Ren'Py - Bad Memories [v0.9.5.2] [recreation]

*** Review as of v.0.5 ***

The story is about a guy trying to find back his footing in the world after $hit hits the fan. For the sake of convenience, he runs into his stepmother who abandoned you under mysterious circumstances. You move in with her at a house you inherited from your father (who's presumably dead), after which the story starts to unfold with your nearly catatonic younger sister, her best friend and her therapist. You get nightmares and visions about your past which is the device that tries to give some context to an otherwise bland, directionless plot.

Let's start with the characters;

• Rachel - your stepmom who abandoned you and tries to amend whatever misdeeds/treatment she gave you. While this is the key mystery element, the unravelling is too slow/shaky to keep a player interested. Top of which, she isn't appealing physically nor shows any vulnerability except under medication, that leads to some PG-13 hot scenes.
• Ellie - your young step or real sister who suffered a trauma that has rendered her catatonic. Her phrases are even shorter than Groot but her facial expressions are on point. IMO, she's more on the cuter side, so cute that it really invokes the young sister, protective streak in you. Ironically, she's the one with whom you have the most interactions and the rated-R type. Biggest downer!
• Jada - Carefree bestie of Ellie who hits on you for no reason. Gets in trouble for which every time magically the MC comes to her rescue. Beyond filling you in on your sister's past you missed, nothing much. I'd rather had Ellie slowly regain normalcy than have this irksome chatterbox around.
• Katherine/Katie -- Acts like a bitch with you, which leads to some forced scenes. Some link to your past, which again, even after 5 updates hasn't shed much light.

Overall, character-wise as well as physically none of the characters are appealing enough to invoke fap-worthy lust. The only connection I made was with Ellie and as I mentioned above, NOT what I would want from a game like this. Shame such character development is going in the wrong direction. Waiting to see the last update, so I can play it out for the mystery and get closure.

Ahh man where to start but if i have to describe this game is one sentence then it would be This Game is fcking awesome.
PROS
- Good storyline although it's not very original you won't feels like skipping any text.
- Renders/animation are absolutely 10/10
- Models are great and everyone has a different personality(Really liked Katherin and Rachel)
- Although the game is not long it has enough lewd scenes so you won't be disappointed there.
Cons
Need more content XD
All in all totally recommended to everyone

The writing isn't terrible and is concise enough for me to not skip it. The characters are fairly unique & break from the tired mom/sister tropes. The models & expressions are great, and the ability to play it all as a woman is amazing! It's great!

This is one of the Best Games i played so far. Super interesting Story and Characters.
The Models look super good and way more realistic than others, not all out of proportion. The progression feels good, although the story is linear you can make choices at the right moment to control if you want certain fetishes or not.
The Characters really do feel alive and are not just some pretty fucktoys which you run through. Amazing writing Quality for a Porn Game.
The Renders and Animations look really good. The Locations and Models are fresh and new.

This Game is so damn good, i am super exited for the updates. Hope it continues on this Path. I also like that there is no NTR, Trans, Futa, Sissy etc. in there. Hate that stuff

I liked how this game was described and decided to check it out. I'm glad I did. The story intriguing. A abusive father who's abused girlfriend takes her abuse out on her abusers child. Then the child returns as a adult to the town they want to forget about. Then there is the somewhat choices in the game, and the whole Pill story arch which is a kinda cool for a Porn Game for some corruption of the Ex Girl Friend for some revenge for her mistreatment of you. Although I admit that I find the Sister who can't talk because of I'm guessing some sort of trauma story line is kinda weird because I feel she is not right in the head but that's just me I guess. I like her hot friend though. The Therapist is hot and I like how their interaction with each other are, looking forward to how their story play's out. I can see a bit of a harem growing with all the girls so far. The hot barista, the dad's ex, the therapist, the sister's friend, and the sister. But what I would like to see is more choices that matter. I'm giving 5 stars because I like the character models, the story is interesting, what sex is in the game so far has been hot. I like the change in angles option. I have this on my watch list and looking forward for what is next!

The story is well engaging in the sense that the narratively, the sex scenes are earned, the characters are qt and the 3d renders are very nice. Fewer choices than in other VNs but it's not necessarily a problem; definitely eager to see more!
PS: Hannah is best girl

Rating for 0.5

Bad memories - imho - is one of the best VNs at the moment.
The story building is brilliant, the renders are really great and the animations (for being done in DAZ only with its shitty IK chains) are very good.


One very interesting feature: You can play as a female or male protagonist.

Updates times are good for a single dev op (about 3 months, if I remember correctly) and considering the quality and the time needed for scripting/rendering for both views, content for each update is quite long.

As there are still many questions about all characters, I'm really curious how @recreation will handle this, with 5 updates left, as he said we are at 50% of the story now.

Looking forward for the next update!

Version Reviewed: v0.5

This one is mostly a VN about reconnecting with your estranged family and boinking all of them.

Unusually for a VN there is an option to play as either a man or a woman, although the story is roughly the same either way.

There are a handful of choices you can make along the way, but it's mostly "do event/don't do event". There are also some free roaming segments, but usually they only have one possible event so it turns out to be another "do event/don't do event" type choice.

The characters are all well rendered but they're also kind of nuts. Like most of them have actual mental problems. It makes the game a bit icky to play because of the way you're taking advantage of some of them.

The characters:
* Your mom: Roofies herself every day. You can go and abuse her, but the MC is such a flake he keeps forgetting to do it. Hopefully we will dig into that prescription and why it was given to her in later versions.
* Your sister: Mute and totally fixated on you. She somehow goes to regular school. Maybe not your real sister, but the MC can't be bothered to actually search through those papers on the hall to find out. It's like she wandered in from the end of a corruption game.
* Your Sister's friend: Actual sex maniac. Probably corrupted your sister. Needs therapy. There might be something with her mom eventually, but probably not soon.
* The Barista: Seems like a nice girl. Nothing happens with her yet.
* Your Boss's secretary: Your boss seems to want you to bone her, but she's too shy. Nothing happens with her yet either.
* Your Sister's Therapist: Your character smells her and that's all the invitation s/he needs to full up sexually assault the therapist. For some reason she's into it? Probably abusing your sister during their sessions.
Overall: There's a good amount of fap material, including some nice but somewhat wooden animations. As a VN there's not much gameplay to speak of, and the choices are relatively few but that's fine for a VN. The game loses a star for being kind of icky with consent.

Fantastic game with interesting characters (both their models and personalities) with a story that keeps me interested+engaged. (look at others reviews for more articulate and precise reviews as I am just here to give praise to something I love!)

My one criticism is that the sandbox elements are pointless in my opinion as I believe this type of story is better off staying a pure visual novel style. There is no need to provide me with the option of moving from locations and rooms if one one location has the event to move the story forward.

Other than that please keep up the good work recreation and you will have my support until I run out of money

Review on v0.5

Some caveats:

• Played as a female MC because it offers a nice change of pace from the run-of-the-mill VNs out there, and I have no interest in doing a playthrough as a male MC, so I can't really comment on that experience.
• I know this build is pretty early, so maybe a lot of my issues will get resolved in the future, but as it stands, they are still issues. So before people get mad at my criticisms, I do occasionally revisit reviews after later updates, but I think it only fair to criticize things that I, as of right now, see as problems.
• This review will probably be heavy on the critique even though I give it 4 stars. That's because I always find it more useful to know about the negative points of a VN. If I look at reviews before a DL, I pretty much scour the reviews for the more negative ones instead of all the glowing ones, just to know what I'm getting into and know about the downsides beforehand. That doesn't mean I won't still DL and enjoy that game, I just think these negative points are useful to know, so that's what I'll be focusing on in this review. But I'll also give reasons for my pretty high 4-star-rating.

So let's get into it.

Pros

• Good graphics. Generally nice rendering (even if some graininess persists), but more importantly, the models feel unique, they don't seem to be all the old recycled models that you see in tons of these Ren'py games. The environment is rich and fleshed out, always important to not have just bland backgrounds and only focus on the models. Also pretty good animations throughout.
• Interesting characters with hints at more love interests in the future. I like the introduction of the four main characters while also having some potential other partners in the future without overwhelming us too much right out of the gate. The characters also feel pretty unique and well thought-out.

Pet peeves
Just some things that might annoy me more than others based on personal preference, and that I don't feel right claiming as objective cons.

• The occasional sandbox element seems pretty superfluous. Not bad necessarily, but just... irrelevant, when you can't actually explore properly and make your own decisions. Just go for the straight-up VN then, wouldn't really make a difference.
• Apparently just this one therapist willing to help Ellie? Nah, that's not how therapy or therapists work. Of course therapists would be willing to work with Ellie, just because improvement seems lacking is no reason to completely abandon a client/patient. So there's really no reason to have Katherine forced on her, of course Ellie's not going to improve if she doesn't feel comfortable with the therapist.
• Occasional sound effects thrown in there but generally no background music... that's annoying to me. When there's no sound design in a VN, I tend to play my own background music so it doesn't get too boring but when the dev then throws in the occasional sound effect here and there, that's distracting. So either go all the way with the sound design, or don't include it at all.
• I guess I somewhat notice that the male protagonist play-through seems to be the one that the dev originally had in mind and the female one is just tagged on to broaden the appeal. I might be imagining that though, but some scenes are a bit weird with a female protagonist, like women just generally peaking towards your crotch (there's nothing to see there, if the women were so hard up, they would be staring at the MC's chest or belly or waist or thigh, pretty much anything other than the crotch) or getting a 'blowjob' in the car which really seems awkward with a female MC, as well as some dialogue choices that seem off. Also, women keep hitting on you but men don't seem to be interested in you at all, that's kinda strange and unrealistic, there are many more straight guys out there than lesbians and the former group is also generally the more direct and forward one, so that too seems to be a leftover from the male MC storyline. But all in all, I might just be looking for these things too much, I can't say it was ever hugely disrupting, so maybe not an issue for other players.

Cons

• Lots and lots of typos (mix-ups with who's/whose, you're/your, its/it's, then/than and lose/loose, 'awfull', 'Thank's', 'instandly', and a lot more, didn't bother noting them all down)
• My biggest complaint, generally a lot of sex with at best questionable consent...
  • Taking advantage of Rachel in her drug-addled state. This is questionable not only on the sex side of things (basically the same as assaulting a drunk chick) but also in general taking advantage of her confusion and lowered inhibition to convince her of things she wouldn't normally agree to. We also get no hint at any actual reason she needs this highly experimental and apparently highly-addictive drug. Yeah, this probably will be explained in future updates but right now it feels just like this weird arbitrary construct that allows the MC to engage with their step-mom in non-consensual sexual interactions.
  • The whole thing with Ellie in general seems... icky. Hard to say if she is even able to give consent, she might be, but she often really seems to have the mind of a child. And before that's cleared up, it doesn't feel right engaging in anything too overtly sexual with her. I know that the dev probably wants to reveal Ellie's backstory slowly, to keep up the suspense, but idk... Even if we can later on generally accept that yes, she is completely there, and can give consent like any other adult, until then, the MC doesn't know that... So yeah, pretty iffy at best.
  • Straight-up raping Katherine in the bathroom... The other scenes with her are marginally better, but I'm sorry, that first one, she did not consent to this, even if she didn't resist much. That's the typical victim-blaming that's just disgusting to see; 'oh, you're wet and you didn't kick me in the face, that must mean you secretly want this and I'm not a terrible person for raping you'. No, sorry, that's not how this works. Stop it. If Katherine is shy and hesitant, then you have to find another way to make her open up to the MC, you don't get to jump-start this relationship by having the MC rape her and then gaslighting the player into thinking that's not what's happening.

All in all, this was a pretty fun, short playthrough. My biggest complaint (see above) seems to smooth out as you go along, so hopefully we won't see as much of this in future updates but I would also really advise the dev to revisit these particular scenes and slightly modify them so they aren't as problematic... just doesn't send a good message as it stands.
But I generally really like the characters and the story-telling even though we really need to kick off with some actual plot soon if this is gonna keep being interesting. Character exploration is only gonna take you so far.
Probably the best thing for me was the fact that you have the option to play as a completely lesbian female MC, you actually don't see that too often. Mostly, even if the MC (or another character) is female and apparently lesbian, she's gonna crave some cock sooner or later because many straight devs don't seem to get the idea of a pure lesbian person into their head.
I wanted to give this only 3 stars at first but that seemed unfair because I tend to criticize VNs more harshly that I give 3 stars and they are also generally games that I enjoy less while playing. The aforementioned problems notwithstanding, I really enjoyed playing this and I like the characters a lot, especially Ellie (she's so cute), so 3 stars would be pretty unfair.

3.5/5

Graphics: 5/5 - The graphics are great for a Renpy game, no complaints here.
Characters: 5/5 - Well rounded characters, both dialogue & design-wise.
Dialogue/Story: 4.9/5 - There's room for improvement, such as events feeling abrupt and out of nowhere, although it's still a strong and very thought out storyline.

Overall Rating: 5/5
I recommend giving this game a playthrough, it's a well thought out game with great renders and a fairly good storyline.

Here's my thought about this game after playing the last 3 version.

Graphic / render 10/5 : Just amazing render, but sometimes the lips kinda weird , but the rest is amazing.Also the pic kinda match when talking, not just 1 picture and bunch of text.. background also moving.. Well done

Story 3/5 : So so . but this is a porn game, what'd you expect?

R*pe content 4/5 : unless i miss it, not much of it.. maybe in the future (please xD)

Overall imma give it a 5 stars , cz the render is sooooo good imo , can not wait for the future releases..

Damn Chrome, crashed while I was writing my long review... Hopefully my writing it again fully will put some emphasis on how much I like this game. I actually even thought I had already reviewed the game but why the hell not do it again (x 2) !

First of all how I feel : (Not actually a spoiler but I do wanna follow reviewing rules)


Now for what matters :
v0.5
Generally and quite objectively a really good game, amazing renders and a very original and well thought out story, the characters are very nice and the little details in the renders/story/game design/programming are just heart-warmingly good.

Renders 4.5/5 :
Might not be the best renders of any game from a purely graphical stand point, though they are pretty damn high up there ! I mean every character model is as good as they can get but minor details in the scene tend to kind of put me off, not why the 0.5 point isn't given though.
Rather in the actual rendering, some reflections, lighting properties and the colour correction aren't perfect.
But I have to say, the renders aren't worth making better because they are already so amazing.

Story 5/5 :
The story is very good, it's original and surprising having a mix of well known elements (sub,drugs,etc.) but presented and written in a way that is oh so refreshing. It's character driven (so most of the story review has to be in the character section) though some plot points lead to the larger story and seem promising .

Characters 5/5 :

Animations 5/5 : Just great! Plenty enough though there could be more in there.

Playability 4/5 : Well done, things like a quicksave at the end of the playable content (v0.5) I have never seen and are so so obviously necessary when you think of it!

Again love the game, you should play it!

Fantastic graphics + Awesome animation + A deep well thought out storyline = An awesome visual novel which will grip you and leave you wanting more and more! I love this VN and how it grips me each and every time I do a playthrough on each update from the beginning. It's also a story I always play both genders so not to miss any content! Trust me you won't be disappointed and it's well worth a download

The visuals and character models are great, the intimate scenes are excellently written and visualized, and the writing, in general, is very good with an interesting story that delves into more uniquely complex relationships than you usually see in other adult VN's. Some choices are presented in the course of the story mostly in the form of how to approach and interact with certain characters, as well as gender choice for the main character at the beginning of the game.

Overall enjoyed the game for its unique approach to the typical adult VN story structure and the appealing visuals as well as good writing.

Honestly enjoyed this game a lot, as a total Dom, the MC's interactions with Katherine were just .
+ One of the few games where you can play a male or female MC
+ Beautiful renders
+ Each girl has her own unique appeal
+ Animated sex scenes
+ Story is good and builds a foundation for why our MC acts a certain way

Basically a well rounded game, which I hope continues to be updated regularly. Cannot wait for more domination choices, especially with Rachel.

this game has potential, has interesting characters with flaws but its lacking in character diversity. The story is ok if not alittle strange for my taste and your interactions with the characters seem forced. also sister character really dosent work for me. hopefully most interesting characters get included in the future.

first game like this that i ever tried and i can honestly say that i ve been blown away about how good it is , especially the story line . I was reluctant to try this type of games but is true what they said in the add is so much better than porn . I can wait for the game developer to finish this version mostly for the story

Good story, loved the characters. I love these type of games with choices and different scenes. Also the graphics are not bad at all, really enjoyed how all the characters look, including the MC both male and female. I also enjoyed the different "romance" options it gives you and that it actually lets you decide which one you can choose. Developer, if you're reading this, keep up the good work!

I want to give this game a higher rating but can't for the simple fact that the player doesn't have any choices to make beyond meeting LI or being intimate with those LI. There are so few choices in Bad Memories that it feels like there is really no reason to give the player any input at all. All dialogue is predetermined, you don't get to choose how the MC feels or reacts toward Rachel (or anyone). Even after you've learned that she's on experiment drugs and you eavesdrop on her talking to someone about you. Nor can you stand up for yourself in any meaningful way with anyone.
There is a "free roam" feel to the game but there is no reason for it. You can't interact with anything in the house or do anything in the house except what the story requires you to do. The passivity of the MC and lack of things to do can make the game frustrating to click through.
All of that said however and I still am enjoying the story. I want to know where it goes and what the resolution will end up being. It just feels like a missed opportunity to not include more of the player's decisions.

Pros: Renders are top notch. Story is interesting if, at the same time, frustrating for lack of player input.

Cons: Minimal chances to make any decisions, no story altering decisions are made by the player. MC is too passive in how they talk to other characters. Frustrating lack of ability to interact with the environment (yet the player can wander the house from room to room). Minimal sexual content, which is all nonconsensual (the MC forcefully fingers someone and wakes up to oral being performed on them).