HTML - Back to Freedom [v0.40] [Bald Games]

BACK 2 FREEDOM:
(some spoilers)
[reminds me of "Desertstalker" (Renpy)--if you tried that & liked it, you'll like this one, many things in common] [written early on, changes later]

OK to be fair, tried this once (a long time ago?) & gave up on it.
Maybe it was the Ex-con thing---in both stories & RL, Ex-con stories typically don't start *OR* end well.
[people can brand someone for *LIFE*, just b/c of *ONE* mistake!]

Now I'm older, & maybe I understand a little better that *NOBODY* is perfect---not IRL, & not an any realistic story.

I've tried a lot of HTML stuff, & 90% of it is TOTAL CRAP. (another 8% is partial crap..)
This is one of those very *VERY* rare gems of the 2%.

Fair warning (dev mentions this, worth repeating) this is *NOT* like most games, not possible to get all girl or all content in one play-through; As most scenes are worth seeing, gives it longer play-ability (often no "wrong" choice, just different ones)

1ST, what I like:
-- Generally not a fan of real porn clips, but this dev actually does a VERY good job w them: Applicable to the scene being described, decent quality, not obtrusive (you can glance at them & then still continue reading if you wish! )
-- OMG *FAR* far too many these days have some kind of beta M MC who isn't good at anything! [who wants to be a looser?!?]
THIS GUY HAS SOME SKILLS! (common ex-military type--REALISTIC!)
On same note, *REALLY *HATE* devs who force the MC to fight---& then get his ass kicked! [ugh, DELETE!] (HINT DEVS: either NO fighting, or FIGHT & WIN!!!)
-- CHOICES. YES! A dev who understands that choices should MATTER!!! [otherwise, read a book/watch porn; CHOICES MAKE IT INTERESTING!!!] THIS DEV does a very good job with choices---kudos!
-- REALISTIC! So much out there is bad logic/ totally unrealistic BS
-- $$$ (UGH so sick of devs who give MALE MCs almost nothing for $/job, & all you want to do is cheat!) This guy's NOT rich, but, he's not poor either--for a non-college degree job he does pretty good--HINT: has a full time live-in maid (5 days/7)
People act like you can't get a decent job w/o a degree, but that's *NOT* true, you just need skills & this guy is a good example!
--"nice" he doesn't go around being mean & cruel &/or killing people, mostly fair w everybody (or tries, not always possible even IRL) Example, tries to be good to wife & kids (even maid! lol!)
-"Harem"--can have more than 1 girl [don't know why, but *NEVER* seen game where MC can have more than 1 wife! (many many cases in actual RL history...) Too much tradition???]
-- [later]"She still fights her submissive instinct. She doesn't want to do something she considered humiliating all her life but can't help it. In the end, no one can fight their nature."
--Multiple "O"s (hey women have it GOOD!)
-- " You are the bomb itself, Abigail. And you're always about to explode. "---LOL!!! OMG! totally cracked me up!!!

Sidenote: didn't understand the "power fantasy" reference; No superpowers,--He's just a mortal human man, not rich, not some big government leader, He doesn't even own a company or lead a gang! [not 2 D15 yet, but so far seems not applicable]
[I checked & still a lot of char "haven't met" yet, so maybe something will change?]

--Touches on a # of VERY real issues Prison, 4 example: Most who've never been inside, have no idea what a wild EVIL jungle it can be. "the guards were all bought & did nothing to stop it" (sad, but often true!)
-- CONSENSUAL. (No RAPE or SLEEP BS! some teasing about blackmail, but none yet so far..)
[I have never, *EVER* understand why some hate incest, but accept rape; How can that even make sense?!?]
"just a little longer, .. Please.."
Women get mad @ men who don't spend enough time w family, but WOMEN often work too much, & do the SAME THING!
--(also real) Rich kids often run wild & get away w anything b/c parents are too busy don't care, & don't discipline
Sidenote: Current POTUS was about to be indicted for FRAUD when won election! (how's that for "power fantasy"?!?)
-- "There's a difference between lying and not telling the whole truth."---AGREED!!! Many MANY things IRL don't know the full truth about.

REF: BFW: Later on, MC gets choice to REJECT her teases & seduction, & do Right Thing! (Best Friend's Wife!!! )
[so, mistake, but not forced to continue it] + .5*


DID NOT LIKE (**Spoilers**)
--Generally not a fan of cheating, *however*, here it's described an being "open marriage" they can be with others as long as their meeting their own needs 1st. [husband meets wife's needs 1st, wife meets his needs 1st, my paraphrase]
HOWEVER, player should always have *OPTION* who MC messes around with. (maybe it's the dev's power fantasy, not the MC?)
Example: His best friend (M) is married & has a hot wife, & she basically seduces him. (NO OPTION TO SAY NO!)
Even if you're ok w the "open marriage thing" this is his *CLOSE FRIEND* & they're MARRIED!!
[totally wrong, but again, no option] -1*
REF: *BFW.

--dev uses "PERV" way too much! UGH! [if you're trying on clothes at the store, you want to see how the back looks! are you perving yourself?!? UGH.] Dildo, sex toys, cam shows, women are the *REAL* perverts! lol!
Besides, it's *NOT* 1-sided, the women want it as much as he does! (often MORE, but again, nobody call them PERVERTS, even when they are...) EITHER give it back (name calling) or, don't allow it at all. [EXTREMELY disrespectful!! Many parents/bosses/teachers/etc would NOT allow that IRL! ]
BOSS: "Blanche: You deserve a reward, .... And to be honest, I'm tired of fighting my feelings. I want this. Please don't deny me. "
--Massage/lotion: Only allows 1 option, should be allowed to do multiple areas, more realistic, & hey, you need SUNSCREEN EVERYWHERE! [no, not a PERV thing, if women get wet from a good massage, don't blame the man!]
--says "sorry" too much (NOT possible to please everybody, not our reason in life, have to pick & choose how we spend our time & energy, JUST as IRL!!)

--NURSE. (1 more w the "NO OPTION")

--ATTACK: SHOULD'VE GIVEN MC OPTION TO BE HONEST W FAMILY! (they'll want answers if he's gone or DIES etc...)

--MOB BOSS: Very bad situation, many bad/illegal things could happen [where's the "power fantasy"?! MC POWERLESS here!]
[was going to submit here, but now think should wait to see how ends...]

--Wish there was more choices; Good early on, but then start to get forced into situations & people. (ie, no choice)
--UGH. (what did I say about CHOICES?!?) -->> the bosses' daughter?!? UGH! so WRONG & SO STUPID!!! [good way to get fired or accused of RAPE!!!]

-->> Given mob situation, should've used $$$ to get BULLETPROOF VEST! (no good to anybody DEAD!)

--Can discipline boss daughter, but NO OPTION (again) to discipline own kids when misbehave

--UGH. Take back what I said early on, there *ARE* mini-games!
(MC is supposed to be the expert, *NOT* player!!) NO WAY TO SKIP! :-( [some are ok, but some are difficult]

--ANAL should *ALWAYS* be a choice, not everybody is into that

--way way ***WAY*** too nice to people that are mean/rude to him! [includes women]

--Brenna: (TOTAL BITCH COP!) SHE treats him like dirt; HE needs to give back what she's shoveling!!! [THIS is a "POWER FANTASY?!?" I DON'T THINK SO!!! ] (FEW OPTIONS & THEY ALL SUCK!)

--Spends more time & $ on other girls, than his OWN DAUGHTERS! [FORCED!]

Kelsi: [FINAL EXAMPLE] Dev **FORCES** MC into relationship w her, even though she's engaged! [if it's a "power fantasy," it's the dev's/creator's fantasy, NOT the player!] NOT ENOUGH CHOICES!!!

Dev knows *NOTHING* about girls that have been through trama (like almost raped!) LAST thing girl like that wants to do is get sexual w someone else... [but again, NO OPTIONS!!! ] {Hint: They need LOVE & AFFECTION, NOT SEX!}

Most of early part, 4*; but there's a *LOT* of negative (see above) in fact, even if it were possible IRL, many *FORCED* choices could be VERY VERY BAD! [wind up dead/in prison/accused of date rape/etc]
3* [I pushed it, & went to D20;]


Could've been 4+* if written better, & player allowed to make better choices.

this is a very good game with two diffeent routes. Whether you take one route or the other, or some kind of both rouge, the game has a lot of anal sex, which is amazing if you are into it, and many very hot scenes.

The game presents two main routes: Love and Corruption. However, the Love route sometimes feels less like a genuine romance and more like you're pushing the characters toward corruption instead. Secondly, the game leans heavily into anal porn, with 70-80% of the gallery videos focusing on anal scenes. If you're into corruption and anal, you might like it. Personally, though, it's not for me

Sets the standard for what very html game should aim to acheive, abundant content, decent writing if very male dom fantasy focused, decent video sizes.
A go to for html real porn.
Only downside: no video sound.

Story is very good to be honest. Surely need to play more then one time to see everything. If you have time go for it... Sandbox did not take my attetion like story. Good job with achievements. Hopefully update frequently.

Honestly, a really great game with good actresses and clips chosen. The only annoying part is the fear of missing out from the choices i made days ago so its too much of a hassle to reload to get an outcome i would have preferred. However with recent mention of a new game+ mode i'm sure this would be help a lot for me. Either way the fact that there is a fomo feeling means that each choice is impactful and has an actual effect on the story. I do wish there was an option to skip the minigames or the slow text part because I find myself just staring at my screen waiting for me being able to continue playing.

It's such a grind and luck-dependent game. I was expecting something good but not really cup of my tea gameplay wise. And story wise it's just average. The unskippable minigames halt the replayability for me because it's just a waste of time. All in all it's just a quick cash grab for their patreons. Not for me.

Love this game. Hope you have more like it. Some games I have tried are too text based that one feels they are not immersed in the story enough that it gets boring. I have played this story many times and each time I love the experience.

Pros: Models and lewd scenes are well curated and plentiful. Story and dialogue are passable (it's an html smut game, I don't expect much).

Cons: Somewhat opaque design makes pursuing some love interests difficult. Couple that with a lot of unskippable content for other characters and it often becomes a pretty tedious slog.

- Annoying as hell, drawn-out, unskippable minigames.
- Choices based purely on luck
- Content lock-out hinging on multiple, insignificant variables.
- Meh visuals.
- Painful dialogue.
- Riddled with grammatical errors and typos.

dev wasnt fooling around they said this is a male power fantasy game fr.
loving wife? nice cars? fucking jacked and know how to kick asses? breedable daughters??? this game has it all. you can be super obsessive and possessive, the kind of man people on twitter or reddit would call an insecure, creepy, man-child incel and boy it feels GOOD. 5/5 we need more games like this.

This game feels fun, kinks and story are pretty nice and pacing is ok, but it gets uglier the more you play. Locking routes left and right, tiring repeating minigames and luck based events are all here for the one obvious reason: the developer REALLY wants you to become a patreon supporter. Otherwise you should prepare for dozens upon dozens hours of grind.

Overall 2/5

I Love this game.
This was my first "Real Porn" game and i was bit spectical at first but now this is one of my all time favorite porn game.
Story is actually good and interesting, characters serve story well, yes there are some classic porn logic but who cares.
i Really cant wait to see this be complete and i'm sure Bald Games next game will be also fantastic.
5/5 game.

One of the best HTML games I've played. The characters have depth and there's a lot of 'opportunity costs' of if you do one thing you can't do another. It's hard to juggle, but at the same time, feels well made. Very much a power fantasy, but it's a game, so.

Possibly the most run of the mill HTML game I've played yet.

It has a love/lust system based on choices at the end of dialogues which essentially serves to gate keep which girls clips you can watch, and 'interactive' lewd scenes where you get to pick scenes that is basically mindless.

That's basically the whole game, it's barely a step above a kinetic novel, which isn't inherently bad and could work with good writing and good scenes, but the scenes are mostly generic with very standard models offering little variety, that you've probably all seen before and the writing is mostly uninspired and riddled with porn logic.

Altogether a forgettable game but if standard 90's porn actress is your type you might wanna mindlessly click through for a quick fap, not much else to do here.

I was roughly OK with this till day mid-twenties. To be sure, this is drowning in a supernaturally talented/lucky MC that every woman wants to be with. It has grind elements and minigames. With Twinehacker/Sugarcube, I could brute force my way past most of it. And what was lost to the bizarre gatekeeping in this game, I simply didn't care. Nothing is compelling enough to warrant multiple replays, let alone the mental gymnastics involved in keeping track of where the gate keeping happens and how you could avoid it happening.

As another review mentioned, you'll run into things along the lines of "you would have had to have done something with this person on Day 13 to be able to use these 3 options with them on Day 24" or "There would have been a lot different scene on Day 28 if you had gotten them pregnant on Day 18". They constantly have these orange circle question mark icons that initially are helpful and later on seem helpful and a slap in the face. I understand that this is supposed to incentivize multiple playthroughs, but I was TRYING to impregnate all of them and I cannot FATHOM how I missed Jillian unless I chose someone with more priority on that day and unknowingly blew my only chance at that option.

I'll wager that insight on stuff like this is outlined in the Official Game Guide you can get for $2.00. If it isn't, then it's worse than I thought. Realistically, they aren't asking for TOO much. For $10, you can unlock all the useful cheats. But it still smacks of the manipulative and predatory tactics in mobile games and that Activision and Ubisoft love to try to put in their games to bring that Mobile money to PC Gaming. But it's less predatory in this one than in other recently reviewed HTML games by me.

What brought me to a stop to write this review before even finishing this to the current update is the storyline for the MC and Kelsi that starts in the Day 20-ish range. For a guy that developed a city-wide reputation for being a problem solver and always knowing what to do and gets things done. I cannot abide by the sudden idiocy in his reaction to Kelsi. Literally, he's doing what he gave his daughters and Kelsi shit for earlier on in the game. And it's ironically occurring at the same time that he gets caught betraying someone important to him. The amount of willing suspension of disbelief expected of me to swallow this not just 180 degree reversal of character trait but a sudden and isolated regression of skills and mental faculties as a human... but mostly JUST for the Kelsi storyline at this point. I feel like I'm supposed to not question this and just ride with it like it's character growth because he's also written as being completely blind to how he should handle his wife around this same time. Again, completely unlike this character has been 99.9% of the time up to this point. I just don't believe for a second that he would waste his time on this whole convoluted scheme. I think he would just be like, "Kelsi, I just want you to be happy. If you feel this is your happy, then by all means." And then when/if it fails, if it does, he'll weigh whether he should help her again. I'm sure I'm biased here, since I always kicked Kelsi to the curb - I didn't need another Gina.

Hell, I stopped liking Being a DIK because I felt the game jumped the shark after the INTERMISSION release or whatever it was. So maybe I just don't like this game because I can't easily see all I want to see playing it and will just cheat to unlock the Gallery and stop playing it. Maybe I'm the only one that has issues with a smart MC suddenly acting like an idiot for two new developments in existing storylines. It just undermines an already precariously held together foundation, imo.

I'm hanging on by a thread with this one. Will update if I end up with more to say or somehow can make this wall of text make more sense.

One of the best games / VNs around. Storyline has a bit of everything and all options can get really complex. I tend to cheat on these games but this one is really worth it to go over and over discovering new paths. Besides of good quality of writing, engagement and complexity, it's not grindy but with enough difficulty to find different scenes/storylines.
Last but not least, dev is really engaged in the community and has very regular feedback on anything. Keep it up!

Writing: 9/10
Imagery: 9/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Kinks: 8/10
Overall: 9/10

Back to fucking every woman you come across.

Your wife, your daughters, your maid, your boss, your secretary, your boss's daughter, your daughter's rival, your wive's mother, the list goes on and on. Luckily our ex-military man, hardened further from his time in prison, can handle them all and still have enough energy to go toe to toe with Ivan Drago.

While that might sound like a lot, trust me when I say the story is actually really well written. Normally I will blast past the stories in these real life porn games since they are barely worth the time, but here I was intrigued by the MC. The choices on how you can direct him are really in line with how I actually would react to some of these situations myself, which helps put you in the character's shoes and it is because of this I wanted to know more.

I've played through the current version of this game, 0.31, around 5 times now. Sometimes as a pure good guy, sometimes as a corrupted jerk, and other times as a huge prude who only bangs his wife while fighting off the advances of all the other girls who approach him sexually. While there might not be a big difference between the paths, the choices available do depend on your level of corruption and how far you have gone with the women. So even the last path mentioned can have its own unique moments.

Now one other thing I want to say is that whoever is picking out the ladies to fill in the rolls here are doing a bang up job, all the women are sexy, hot, and all bring something a little different to bedroom. The only suggestion I'd make is for a hot goth chick, I don't know how or where to implement her as it stands, but that is what I'd like to see.

For now I'm digging this one, and I'll be back again at the 0.5 mark to see what's changed.

The first half of the game is very good. What I liked:
- Development of family relationships
- Video selection
- Non-linear narrative
At first I really planned to give the game all five stars

But in the second half you start to notice some significant shortcomings:
- Too many characters are introduced into the narrative, they scatter the player's attention. And at the same time, interaction with them seems superficial and strained. After the 24th day, I simply did not understand who all these people were that I was fucking in the ass. That is, pornography completely pushed the narrative into the background.
- Many options are not available without cheats, they are vital for comfortable play and disclosure of a huge layer of content (the save editor will help us here)
- Some choices require the right action a third of the game ago. Moreover, the choices are not critical to the narrative, for example, in order to have the opportunity to have anal sex with character X on the 32nd day, you had to have sex with her on the 8th day, this looks absurd, especially in cases where we subsequently sleep with this character more than once, but anal sex remains an unbreakeble taboo for us in all the later game. Because it did not happen six months ago and now there is no way to fix it. WHY? Its nonsense.

And lesser significance - some events are quite non-obvious, require a grind or a guide. For example, throwing a specific number on the roulette, it just took me about 20 minutes to save-load the event. This is not cool, this is not fun, this is not a challenge. Repeated scenes and a drop in the quality of videos in the second half. Not technical, I mean more the selection of actresses, staged scenes with pseudo-sperm, liters pumped into their cavities, and the like. In the second half, the focus of attention completely shifts from Gina, Megan and Angela to absolutely unrelated girls - the boss’s secretaries, strippers from the club, etc. By the end was the same boring repeateble minigames with shooting or dancing. So...Day 1-24 (or about it) - 5. The all game as is - 3/5 due to a significant drop in quality

For a game that has "freedom" in its title. This game sure has a lot of paywalls and gatekeeping. I'll rate lower if not for the effort cause game literally needs your full attention and could easily ruin your run because of simple route divergent that for some reason completely gate keep a progression. Doesn't help that the guide as well as the cheats are behind a paywall. Making the grind and this game feels like total chore and a waste of time. Once you lack certain lust or love you won't be able to replenish it as it's already cemented making your run full of holes that you potentially could fix if this was a sandbox but nope. This is a virtual novel and your stuck progressing through everything and having to endure not being able to access a lot of routes. Overall. This is the kind of game you wouldn't like to re-play once you lost your save. It took too much time and the gave back isn't worth it