Ren'Py - Completed - Babysitter [Final v0.2.2b] [T4bbo]

I refrained from evaluating until the game was over. I personally liked the game very much. The graphics are very good and acceptable, as well as the animation. And I will rate it with 5 stars. And as for the story. The story is very simple, I just wish there was more development in different directions, but not overloaded. And I will rate it with 4.5 stars.

This game isn't only fantastic, it's also huge.
there are so many paths and combinations of path's you can take - easily hours of playtime which is nice for a VN (which i usually dislike)

you can also get many kinks addressed here, corruption, incest, web girl, big dick, romance, forceful... its all here

I have to say it is one of the most complex game I have play in terms of choices and paths and it is a semi open world.
I enjoy it because of this freedom of choices,

I have play several times to see all the patterns in the story (I hope).

My favorite was Jessica, she was way more lovable than the main girl Christine, I guess the author know that too, because he only uses jessica for UI and banners .

The story is pretty solid, they are some spying and plots, not the type of content you usualy have in adult games.

The game really takes his time all long and it is a good thing, because of that the very end seems way too much rushed and forgot some plots or characters in the way of closure.

I have see some bugs here and there, but it is not dead end for the game.

In short it is a game worth trying and make more than one time.

Okay models, the animations work (played on Android), the story was kind of mediocre and HOLY SHEEEYIT was that ending horrible. Embarassingly I somehow triggered the NTR route in my first playthrough (it's not fun, trust me ). I then downloaded the walkthrough (which is incomplete ) and played the Patreon route, expecting to get a harem ending at the very least, but I haven't tried the other route yet but at the same time I don't think it would make any difference, it feels like the result will still be the same. Getting Christine pregnant might get you a different ending (never been a fan of pregnancy so obviously I didn't bother giving that one a shot). Overall, a solid effort ruined by a rushed ending.

i liked the game/story on the clean path, i saw what the dev tried to do and i hope his next game will be even better.
cant 4-5 star it. there are a fewtoo many grammar issues ( even with the names) but looking at his patreon he is getting proof readers ( yay) and small continuity errors with C route if she doesnt work for silver there is a moment in the end where she quits that job ??
overal. please keep writing & developing, you have the skill/talent for it

Oh Boy! Time for an honest review. I played both routes with their different variations. Here it goes:

Story started out great. It reached its peak at the yacht. Then the magic slowly faded away. In the last two updates, after you meet Christine's mom Monica; there was a huge rush to end the game and concluding a lot of important plots in slideshows during epilogue.

What about the TWO routes? Well the Friend route is worth it, even with rushed ending. Very good romantic end if you stay faithful. But the Horny route is a huge let down. Normally in these type of games, you corrupt a character to end the game in threesome, harem etc. But here, the main center of attention Christine(Chris) leaves you no matter what. WTF?

Graphics and Animation wise, the game offered decent material. The animations are specially very good at times. Static rendered pictures are a mixed bag; ranging from very good to just bad. Some improved over time. Jessica, Sonya and latter on Christine(not at start) have excellent models. Monica looked awful to me.

Finally my main issue with the game: A rushed ending along with a lot of problems that it introduced.

First of all, there are a lot of coding problems. I did exact same things yet got different outcomes. Veruca pregnancy not implemented. I found Chris+Jess doing porn even in Friend route. Also in Friend route, there are no consequences for cheating on Chris after you choose to be exclusive. You can sleep with Jessica few times, Veruca twice, Sonya at the end and also Alyssa even before that. Just don't sleep with Jessica/Monica at the very end on couch. You still get the good ending. Ending of Sonya is so tricky. I got that one where she leaves to find other men most of the time. But in horny route, I got her to stay as partner and have regular sex after I had sex with Veruca twice. I have no idea how the game triggers Sonya's particular ending. There are a lot more irregularities that I'm sure others will find.

Next the missed opportunity to explore the main plot of framing Silver and his group farther with more involvement of Veruca and specially Alyssa. You get only one chance to bang Alyssa, and both Routes in walkthrough tells you to ignore it. If you do that then there's no more content with her apart from some talks. What was the point of creating a great looking model for her anyway. Sonya could have had more content.

And finally Monica. There was almost no build up. Game pointed out that she always had crush on her brother, so why not. Bang your niece's mother! There could have been a lot more content surrounding her and her coming to terms with MC's relationship with Chris. But a quick fuck it is! Fan Service imo.

That's enough babble. At times it was a 4 or even 4.5 game for me. But when I consider the whole game; specially how it was rushed to finish while the Dev started a new game; I have to say I am disappointed. Could have been great. 3/5 it is.

P.S. I hope the next game gets full attention from start to finish.

Some spoilers ahead.

I think Babysitter’s most glaring weakness is pacing. In the beginning of the game, the pacing is strong. There are not only choices which shape the plot of the story and the characters in it, there are optional, lesser choices that unlock hidden content and even some collectible things to find. These extras serve not only their face value function but, being early in the game, they serve to stretch out the run time of the first act. As a result, the relationship you form with your niece feels believable. It’s a slow burn from her questioning whether it’s wrong to have these feelings to eventually trusting and loving the protagonist, and that’s due to good pacing, strengthened by the aforementioned story devices.

Where I think the story had its biggest error in pacing at the boat, but not for the reasons a lot of people are mentioning. By all rights, the boat should’ve been the climax of the story. Not only is it the location which all of the characters discuss and where all of the story’s big players converge, but it’s where the pacing takes a dramatic shift. No longer are there any gradual consequences or stat farming—once you’re on the boat, you see the effects of your choices instantly, and the options available to you are determined by the stats you’ve acquired and the relationship choices you’ve made up to this point. Once the player’s on the boat, the pacing changes from cycles of action and repose to just action-action-action. This would be good pacing for a climax, but the boat is not the climax.

After peaking, the story awkwardly wanders in normalcy for a bit, decreasing in tension, before the climax happens at a bar of all places. At this bar, the story’s central plot (the investigation) and its central relationship (between you, Robert/Steele, and the niece) both come to a head, and it feels bad. Not only does this bar event kind of come out of nowhere and come after a location which should’ve held the climax, but it feels bad as a climax because none of your choices really matter and nothing decided at the bar immediately leads into a conclusion. There are, I believe, just two outcomes of the bar location, and there’s no way your character stats will be close enough by this point that any choice you make at the bar will make the difference in which outcome you see.

The final pacing issue comes in the conclusion, which comes a little awkwardly as both a trip to a resort which the player acts out at a regular pace, and also as a summary epilogue, after the resort. The pacing here feels inappropriate because the story at the resort is told in a way that makes it feel like the action and tension are increasing—despite already having 1.5 climaxes in the story. I believe this was done because the author wanted to introduce one more “romantic” character, but the pacing of the tryst is so different from any other romance in the game (and the relationship in general feels empty and out of character), that the decision to ruin the pacing yet again just for a weak character feels so frustrating.

Despite all of my criticisms regarding its pace, I still believe Babysitter is above average in the areas of setting and character graphics, overall story, player interaction, and so many other areas. I’ve played a lot of games on this site and seen a lot of stories and, for as fresh as my frustrations and disappointment are regarding Babysitter’s ending, I would be lying to myself if I said the game overall was just an average experience—let alone below average, as some others have reacted to this last patch. For these reasons, I must give the game at least 4 stars.

I personally am giving this game 5 stars. Not necessarily for the game itself but for the path it set me on as well as for the help T4bbo has given me over the time I've known him in the creation of my own game.

I found this game by chance while on YouTube. I forget what exactly I was looking for but a play through of the early part of the game was suggested. I checked it and I really liked it. I hadn't really paid much attention to the story at first, it was for the graphics/renders that I was seeing. As a big comic book fan when I was a kid and have always wanted to do my own comic book, it got those gears going. Plus it also reminded me of the movie big with the whole 'interactive comic book' vibe. So I got into it quite a bit. Once I started paying attention to everything, and realizing I could do this, my path was set(though, definitely have had my bumps and bruises so far along the way).

The game itself, I've always liked the rendering. You can tell the improvement from the start of the game til the very end. T4bbo has always put a lot of time into getting better with his rendering and it shows. Some think it's as easy as just popping a character in a scene and hit render. No, it isn't that easy. It's actually a pain in the ass because you have to make sure each render is set up correctly and your lighting is good and your camera is set for the right DOF.....if not, and you're batch rendering, you just wasted a lot of time rendering junk and having to go back and rerender stuff. So I think presentation wise, he has always done a great job on that end.

The models....For the most part I think the models were fine. He improved Christine as the game went on as well as Sonya. The male models were a little 'eh', but were you playing this thing for the male models? I know I wasn't. Monica I was a little disappointed in.....she was certainly improved from the first time we saw her. If she's supposed to be around 50, then I fully understand the choices that were made with her....but if she's only supposed to be slightly older than the MC, she's either aged way too much or did A LOT of hard drugs. Again though, I don't know what her age was supposed to be. That being said, she's still very much approved upon from the first time we saw her.

The writing. This is where it fell apart for me. Initially, I didn't mind it. It was a little silly, but hey, it's a game. I was able to suspend my disbelief. I was ok up until the final writer change. The personalities of the characters changed and either said or did things I don't think had the writing stay the same. This was out of T4bbo's hands though since there were some issues going on. Life happens. This isn't to say the new writer was a bad choice. Just that the writing style didn't match the characters or the game. The old writer was brought back as an editor to try and keep the flow going. The damage was done though. Even before the switch though, there were certainly holes in the writing...which happens. If you really stop and think about it, the fact they were able to pull off this story line with the limited character line up they had is impressive. Though, the ending did seem rushed. I think between being late on releases and burnout from the game, might have been inevitable. He has stated about doing some more content post completion depending on the feedback from his patrons. So maybe if given time and a more relaxed deadline, maybe some of the loose ends can be tied up properly.

Character development. This was probably my biggest issue. While the MC and Christine were the stars of the game, the biggest character development was Jessica and probably followed by Sonya. I thought too many times that when it seemed Christine was making progress, she was acting like a naive twit again. The MC, while he had his moments, kinda felt the same. Jessica was struggling with her sexuality through the game but was built up. Sonya was weak in the beginning and wound up becoming a strong woman who knew what she wanted to do. I didn't get that with MC or Christine(keep in mind, I did like both characters, but some of the writing for them was just weak). As for Silver, Robert and Paul.....these have to be 3 of the dumbest criminals I have ever encountered in a game, book or movie, lol. And that might have been the intent because none of them were made to look very bright. Before the ending, you get that Silver had been doing seedy stuff for awhile, but wondered how since he's kind of a dipshit, lol. Paul is just worse. Robert, you can kinda see because he is more portrayed as a street level thug who thinks he's bigtime only to be proven how smalltime he really is.

The game certainly had it's good points as well as it's negative ones. The positives definitely outweigh the negative I think by a large margin. Certainly some lessons to be taken into the next game to try and avoid. As for me, because this was the first game that exposed me to this genre, it will have a significant meaning for me. As well as the help T4bbo has given me with the creation of my game. Some of you bash the guy, but don't realize he's actually a pretty cool dude and has been very giving when he doesn't have to be.

-ReturnofPoncho

First of all Kudos to the dev for at least completing the game, now on to the rankings...

3/5 Story - The story started interesting, and while I despise NTR, the routes to take to avoid it, and the joke scenarios (hello shark) were funny and well done. The romance with the different characters was well done as well... That said the endings just feel rushed and uninspired, not sure if the dev lost interest, or got too busy with his new game. None of the issues brought up got resolved in a satisfying way... Jess ending with Chris ? Nope, Monica romance ? Nope, Veruca pregnant ? Nope... etc...

3/5 Graphics - I liked the models despite most feeling they are generic Daz models you can buy without any alterations, however the males are awful... dropping the score considerably... the MC is never shown except that dumb gross beard, Silver is using the shitty "Russel" model... and there is ugly as sin Robert... eww.... The reason the game goes back up to 3 stars is the animations... lots of people hate these "stock" animations that are a loop, but honestly they are the smoothest ones, and work well for porn games, I am fan of them.

3/5 Characters - the characters while having well written personalities, which should net the game a higher score in this category... are stringed along by a dumb plot (mostly the NTR routes)... the girls honestly swallow such HUGE stupid pills you'd think they choked to death and got replaced by blow-up dolls instead... they fare a lot better on the romance paths, but you have to take the entire game in perspective when rating.

Kudos to T4bbo for complecancel the game.
So there's no need to suffer anymore trough the story. Found this game just recently and it was intriguing but lost it all after a while. Story was easy to read and enjoyable no engrish stuff.

Renders were ok, used models not overused but kinda ugly sometimes. Animations were good though.

Seems to be the devs first work and therefore it's really enjoyable but no real need to replay the stuff. Story is too twisted and even some minor decisions have strange outcomes.

Better to end it here instead mutating it into a huge mess. Will try the new game.

Up to before the yacht I really enjoyed the game, the "enjoyment" rate was quite high, about 3.5-4 stars and I was hopeful with what could happen in all the routes. Unfortunately from the yacht the game changed too much. It was not enjoyment anymore but frustration and disappointment.
What could have been a great game, with hot scenes, nice corruption, that I hoped would progress into sharing, bdsm, prostitution etc, became a boring game, with little of that and rushed scenes, I felt the Dev wanted to finish it and destroyed all the possibilities that this game, up until before the yacht has presented. The last few updates I just extracted the CG, sure a few nice animations, and a couple of hot CG, but not the CG I hoped for.
Enjoyment rate is 1 (terrible) this because I didn't enjoy it at all and because of the high expectation that the game did have up to the yacht.

A good start, followed by a faceplant into a blender.

Following this game has been an exercise in patience. The content and development were good, great even until about midway through the project. While the quality of renders and occasionally the writing were janky in the early versions, it was still nowhere near as bad as other games trying to hit their stride. Once it did, it was amazing for a while; regular updates, good quality writing, constantly improving renders and some creativity with the setting all made for an exciting experience, and had me hooked for the next version.
Then came a sharp cut. Coincidentally when the creator announced a second game. The head writer "disappeared" and had to be replaced, deadlines were missed and communcation was less than stellar. To this day the development process has not recovered. I cannot rid myself of that niggling feeling that this project has simply been placed on life support until the fanbase migrates to the newer game.
While the renders are likely better than ever by now, a product of experience no doubt, the writing and story lacks soul. and that can't be countered by pretty pictures in this medium. If I just want to skip to the naughty pics, I hit up sadpanda and spare me the trouble.
That said, you will get a good experience playing this game, just do not expect anything from the updates, you will be disappointed. I cannot rate the game higher than average as a result, since the ending tends to stick with me. I just wish that the dev would stick the landing on this one, but at this point, I cannot help bout doubt his willingness to do so. I am certain the team could do it, they just no longer seem to care enough. This has been one of the biggest disappointments in western eroge. Not because it is bad, mind you, but because it could have been, and used to be, so much better.

I spent few hours playing, but I found this game very mediocre.
Mediocre in the animation, storyline, character building, sexual tension.
I see it is constantly updated but still the backbone of the game is not as intriguing and charismatic like other titles.

I appreciate the developer work though

_Babysitter_ has outstanding features and mediocre elements; in the round it is a flawed game that is probably worth your time (with certain caveats).

The game is highly fappable... but getting there requires _hours_ of fairly dedicated work with a walkthrough.

Its strengths are largely the flipside of its weaknesses:

• it is enormous -- so enormous that seeing even a slice of everything requires a walkthrough;
• semi-open world elements and a zillion variables make it very replayable, but also make setting up scenes labour-intensive;
• the character art is good -- but the backgrounds and animations are less impressive until late in the game;
• the two main girls -- Christine and Jessica -- are interesting characters, but (as others have noted) the remainder are clichés.

IMHO, the semi-open world design added nothing to the game and greatly over-complicated it. It was unnecessary.

I hope the dev learns from the experience of creating this game, and applies those lessons in his/her next project. I will follow it with interest, and recommend that you do the same.

excellent work!

voyeur, cheating, Girlfriend sex, secretary sex, incest or NTR many fetishes are here combined
just playing the game once doesn't end it
you have so many options how to game could play out there is something for everyone if you go step by step with the walkthrough or go random its nice

I play this game for 8 th time and I still love it the MC can get the guy s or the guys can get the MC its nice to feel the experience
Its kinky full of fetishes

This game is a Cliché'd mess featuring "The Gentleman", the "No Life Dad"/Creeper, the slutty friend, the weinstein, and the magical cock. (Check out this thread if you want a deep dive into all of these.

Clichés aren't always bad, in fact, they can sometimes even be good. But not in this case. It just kind of felt "paint-by-numbers" without much new or interesting in it. The random clicking around the house to navigate was also very annoying. As another reviewer said, if this had been the first game I played, I might have liked it more. As it is, life is too short and there are too many other games out there to continue with this one.

A few key points:

Why did Sonya's look change so drastically after the meeting with Mr. Silver? It was very weird and kind of distracting.

Every dude the MC met the MC hated (and you had no choice about it, the thoughts were pushed across your screen without input). I mean, the MC even hated some high school punk who Christine had some partial make out session with way before the start of the game. I find alpha-rage-jealousy to be very off putting, I want my characters to be strong of will and mind. Un-restrained Jealousy is a sign of weakness.

I liked the truth or dare scene. It was well put together and pretty hot. Oddly I haven't run into a truth or dare scene in other games. So well done there!

The sex progression is slow and I didn't enjoy the characters or the writing style in general. I'm not exactly sure what it was exactly that put me off. I think the white knight good guy love route feels icky to me because it's so sentimental and impossible. The bad guy horny route felt dumb as well and not in a passable way like some other games.

I quit playing right at the start of the second day. The walkthrough said to go to the bathroom and use the toilet and I spent about a minute clicking around just trying to figure out where it was. The actual game didn't give any indication as to what I was supposed to do. I'm somewhat interested to see where the story goes, but I just can't deal with the awful user experience.

Pros:

The English is competent. I didn't see any spelling or grammar errors.

The textbox is custom and looks nice. It scales to the height of the text too which is cool and I haven't seen it before. One minor gripe is it is only a tiny bit smaller at one line than at two, so it can be a little annoying if you read as fast as I do with the top of the box constantly jumping up and down. Better in my opinion would be to make the minimum box size equal to two lines of text so it only rescales for three or more. It's very small anyway even at two lines.

Meh:

The renders are nothing special and somewhat low-res, but not ugly.


Cons

The intro background story has about a page worth of flying text you have to read as it moves by without the option to pause. You know, Ren'Py has this built-in system for text which allow the reader to read at their own pace. Why would you think it's a good idea to introduce your game this way? I almost stopped literally 20 seconds in.

The navigation system is awful and moving around is an unintuitive nightmare. It's the worst I've ever seen, hands down. A system like this is unnecessary in the first place but if you insist on it, at least provide a menu to make navigation reasonable and give text popups when you mouse-over doors, etc. It probably took me on average about 15 clicks to get from one place to another because the layout makes no sense and there's almost zero guidance.

You are just left to wander around with little or no indication what you should be doing. Good luck figuring it out without a walkthrough. And the developer apparently disabled the text history (it's not in the menu anyway) which makes it worse once you've starting moving around the house and can't figure out what it is you're looking for.

There are a lot of text buttons you have to click on for no reason. IE, not an actual choice, just something that makes me take my hand off the enter key, move the mouse, and click so I can go back to reading. It's a pointless chore.

Whether you like incest and/or NTR there's a ton of good content here.

I'll get my 2 cons out of the way first.
The biggest one is how reliant on a walkthrough you'll be. I'm much more a fan of having key decisions effect the course of events rather than the kinda of "oh you don't have enough of these points so this is going to happen rather than the thing you wanted" style... navigating even just your apartment each day is a bit of a chore, oh you've woken up well click to turn around, click the wardrobe, put on trousers, click to the next room - and the layout is super annoying until you get used to it ... basically I think it would have been better as more of a true visual novel and then maybe you'd be less reliant on having to use a walkthrough to be looking at erotic games or spying on people at the right times and stuff ... basically, playing the game is no fun and a chore, but the story and content do make it worthwhile, but that aspect still left me feeling grumpy... I sort of feel if you ever really need a walkthrough to see the content you want to see then a game has been poorly designed.
The second much lesser complaint is just that it gets a bit buggy near the end of the current content, it didn't cause me any major issues you can just "ignore" your way through it and I think it's mainly just due to missing images from the scenes but it happened on each playthrough I tried with various routes (to greater/lesser degrees) so is probably worth mentioning - but I'm sure will be fixed in future updates.

But the pros are strong.
The plot and writing are great, I loved the corruption of your niece, not so slow as to be boring, but slow enough to let things nicely cook... though thinking about it I've got no idea why the game is called the babysitter, sure I used a mod to restore being the uncle, but even if I wasn't there's no baby for her to possibly sit and she gets 1 of 2 jobs pretty much straight away anyway.
The renders and animations and everything are solid no complaints there.
There's a ton of content, as it's only 0.2 I didn't expect it to go on for nearly as long as it did (I should have learned by now to not pay attention to version numbers), I got to what I thought would be the end of the game and it kept going, haha.
There's some different branches too. The 2 main paths involve her having a completely different daytime life, then in each you can try to get her, or someone else might and then there's other characters to maybe throw in the mix... personally I think if you're after NTR the corporate route probably pulls it off better, and if you're not then I liked her going to work with her friend as those 2 dressing up and stuff was nice to see and was ultimately better for my tastes.

So yeah, good story, well written, good characters, mega hot, buuuut a bit annoying to play and you should definitely look at the walkthrough to get your desired outcomes... I'll definitely play a full release of it and hopefully someone would make a walkthrough mod to go with it then as constantly flicking out of the game does ruin things a little.

I don't know... i have no hate of the game. Actually i loved it. NTR does bothers me a lot so i played "good uncle and corrupting uncle" routes.
In my eyes Christine character is adorable , her naivety and shyness were very charming. Yes she did appear to have some slutty tendencies but her persona seems to be emanating faithfulness, the way she struggles with her jealousy but still keeping it in check by staying loyal and trying to see (find/fix/) mistakes says a lot about her persona, which i have appreciation for. She was using words "i love y.." "always yours" are really fitting her. I hope to see more of the same.

Jessica on the other hand.. her brain screams "love me!" not "whore me" despite what others seem to want or see in her. She longs for being wanted, belonging to someone and not to be tossed from one to another like rag doll. She is very envious about Christine relationship with her uncle ,on subconscious level and wan't what she has.And she is definitely in love with uncle and Christine, she just cant understand whats happening. Her ending up with Christine and uncle in love triangle only seem right fitting , after a lot of crying and her opening to them and realizing her real desires with help from "uncle" who would bring her to the ground and kinda adopt her (knowing that he is more mature with his thinking and has insight into her feelings and persona) , but seems like he might need some help.. which is where "mom" jumps in..

Mom.. i dont know plans , but i do have feeling that after "taking in" situation and realizing her daughter feelings and knowing that it would simply be devastating if she goes against whats happening , (knowing that she already supported her and accepting when she thought that Christine was lesbian) in fact i think it would be liberating to find out about the "love triangle" and not only lesbian
And as most "emphases on most" mothers do... They HELP.. so . she could be the real game changer for Jessica and help her ground down and make her understand that she can be loved and accepted by uncle and Christine