VN - Ren'Py - Being a DIK [v0.10.1] [Dr PinkCake]

Like many others, I consider this game to be the gold standard for AVNs. Wonderful writing, excellent pacing, realistic characters, incredible renders, the works! I've already purchased this on Steam and played through what's available there multiple times on different paths. Can't wait to see more from DrPinkCake!

I came for the "plot", but stayed for the plot.

The cons:
- The 3D character models sometimes look uncanny, especially in the earlier episodes.
- The first 20 minutes of the game is kinda dull and it's easy to drop the game when you start.

The pros:
- The sex scenes are very good, the animations are nice.
- Excellent immersion. This game really takes you to an exaggerated college life that you wish you had.
- The writing for this game is top notch. The characters feel very human, even AAA titles don't have such complex characters. It's like a very good drama TV series and you are part of it. I literally laughed out loud at a few jokes in the game.
- the mini games make sense, which is very odd and rare for hentai games.

Although it is one of my favorite adult games, I started to see that the enthusiasm and development speed of the first seasons were no longer there when the developer started to make too much money from this game. I hope that he will give a good ending to this series with the third season as soon as possible. The quality of the episodes in the seasons has started to decline and the development process has become too long.

Not sure why there is hate for chapter 10 unless you despise the minigames cause chapter 10 is clearly the best chapter for me. It's when the game is starting to ramp up and get going from story to relationships. Where the relationships are starting to feel like relationships and there is finally some developments in the plot.

If this was just about the characters then easily a 4.5 or 5 / 5. But as a whole package I feel like somewhere in between 3 - 3.5 prior to season 3 but so far Season 3 is the best for me so I can say with that it's more like a 4. Depending where you sit on the minigames and free roam. For me about 1/2 of the mini are good but I do hate feeling forced to play them to manage my money. Also this game would be so much better without the test. But this game is very replayable and it does a bit of everything good and only excells at a few.
I'll be straight this isn't on my top 10 list atm it's #12 but after playing episode 10 might make it back onto it.

Story : 4/5

I don't get why so many so came for the porn and stayed for the story. It should be more like stayed for the characters. Because other than characters arcs there does not seem to much of a central main story line. As it's all in the setup phase in Season 1 and 2. End of Episode 9 and Episode is where it starts to finally pick up.
With that being said I do enjoy all the character story arc's so far. There isnt one I can say I dislike or wish wasnt in the game. I'll talk about that more in the next section. If I would to judge this purely based on the main story and not the characters arc's it would only be like a 1 or 2 / 5.
Characters : 5/5

This is easily the best part of the game. Very few other AVN's have a good cast of characters that are all well written and have decent or good story arcs. I'll talk about each character in the order I like them best.











Music : 4/5
Most AVN's I don't care about the music however in this one it's either okay or amazing depending on which part in the game you are at. I say it really shines during any of the parties.

Gameplay : 3/5
This is the worst and best part of the game at the same time. There is so much branching the it makes this game really replayable. Most of the minigames are okay and not a big deal since you can turn them off at the start of the game. I just wish you could do it at any point during the game. What makes the minigames bad is the need to play them everytime you can just to manage your money and keep it as high as possible. But in reality you don't even need to do that unless you want to collect everything. But it's enough to burn out and lose interest in multiple playthroughs. The free roams events in this game I enjoy for the most part. There is alot of content playing all paths up untill Season 3 took me about 2 weeks to beat.

Animations and renders :
not gonna give a number but rather just mention how much of an improvement they are in chapter 10 that it makes me really wish the entire game was like Chapter 10 in terms of looks and animation. But it never looks bad but never is amazing either.

BaDIK redefined the AVN genre, and it was daring enough to break the stigma and taboo these types of games had. An enganging story, lovable characters and a intricate connection to the player.
Simply the number one AVN there is.

This game is going from the best to the worst… I mean, who writes this kind of crappy text? Are you an 18y-old horndog? There’s absolutely nothing interesting about the interactions and conversations. It’s all blablabla. Not to mention the road the story has taken. You’re making shit up as you go and completely lost your original blueprint. Episode 9 blew the whole build-up from the entire first two seasons to pieces, and episode 10 tries to introduce a kind of new and interesting story-arch but fails to deliver, instead it becomes boring and meaningless. And btw, whats up with those weird faces? Certain emotions you want to emphasize, look like the person just realized he/she stepped in a giant turd.

I'll start this. off by saying that the production value of this game is amazing. The renders are good, the LIs are largely good, Music and effects are good, and the free roam is actually very well done, if way overused. I genuinely like the free roam but feel that putting long and unskippable fetch quests into a game with many, many paths really decreases the replayability. But overall the game is really good.

However the story is a cobbled together mess where things happen because the plot requires them, are either nonsensical or swiftly abandoned soon after, or are forcefully removed from the story in order to come back 6 chapters later as a "twist". Here be spoilers, though I try to censor the big twists as best I can.

Some examples of nonsensical plot points include:

- No less than three twists that were only twists because the MC was unaware of someone's last name, despite dating some of them for months.
- A character who was being controlled by a parent who threatened to default on a co-signed tuition loan if they didn't do as they said. Doing this would also destroy the credit rating of the parent, but apparently he's willing to do it anyway. Also, that's not how loans work.
- A drug and prostitution (and arguably sex trafficking) ring being run out of the HOTs sorority in which literally every member is involved except the president, who has zero idea. The leader is literally adversing her wares to people who she just met yet the President, a LI who is shown to be very intelligent and also genuinly cares about the members of the sorority, has no idea because the plot requires it.
- One new girl refuses to take part and leaves, and is promptly erased from the story after deciding to "ignore" literally everyone including ones who weren't involved . She would just ruin the plot if she told anyone so she was silenced due to plot reasons.
- Maya's entire storyline revolves around a (true) rumour of free tuition offered by the sorority (as a form of extortion into prostitution), which she needs. This secret is both so secret that the sorority president and the rest of the university is completely unaware, but yet random people outside of the entire university are aware of it. There is no explanation as to how Maya knows about this.
- The main plot involves a certain person who can give or take scholarships to and from students, at any time including during the school year, and for apparently any reason without any oversight.
- On the MCs first day he is given a weggie by the jocks. But he's also a pro boxer and a week later fights 3 jocks at once and wrecks them. So there's some really inconsistent bullying going on because the plot required it.
- A certain teacher makes the MC jump through 18 hoops for a secret sexual encounter, but then allows him to film it that same night without a second thought despite the frat he's in posting a nude photo online of another teacher that very same day.

- The most egregious example is with the Josy/Maya reveal. You have 3 ways of romancing the girls. 1. You romance them both. 2. You romance neither of them. 3. You romance one but not the other.
The problem is that the game forces your character to storm out and get really angry with them after the reveal. Except this makes no sense for two of the three choices. If you didn't romance either of them, why would the MC be angry that they are dating each other? He would not care at all. If you romanced them both and then get upset, well now you are a huge hypocrite because you did the exact same thing as them. It only works if you only romance one, as then it actually feels like a betrayal. Giving us player agency with a love interest and then yanking it away like that undermines the entire point of being able to romance someone.

Then there's the story straight up abandoning plot threads.
- You meet Maya because you need a new dorm after your guitar was stolen and your asshole roommate was beaten up and lashes out at you. You meet Sage because she is given the guitar (despite not knowing how to play). It is never explained who stole it and beat up your roommate and he effectively ceases to exist afterwards anyways so it doesn't matter.
- The Jock president gets sent blackmail pictures and blames the MC, resulting in him assaulting the MC and getting removed from the leadership of the Jock frat. It is never explained who sent those pictures, why, or what they even were pictures of. And that Jock then all but vanishes from the story as well from that point on.
- A teacher has a nude posted online and feels ashamed, but the MC and others help her overcome it only for her to do a 180 and abruptly resign. She also disappears from the story after this point.

- I'll add in that the photos and alleged blackmail does get revisited in Episode 10 and looks to become major plot point now. But it still doesn't excuse the results. I was expecting the MC to talk to the teacher about why she did a 180 and quit after she has sorted it out. Or why the Jock thought that the MC was blackmailing him (the Jock shouted it during the fight). But both characters simply disappear after these scenes and they are never mentioned again. Plot threads that realistically should have been followed up on were forcibly removed from the story until DPC decided that they were allowed to be talked about again several chapters later. That's not good storytelling. I can guarantee that after 6 in game months the sorority girl who left is going to magical appear again just in time to blow the whole prostitution ring wide open.

- After the Jock president beats up the MC, the frat is on thin ice and are warned that any misstep could result in them getting shut down. This is brought up multiple times and the DIKs even mock the jocks because they know that they can't fight back. Then this whole thing is promptly ignored as the jocks literally destroy the DIK house and both the school and the DIKs themselves don't seem to care and no one even brings it up again.

Are you sensing a theme yet?

The main plot, as much as their is one, seems to revolve around Quinn setting up the drug and prostitution ring because she "needs money". Why? Fucked if I know. 5 years in and we have almost no insight into the motivations of the main antagonist.

In all these cases, the plot required something and it just happened. There was no logic or consequences, the story just needed something to happen so it made it happen and then ignored every consequence that could have resulted from it except the one that it wanted. Key details that anyone would realistically know are hidden for the story, threads get introduced and abandoned all the time because the story requires it, and other threads are forcibly ignored until the plot requires someone to give a shit about them again. The main plot hasn't advanced in any meaningful way since the second chapter and at this point I just don't really care anymore. Quinn needs money. Whatever. Honestly the secondary plot with the photos and the people behind it is far better and actually makes sense, so why didn't DPC just run with that one?

This game has a ton of splitting paths that make for great replayability, but is also chock full of minigames and long unskippable free roam events that make it a daunting task to go through it again. That said, I think that the free roam events are very clever and well done but they need to be used in moderation. Chapter 9 was a single multi-hour long event comprising of 5 parts, and honestly by the end I was just skipping through the tasks wanting it to be done. I really don't want to replay that event but I'm going to have to for every LI path now, which just sucks.

In summary, the game is artistically very good, but the story is a mess and it feels like it's adding small plot arcs one at a time that have little to no effect on the main story.

That said, I still recommend this game. It's good, really good actually, but it's far from deserving of the perfect praise that it receives.

This developer has been doing so well since the first game he release which is acting lesson. Now with BiD i gotta say im in love with content that has been produce by Dev. Great storyline, great dialogue, great renders, animation and yeah especially the girls. I love them all and trying them all.

Keep up the good work. Patreon support here lets go!

This might be a porn game, but it's more a game than a porn game. Good story, good characters, long and impactful. Ironically, a lot of times, I'm more interested in the story than the porn part because these are rich and feeling characters. It's not a perfect story, no story ever is. But it is really, really good.

There is no doubt that the full score works, if it is not no nfsw can reach, multi-route choice network narrative, three-dimensional character shaping, good use of bgm, this is the ceiling level works, I cleared more than ten archived routes, accumulated 200 hours, never tired

The crown jewel of adult games. Graphics are top tier as is the writing. Perfect mix of sandbox and VN. If mini games are activated, they aren't repetitive and "grindy" - nor do you need to play them at all. Even side characters have fairly flushed out plot lines.

Only knock on the game...30+ gigabytes and counting! Development has slowed a bit since the game first came out (updates are now ~yearly) but its understandable given how much content each update packs. It is also because the developer is actually finishing each path the player can take rather than rushing to the finish line.


5 stars do not do this game justice

I feel this game consistently does everything to a high level. The game doesn't do any of the stuff that's foundational to an AVN badly it does all of it well. That's not something you really see there is usually something whether it be visuals, sex, story etc that's just not that good. Here everything is genuinely done well. I've not played a an AVN where consistently every single aspect is done to a quality level it is in this game and that's what has made it stand out for me.

The only real bad points is the minigames and sandbox parts and I can forgive the sandbox because Ren'py is a bitch to do big events in with branching if you don't have it laid out like that. While minigames can be turned off. Some optional minigames or sandbox just really just didn't have an impact on my enjoyment especially since I was having fun even in the sandbox parts. I was surprised when I realized I was having fun since I usually detest sandbox parts.

So you essentially have a game where there's 10 episodes where everything is done to a high standard with a bunch of choice and hot girls and fun characters. I don't know how long it can keep the title but right now this does feel like the best AVN I've played simply because it manages to do everything well across the board consistently.

Still the gold standard for AVNs, especially school setting dating sims. It's very clear DPC takes this very seriously and is very proud of it;as he should be.

Top notch dialogue and characters compared to other visual novels.
The game does a great job making you care about even the most minor of characters. As the story progresses the characters get more depth and it's been looking good so far. As the episodes go on we get to truly explore the nuances of our relationships, although we're in the baby stages for now.

The renders have come a long way-not just sex scenes but the look of the free roams has gotten more polished with each episode, and I thought he peaked in the latest episodes party free roam.

The overall story is obviously the highlight. Constant events to keep the ball rolling. Just the right amount of mystery to keep the player engaged. A clear driving force in the story. I think the amount of discussion and theories speaks for itself. The amount of pathing makes it feel like every decision counts.

Lastly, the attention to detail in this game is everything. Dialogue, decisions,
or even just people in the background-they all come together to make the world a whole lot more immersive.

Yes, it's not perfect. Development time, the # of mini games, etc, we all have our gripes with this game-but nothing really does come close. It will be interesting to see where DPC takes these characters and their relationships.

This game is missing a lot of my fetishes - it's relatively vanilla (to me) - and it's still my favorite game on this site.

That's how well written, interesting and likeable the characters are. They all have very distinctive personalities and backstories, even the side girls and male characters. Though there are 5 "main girls", many of the side girls also have a lot of development and content and most of them are interesting in different ways.

The story itself is very fun and well done. Good balance of drama, humour and sexy - and depending on your choices you can tilt it more toward one or the other as you like. Its a classic, spicy teen-comedy type story but since it's a porn game, it's turned up to 11. Despite that, the writing still feels believable. One thing in particular that i've noticed several times is how well edited the scenes in this game are - something i've never considered noteworthy in any other porn game. At some points the editing, along with the writing and music choice feels like a legitimately good "serious" game.

There is a "morality/dominance" mechanic where you can make choices to be either a confident frat fuckboy on one side or a more subdued, polite nerdy guy on the other - and a good amount of overlap between them. The girls reactions toward you are affected by this mechanic and at some point even up to you being unable to have a relationship with some of them if youre too far or not far enough on either side. (a nice shy girl may not date you if you're a huge DIK, for example).
There are many different minigames throughout that you can choose to disable at the beginning. Most will probably not love these but they're not terrible, some are decent and they may offer a little change of pace here and there - though i'd prefer if they were less frequent. Besides them, the game is a pretty standard Visual Novel with reading and choices plus "free roam" sections where you have free movement between screens and some small "sidequests" which amount mostly to optional conversations/sex scenes and the like.

While the story and emotional connection to the characters are the strongest points of the game, that doesn't mean the porn isn't good - its great and plentiful.
Visually everything looks great. Most characters are very sexy (some incredibly so). A little technical/art jank here and there, especially in the earlier episodes - some clothing that doesnt fit perfectly etc. - but overall very high quality. Sex animations are relatively simple but nice and there is a lot of them. Particularly, there's a lot of kissing in the sex scenes that i don't see animated very often which i like here. The enviornments look really good too, clearly a ton of work went into them.

Great music choices for each scene, many are actual licensed songs and are very fitting. Other audio besides music is minimal. One thing i wish the game had was voices - though i get that almost none of these games have them, and if they do they suck. But everything in this game feels so nice and polished that sex scenes without some moaning noises feel a little incomplete.
Thats just a minor nitpick, i get how difficult it would be to give the characters unique voices that don't feel out of place.

The game is unfinished as of now (December 2023) but it's well worth playing - it has a lot of content, both story and sexual.

I can't wait to see the endings, hopefully not too much later than in a couple of years.

The king is dead.

BaDIK used to be the best game in literally all aspects, but instead of finishing it on a high note, the dev started artificially postponing updates, adding completely unnecessary minigames and events. And now, here we are, left with just another average game.

Models: 9/10
This where the game still actually shines. A lot of beutiful and memorable girls. Sage, Jill, Bella, Lily... you name it. A few years ago it was absolute top, but now there are already numerous games that have reached the same level and even surpassed it.

Plot: 6/10
Just a typical college setting. Not really annoying, but there's no depth in it.

Gameplay: 3/10
A LOT of stupid, completely unnecessary and unavoidable minigames. And so for free roams. The first ones were quite decent, but the last ones just plain bad.

Sex scenes: 4/10
Mostly boring. It's actually kind of disappointing to see such well-designed models with poorly animated and not memorable slideshow-like sex scenes. Bella is being the main disappointment.

Writing: 7/10
Again nothing special. There're some good moments and a few amount of humor here and there, but it's not even close to the top level

(As of 0.10)

Had I written this review when this game came out (early 2019!!) I would've given it 5 stars.

The early episodes showed a lot of potential aside from the obvious problems of a first release. Back then the graphics were among the best in this site and the storyline was intriguing and vague enough that it managed to capture my attention.

Fast forward to late 2023 when 0.10 was released, how the mighty have fallen, this game feels like a scam for the players. Let me explain, this game never again reaches the level of those first episodes.

The initial storylines go nowhere, instead we get uninspired plot that's extremely boring, characters that become uninteresting and new characters that I can't find myself caring about.

While the other games that come out get better in the graphics department this game remained freeze in time, no improvement whatsoever.

But the most annoying part is that the same enfuriating features that I had patiently put up with once because the game was in it's early stages, they never go away and instead become 90% of the game while actually getting worse (the freeroams get worse with every update, the mind-numbing point and click grind of unlocking renders wasn't fun the first time and still isn't, the mini-games are the biggest waste of time I can imagine).

And the thing is: you can't escape them. Sure, you can turn off mini-games and play half the game, but that won't save you from the other stuff. And if you want to try another path then you'd be trapped in this unnecessary bloat of non-content that is this game for the most part.

Even if you have a storyline or character you are interested in, you'll find yourself going through dozens of storylines and characters you couldn't care less about but simply can't avoid. So you'll have to go through walls and walls of poorly written dialogue just to get to those few storylines you actually want, and get at most some short minutes of actual content once per year.

So I can't score this game at this stage highly. Yes, the first episodes were pretty cool, some of the characters seemed interesting... but it has been downhill since then.

Bar some exceptions, everything has gotten worse to the point where I wish this game would've ended some episodes ago. then my score would've been in the middle: an okay game with unfulfilled potential.

But the game dragged on, and now it's not that it didn't reach it's potential, but it's gotten significantly worse and it's living in the glory of it's former days. if you could trim this game to leave the good parts then I would still recommend it, but as it is, I can't recommend to anyone to pick this up nowadays.

TL/DR: Well crafted, yet profoundly overrated! Exceptionally annoying free roam system, high reliance on prostitution narratives, hit or miss mini-games, and lack of non-prostitution kinks bogged down this otherwise above par title.

+The best thing the game does is capture the full on hyperbolic bullshittery / humor of being in a frat. Some of the situations and characters were a riot. Derek (idiot savant) and Aerlith (bimbo- slut) had me laughing out loud.
+ Nice animations with a lot of scene angles ect. I don't personally put much weight on animations- but if you did this would be a big plus for you.
+ Lots of Snappy dialogue
+ Dynamic conversation based on the heroes DIK vs CHICK points was done pretty elegantly. (Though it is hard to appreciate without looking under the hood at the code or without doing multiple play-throughs.)
+ Robust and dynamically updating character profiles
+ The author did a decent job at giving the different characters their own voices.

- It plays a lot like a soap opera. Most of the problems the characters had were a product of their own poor decisions.
- A lot of the drama in the game derived from the MC kinda being a sulky whiner- which isn't my favorite vibe of MC.
- The sex scene writing was not very good. I didn't find it very erotic
-Prostitution kink and overly libertine chicks shoehorning a lot of content in was pretty unfulfilling for me as a fan of poly romance.
- Outside of prostitution, the game is very vanilla. Some ENF, some MILF / mommy/son RP, but it is mostly penis in hole or on body part X type of vibes. Even when it lightly dabbles into BDSM/cheating ect, it does so in the most vanilla possible way.
- Routes are pretty exclusive from each-other. That isn't usually a deal-breaker for me, but the game is so grindy with so many clunky AF free roams that replaying content to see alternative scenes / character flavor is absolutely not worth it. I'd rec playing the game once- on w/e your favorite route is and not replaying it. Shit is annoying. I ran out of steam for it around chapter 5 when the routing started each getting its own unique free roam / there started being like 3 pathings.
- MC is really not that tall or big or w/e but gets constant praise for it. Kinda a small man's fantasy I guess.
- Mini games were not very fun as an aggregate. The pattern recognition in the maths one was relatively fun- but a lot of the other ones were really mundane / boring.

This game used to be elite but it's been trending downward over the past few updates. The overall gameplay, storyline, and renders are great but the recent over reliance on mini games is getting to be annoying.

I had no problems when the game had the fighting mini game or the house management system bc the game tended to focus on only one at a time. Now the game is throwing ever increasingly annoying tests, fish tank management, and puzzles at me. Worst of all is this new science class system where I have to mix chemicals and liquids together and I can't just skip it. Seriously a line from the game is "pour the contents of the volumetric flask into the beaker on the stirrer". It has me locked in this annoying mini game with 7-8 drawn out and confusing steps that I need to follow OR I wait for a 400 second timer to click down so I can fail it.

That's a big loss in this game. The storyline actually pulled me in and kept me interested. I didn't need non stop wall to wall action and sex, I actually like to watch the relationships of the characters develop. Now the game is making me feel like it's an actual school simulator that might occasionally have some action every 30 minutes or more. I'm all for adding something more to the game to make it feel more complex but the decisions the developer is making at these later stages of development is really making me not want to play this game or explore its updates in the future.

Where do i even start, this game is way beyond what any other visual novel has to offer at the moment, it is so complete, the story takes so many hours to see all the branches available and the girls are all stunning and full of personality, i personally love the mini-games that DrPinkCake created for the game, especially the latest ones from the episode 8 to 10, they are really fun to play, the episode 10 in specific is pretty fantastic, we start to see the lore of some of the side characters that were present in the previous episodes and that makes the game feel even more alive when you can tell the background of each character you talk to in the game and how they all connect, with this said I really think anyone thinking about starting playing visual novels or playing a new one should definitely try this one.

Its still simply the best avn.

It excells in Backstorys, Worldbuilding and Character-building, there isnt a second avn feeling this immersive and characters feeling this real.

The branching is way more meaningfull than in 99% of all avns.

The Li's are amazing, unique and very different from each other and have their own motivations and goals.

The mc is - not considering his horsecock - a very normal and unspectacular guy but his experiences during the 10 Chapters so far really shape him into directions you can influence.

There are a lot of AVN's which are better in single categories compared to BaDIK but non of them reaches the overall quality so far and none of them have this amount of content yet.