line it's awesome, and while the mc's story is not that interesting in my opinion, the other character are well thought, even though they sometimes start a bit clichè. I love the card fighting style, very unique and well managed (And also well balanced). The corruption of the characters is great, the sex scenes are awesome, the pace is good. What can I say? 5/5

I'm really enjoying Astral Lust! The story has me hooked, The animation is smooth and adds to the overall experience.

Renders 5/5
Characters 5/5
Story 5/5
Gameplay 5/5
Animations 5/5

Overall, this is a fantastic game! It easily gets 10 out of 10 from me. The characters are engaging, the story is interesting, Definitely worth checking out!

Review for Astra Lust v0.3.0:

The graphics/renders are from 2015, so it's off to a bad start. I learned the gameplay with 0.2.4, which was already poor, but now it's changing on the fly, and it's not any better. Events are dependent on a random number generator just to drag out gameplay for no reason. I'm sure the developer is "learning a lot", but I'm not going to be a guinea pig. The dev is really just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Halfway through the 0.3.0 update, I started getting tracebacks when trying to save my game, so now I can't save anymore (I'm playing on a PC without any cheats or mods). It's clear that I would have to start over at some point, but this game isn't worth it. I don't think I'd bother playing this game again if it had the completed tag.

Lets just get into it,
Game play is downright amazing, the deck system is refreshingly fun and the enemies all seem to have a unique set of abilites that makes each encounter interesting. 10/10
Story is unexpectedly good. At first I had expected something generic such as the world ended and now youre in a grim struggle to survive and everything sucks. While this is true it has a unique twist and super interesting lore (not well defined lore yet but I love it) 8/10
NSFW content is well... its okay. All of the characters have time in the lime light and their fair share of sexy times. But it feels a little generic. All in all not good not bad 7/10

7+8+10= 25/30 so roughly 4 stars and change.

Very buggy almost unplayble. Android version is crashing after 15 day when you want to sleep. Second thing is random bug ocuring after battle that you can't save game becouse of code error in app. Overall its look like good game but I can't play it with this bugs.

Serious potential on this one.

The good:

• The combat is interesting
• The choices are meaningful without being too obvious what the results will be
• The storyline does not revolve around "My rich and powerful dad doesn't understand me," "I have a magic dick that every human wants immediately," or "I'm Johnny Badass, the biggest badass the world has ever known and I work for a paramilitary organization and/or the mafia despite living at home with my mom and having no money or skills."
• The renders are solid if not spectacular

The fixable:

• I quickly found myself just killing time because I was waiting for events to trigger
• Too easy to hit an instant Game Over screen (this is actually a part of the story so I don't mind it happening but it was just a touch too common for my tastes)
• The models are a bit too same-y. With this many characters I would have liked to have seen more variety in body types, skin color, etc.
• Mina's storyline.

I have faith that the dev could have had a real gem here if they had finished it.

Very good game, nice atmosphere and worldbuilding. I liked the eldritch and cryptic horror theme although horror isn't really something I usually look for, as well as the card turn based combat, which was a first for me but still enjoyed it.

The characters are pretty good but Alice definitely takes the cake so far when it comes to writing and I genuinely felt bad for her at the end of the current update (v.0.2.4a). Lexi is good but not as good as Alice and Mina is so-so. Grace is the least interesting of the main girls to me and I dislike Kiara.

3.5 out of 5 if possible.

The pros:
- World building is very good, cool post apocalyptic modern fantasy vibe with a good amount of horror and mystery mixed in
- Dialogue is strong
- Characters are all very interesting
- Dream sequences and exploration events are all very cool
- Some people have complained about the grind/combat. I didn't find this too bad. The stat grind you can finish in 10 mins or so if you just focus on it, the combat grind to get a good deck is harder because you rely a lot on luck, but I got my 'final' deck within the first couple hours of playtime and never needed to update it to complete the story.

The cons:
- Character design is very average. Alice is the only interestingly designed Main Girl. Main girls all have very similar body types, which may not be your thing.
- Animations are average to subpar for a modern game
- No option to remain loyal to one girl, harem is mandatory (this is only an issue because the girls don't want to be a harem and want 1-on-1 relationships and the MC has to go out of his way to guilt/convince them to be a harem, if it was written different it would be fine).
- Mina's whole storyline makes me feel kind of gross about the MC

Overall it's definitely worth your time to play, I just wouldn't go around recommending it to people as an intro to the western VN genre, especially with games like Once in a Lifetime, which occupy a very similar space but surpass Astral Lust almost across the board.

Yea, so despite my previous thoughts of it being mediocre renpy it is actually one of the fucking best games in it's category.

Story beats every other renpy bullshit to the point I actually read most of this shit (I mean like 60%, I really don't like to read most of the bullshit).

The dialogues between characters are great, sometimes it made me recall similar situations or talks from my life.

Sex scenes were great for me, but that's just mine taste.

There are so many events that it feels like there is always something new, even in repeatable events minimal changes in dialogue or 1 new scene make so much difference!

Cool card battle system mechanics, don't make the same mistake as me and set difficulty on hard, you'll enjoy it much more this way.

Overall 10/10

Good game. Cute girls, hot scenes, decent gameplay loop and even a somewhat interesting story.
Not 5 stars simply because animations are kind of below average, but it's a game I've thoroughly enjoyed and will probably play again when it's finished

If I had to ask for something, it would be more focus on non-vanilla kinks

edit: abandoned, I'm in shambles. I gave it 4/5 but in retrospective it was one of my favorite games

I tried v 0.2.3a

Cool game. The art and writing are good. This is one of the few porn games I've played that actually have a somewhat engaging storyline. The gameplay is solid. It gets a little repetitive, but I didn't mind. There's definitely some weird kinks going on in this; one character has the mind of a child, and another gets off on calling you daddy. If you're into it, then fine; if not, then you may have some trouble. Overrall, tho, very enjoyable.

I really wanted to like this game and give it a higher score, but I can't. The amount of grind required not only for the MC, but for the main girls, is horrendous. The only way to get around the countless clicking for resources is to use a cheat.

The animations aren't bad, but they aren't the greatest either. I'm sure HS has it's limits, but some of the angles the dev uses makes the girls look really stretched out in a lot of the scenes.

Storywise it's not bad for a sandbox game, but needs a lot of work. A lot of the storylines haven't progressed at all since the last time I played the game more than a year ago. I'm not really sure what the dev is waiting for especailly with Grace. She doesn't have any new storyline or events since I played last. I'm not even really sure what the point is of having the dog or cat in the game. No main storylines are connected to them at all. They just seem they are used for fluff in the game.

I'm not really sure how this game is getting a bunch of five star ratings, but in it's current form, it's not really above a 3.5 star rating at this point. With a lot of work for the animations and way more storyline progression this game could get a lot more higher ratings.

Maybe in another year or two this could be one of the better if not best sandbox games that I've played. Good luck to the dev.

EDIT: Just played the newest version and I have to say it's very disappointing. No new developments with the dog or cat storylines. Nothing new with Grace or most of the main girls. This game used to be really good. Maybe in 5 or 6 years you might see some progession with the main story and the main LI's. I'm not really sure how this game is getting 5 stars with the amount of grind and little storyline progression.

Really like this one, the story is great, all of the main and side girls are really well thought out with their own unique personality's, the random encounters of NPCs and other things is a good way of providing more extreme stuff, the dreams where good and bad but mostly insignificant (a few I think have important meaning for the later) I'm hooked on it

No sharing/swinging (pretty obvious, your the only guy, there was one dream I didn't like but it was that far from meaning anything it didn't matter)
No ntr now or in the future, your main and side girls are with you so don't worry about sharing with another guy

Can't wait for more content

(I'm currently a sub on patreon and the Dev is really nice so that's a bonus

v0.2.2b

tl;dr If you dont cheat, there isnt much porn you get with all the resources farming/combat and stat grinding.
You play it for an hour, then you take it out for 2 minutes and put it back in unsatisfied. Then you play it for an hour again... BUT it has a nice story!


Pro:

• Interesting story with a lot of info about it
• Nice girls with a good personality
• Fun and engaging combat

Con:

• Honey select is ugly af and just has its standard movements for sex
  • At least Dev didnt used these seizure like orgasm moves
• One hell of a grind for stats
  • There are 6 stats for MC (physical and mental) which if you dont "cheat" can only raise both categories by one at a day and you get encounter where you can trade them for powerful items and an extra stat (luck).
    • Then the grind beginns again...
  • There are 3-4 stats for the girls which again, you have to grind...
  • Resources, resources, resources!

Overall a very nice game, I liked the gameplay and the story behind it, the girls are very cute and the models are well animated and gorgeous.
It is sometimes a bit grindy, especially during the beginning, but then you are rewarded with some nice story, nice characters and sex scenes.

I will give it 5 stars to encourage the dev to keep on working on it and add even more content.
Good job!