VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Between Salvation and Abyss [Final] [Ethan Krautz]

- Chapter 8
- Nice models and graphics
- Intriguing backstory
- Infuriating writing
- Choices make no difference whatsoever
- Careless setup

Can NOT confirm claims of the renders being grainy. I'm playing in fullscreen on 3440px width and can't complain about the image quality whatsoever! I also like the chosen models, though some of them (especially the older ladies) are weirdly disproportioned. If this was just to offer the players different body types, I wouldn't expect to see basically every adult woman to have the very same voluptuous forms.

The real problem I have with this game is the writing. And, by that, I do NOT mean the story. Which is intriguing. No, I mean story progression and dialogue.

You start out playing a guy who had been badly abused as a child until he finally liberated his family from their abuser. So far so good. But, as you progress through the story, it becomes clear that this MC is simply stupid. He never questions ANYTHING. He takes everything he's told, even if by complete strangers, and even if it is in direct violation of his beliefs, at face value and just accepts it as the new truth. And it takes forever!

Even though the things these female characters want to tell him are apparently essential to their survival, they keep playing the damn pronoun game and throw insinuations around instead of just telling him what he NEEDS to know... and then call him stupid for not realizing sooner. Either because it's "not time for him to know, yet", or because "it's not their place to tell him", or because "it's for him to find out"... It's interesting as a plot twist the first time it happens, but by now became just fucking exhausting!

Like, for example,when we meet the "Woman in red" for the first time. She immediately realized that the MC lost his memories and knows everything about him. But, instead of just filling him in, she makes a few comments about how hard poor little MC's life was... and then fucking leaves without enlightening him! And the only reason the Players can believe her is because, for some unknown reason, we can read her thoughts. "We" is the players, not the MC, by the way. The whole game, all we know is what MC knows, but in this single instance, we suddenly hear her thoughts confirming her words, making me believe that the dev knows how stupid it would be to believe these characters and gave us a reason to accept it.

Or when the aunt and grandmother FINALLY show up to fill him in, the first thing we learn about those two is that the MC barely knows them. He only saw them ONCE in his entire life. And yet, when they turn his world upside down by telling him what is what, he almost has a mental breakdown because he believes them. Even though they didn't offer ANY proof to support anything they just told him. And yet, it just worked.

I also strongly disagree with MC's actions. When he's basically raped by that blonde girl, he still cares about her deeply for some reason. Someone he knew for all of a week! And the only thing he knows about her is that she is friends with his sister. So... Why does he care about her!? Why does his "heart bleed" when he sees his aunt and grandmother sad, given how he had absolutely NO memories of them!? Why does he go full-on postal on any perceived threat, but then just leaves to relax a little after he learns how that one woman ordered his sisters to be raped!?

So, I thought maybe this is all because of the choices I made. I installed that mod that shows the impact of each choice, and the game seems to have a counter for "Corruption Points" and "Love Points".
I played it again twice. First, I only chose the Love-Options, and then I only chose the Curruption-Options. And, guess what? It's the EXACT SAME game. As far as I could tell, even the dialogue wasn't different in any way. I found ONE scene that only showed up when I chose the love option, and ONE other scene that only showed up when I chose the corruption option. But, even then, neither option had any impact on how the story progressed.

It also doesn't help that there's an abundance of typos throughout the game, accompanied by sloppy tagging. Quite a few times, the name tags above the dialogue line show a character's name who is clearly not the one saying what you're reading.

This just goes hand-in-hand with the dozens of instances where the text goes from MC speaking out loud, to MC thinking to himself, and finally to the Narrator informing you about something... all with the very same markup, as if the MC was still saying all of that out loud.

And then there's the most offensive thing about all of this: Most of the action and interesting visual bits are hidden behind the damn dialogue box! First time you meet Victoria? She gets naked and half her body is obscured by that black background. Entire sex-scenes are hidden by that thing! And, yes, I know I can click the middle mouse button, but I also kinda want to follow their dialogue, so I'd have to read the line, hide the box, show the box, read the next line, hide the box, show the box,... and so on.

All in all, the dialogue is infuriating as it is hours of buildup to something we don't know about, the story progression makes no sense as it's only meant to lead you from sex-scene to sex-scene, and the MC is an imbecile. Other than that, the game's quite good!

I drugged myself from chapter to chapter reading and trying to find sand grains of story in this game.
- Renders.
I don't know why some people say that they're grainy, I played at my PC at 1920x1080 and only see a couple of grainy renders. But the quality of renders is not the issue here, it's female figures itselves. For some strange reason dev likes ugly fat mature women. And he likes to show us that. While young women rendered with totally natural figures and they're hot, mature women are ugly and have even more "screen time". So in my mind this game is visually disgusting. And I don't even want to mention puddles of urine, anal prolapse and so on. Needless to say player has no choice to see it or not.
- Gameplay.
It's a kinetic novel with meaningless choices, player cannot choose who to fuck, what fetishes to see, there's no branching in the story. If you like to play sadist with over the top ego who fucks every woman he meets - then it's a game for you. For everyone else I wouldn't recommend to waste your time on that game.
- Story.
Well, there is one. Between lewd scenes we find out that Marty Sue is so important that he can do everything he wants, influential people and whole organizations will cover all the crimes he commits. And, of course, MC has Oedipus complex, fat fetish, gerontophilia, he thinks about it from the start. Every woman easily falls for MC and most of time we read what he wants to do to them (and then - what he's doing to them). No choice. Sometimes we choose between being nice and corruption points, choices changes nothing and we don't know what we choose.

This game got me.
I must say that I loved the models of Alysha, Aysha, Helena and Lycana (Maybe my taste for mature women and women with big tits influences)
Even so, this game has an entertaining plot that is not afraid of censorship and that not every little girl can enjoy it as it should.
I can't wait to see how this game continues to develop and to see my favorite matures

So far the game is pretty good. The renders are good, the story interesting and the characters likeable. There are some things that might not be to everyone's liking, like the prolapse (which I personally do like from time to time lol, but I can see why some wouldn't).
The girl's models are very hot and attractive in my opinion (specially if you are into big asses/tits) and game has very hot and kinky sex scenes with a lot of anal, which is a big plus. All in all, a very good AVN, definetly worth playing

Low quality models, thats all you need to make a game not interesting to me. I played on a pc on fullscreen the models looked pixely. The freckles on the models look blurry. For me personally if the art is not good quality im not interested in the story so i skipped it so i can get through the game as the only thing keeping me interested was the milf. She had promise but the mood of the game is all serious and for me i dont like that. Its a porn game i wanna have fun and be cheerful when i fap. This one has too much agression , violence and gore for me. So i give this 3/10.

First time played and completed till latest patch.

The Good:

• Models of the girls are good, love the adults' proportions, probably the only thing left that'll make me continue playing.
• Story at the start was promising enough with the MC being some super special snowflake without the power to just wipe away his foes so he actually had to think and work (kinda) for some wins.

The Bad:

• Story starts to go to shit after more fantastical elements get introduced, then MC turns into super special furry snowflake with super magical powers and hyper Wolverine powers and the story degenerated into a boring obstacle to sex scenes to be skipped.
• Female characters (there's fucking lots of them) queue up to ride his horse dick, he doesn't have to work for most of that, only the 'landlady' offers partial resistance cause of morals.
• Even female characters that are yet to appear are already said to be MC's whores
• All male characters with dialogue are basically rapists/creeps waiting to rape female characters in game, only the MC is allowed to do that though, cause he's the MC duh. While male characters without dialogue are fodder so they just stood and posed around and then get killed by the MC.
• Choices are... what choices? Events pretty much play out the same in the end.

The Ugly:

• Forcing me to see ugly Grandma sex.
• Dev loves anal and vaginal prolapses.
• MC is basically a horrible bastard allowed to do all his deeds cause he's the MC. No one bothers to course correct him, cause he's the MC he knows best.
• Power creep, wait no, power skyrocket.

All in all, a 2/5 rating from me, wanted to like the game cause of the female models but meh, I'll return once the game is completed.

The models are pretty good for the most part. I don't normally like the oversized boobs that look ridiculous, but it's not a deal breaker, especially when there are other models with appropriate sized boobs. What drags the game down is two things. First, the English sucks. It's not bad enough to where you can't grasp what's happening, but it is distracting at times. Second, this is barely an actual game. There are barely any actual choices and when there are it's something so unimportant. What makes this so infuriating is that there are multiple times when the MC things to himself "oh here are my options..." or something like that and then just decides without any actual decision. There are so many places where there should be a choice. Frankly, this should be a visual novel, not a game. Obviously the dev either can't or won't make an honest effort to develop a full game with branching paths. It seems they wanted to make a story to tell, which isn't a bad thing, just don't pretend it's a game when it's not.

Good Points
+ Story seems interesting at least.

Bad Points
- You can't name the MC like you want, not having one of basic and yet one of most immersive things text-based adult games is very bad point.
- Renders/scenes/pictures quality looks very old, undetailed, and bad. Especially the first couple of hours of the game's sex scenes are not enjoyable at all. Most of the sex scenes have terrible static animations and some of them have poorly-made non-static ones with bad physics. Later they do become better, but they are still not decent enough to say ''good'' etc.
- Your choices do not affect anything important and it's not immersive at all for a game based on a text story.
- Some certain things are not avoidable like prolapses or Clara's content.
- Some characters like Clara look very unattractive and unfitting for an adult game like this.

For The End
The game feels like made in the 2018-2020 era instead of 2023 with its current visual quality, art style, and animations, it's very behind of current quality of the adult game era and not giving the player any choice over the game and content not helps either...

This is SO BAD it actually is fascinating (that's one of the reasons for 2 stars) and I will probably run it through to the ending (chap8p1). The fascination also is a reason for the long review, which a game like this would hardly warrant otherwise.

UPD: As you could read from the first sentence, I wrote this review while hadn't yet finished game. I was actually at around middle of chap6. Chap7 and Chap8 started to be better -- especially in sex scenes. Also Chap8 ties up most of the storylines, it's not as painful to read. So, in the long run game gets better. I kinda wish to update my rating to 3/5 due to improvement of scenes and the advancement of fetishes, but I still think the game is not fully there yet. Btw, note that others already said the game contains prolapse scenes. I myself don't find them sexual, but also am not revolted, so this didn't influence my rating.

There is some good stuff as well:

1) The models are quite decent! I disliked some of them for some reasons (listed below), but in general the textures, faces and bodies are acceptable quality. Not top notch, but better than many you can see; sex animations, where they exist, are quite decent.
2) the story premise is a somewhat interesting. insofar as it is possible to follow the story;
3) the story is quite dark in a way that I found somewhat enjoyable.

All the good things together with fascination add up to the 2nd star.

Well... the BAD list is long, and various stuff has been written by other reviewers (with most of whom I agree).

My personal top bad things are:

* STORYTELLING

1) Incoherent and very very lots of dialogues-based story. Really. I dislike skipping unseen text, but here at some point I couldn't suffer any more and turned it on.
Consider that MC is interacting with over ~15 other characters, MOST OF WHOM TURN OUT TO BE IMPORTANT... and that he interacts with a significant subset of them EVERY GAME DAY.

2) Given that wall of text, one would hope that it would at least be good text -- dialogues that make sense; using the "show not tell" principle, for example. Instead we are having highly unrealistic, simplistic, juvenile speeches, highly unrealistic responses and behaviours... both from MC and other adult(!) and teen characters. This might be how a 12 year old imagines people talk. It isn't. Also there's a wall of text of what MC thinks. Which is mostly repeated stuff about revenge and protecting his own.

3) Multiple storylines converge and create a jumbled mess. Technically possible to do, but not done in any good way here.

* VISUALS AND ANIMATIONS

1) Another VN with MC having horse-sized schlong. Not only it is unrealistic, boring and stupid, it would be painful, embarrassing and not in any way pleasurable for the ladies (and MC himself). Just don't. Enormous dicks are a male teen angst thing (which some don't outgrow). Nobody else cares.

2) Sex scenes would be much more enjoyable, if there were some more different frames, and looping. As it is any sex scene is like 5-6 renders (+maybe one loop) and is over in about 10 seconds. MC came, inserted dick and came in 5 frames. The actual frames and loops that are there, are quite decent though, and I did like the fact that models are moving during sex (breasts, legs, etc),also there is frame for showing MC cumming and afterwards. Also, it seems that more towards later chapters, the sex scenes improve in length.

3) Some particular models are weird. Starting with "landlady's" overly overly overly overly oversized boobs. Honestly, the poor woman has them to the navel. Not in all renders though, in some scenes, they look almost possible. Also, the black European(?) enemy-teen (Drake) is weird. I mean, I guess it is not impossible to have an European-style face for a black person (haven't seen anything like that in other games or in life), in this particular case it looks very weird.

So this was a hard one to review because I wanted to like it so much.. the plot is fun and different.. it uses my favorite model of all time (lookin at you Cece) and the renders/animations are pretty good but the negatives are so strong that giving it a 3 was me being nice..

1. The MC is just a horrible person and nobody seems to care.. they just accept all the horrible things he's done/does without any attempt at some sort of redemption arc. It would be one thing if they were shocked and tried to get him to be a bit more human but they literally could care less.

2. Not trying to kink shame here but the author lets their anal prolapse fetish get the best of them and you CANNOT avoid it.. it's not like you get a choice between anal/vaginal and IF you pick anal it happens.. nope.. just happens 3 times..

3. MC suffers from horse dick syndrome.. it's just stupid looking.

4. But that's matched by MCs "landlady" suffering from some serious tumours in her breasts. Think of your average HoneySelect big breast and you MIGHT be getting close to how huge these things are.. the woman would NOT be able to walk. Every other older woman is pretty big but she sets the bar high.. not sure if the author realizes that breasts do stop growing at a point considering how properly sized all the younger LIs are.

Pretty standard VN that leans into sadistic tendencies and one of the only 3d render games to contain a couple of prolapse scenes.

I got bored with the story finding it mediocre and slow, eventually just holding ctrl until it looked like something interesting was happening.

There are some rougher scenes in here but personally I feel the MC fails to deliver on some of the big 'punishment' talk he gives some of the slaves and ends up just fucking them again.

Despite it's dark themes, most of the sex scenes are kinda plain until about halfway through the game where the MC moves on from mere handjobs and blowjobs from members of his family.

Worth a look. Get the replay mod for a scene gallery. Don't hesitate to just skip through boring text (there's a lot of it).

This is one of these games that are so bad that it actually becomes good.

I'll start by telling the few points I genuinely liked:

• Story idea is original-ish, including secret organizations, mythical/legendary race-formed gangs fighting each other, and a good amount of secrets to unveil.
• Good character development (for most of them).
• Some really good-designed girls (although not all of them).

And that's it.

Honestly, this could pass as a story written by a horny high school teenager:

• MC with a horse-sized wiener, with a secret power to seduce whichever MILF he wants with tiny to no effort at all.
• Several characters have weird body proportions: boobs (50%), and ass (30%) with the remaining 20% being also distributed oddly.
• MC has a thing for prolapses, and whichever female (either the girls, "landlady" or the grandma) he bangs, he leaves them with anal or vaginal prolapses (spoiling and making the lewd scenes very gross).
• He literally fucks whichever female there is in the game, with no effort, and all of them fall for him instantly.
• The story has a good start, even tho the MC is really a monster (figuratively, although later he does become a literal monster) it is kinda "justified" by his background story. Sadly it starts derailing as the story starts introducing more and more legendary elements, making less sense every time. In the latter chapters, the story was so bad that I perceived it kind of like a joke as if I was reading a tale written by a stoned teenager.
• It grossed me out that MC fucks (and in detail) even the grandma. And no, that's not a GILF, it's a heavily wrinkled, old, and nearly toothless grandma.
• There's no real choice in this game. With the name I'd think that you could choose a good or bad path at least, but whatever you "choose" you still are forced to follow all the content nonetheless, including rape/torture scenes with no option to skip.
• You don't even get to change the MC name, which by the way seems to be the name of the developer.

I honestly got kinda sad for this game, because there are characters that I liked, but that lose relevance with all the defects in the story.

Edit to version 10 P2: The story is a complete and utter mess now. It does not have any coherency at all, and it barely makes any sense. Not worth reading.

This game is a jumbled mess. The story has a terrible pacing issue. You jump from one thing to another with very little way in way of explainable transition. The dialogue is bland and littered with errors. The models are nice, there is that.

If you are looking for supernatural stories, this is one of the best story lines out there. Whether you are looking for a wank or story line, I highly recommend this game. Really looking forward to the next update!

I liked the game more when we had choices, now it's just full of non sens...
Such a waste of good models on a very bad storyline. ..
The game is the easy sex type of games where npcs just want to open their legs for MC without a rational reason as if they were starving for a decade.

Love this game. The game has the most beautiful character (Monica) I've ever seen in a videogame of this kind, ever, and I've seen quite a few... -I also like Jessica-. It has lots of anal sex. Very good art style and some interesting characters.Some things are a bit....hardcore, which I am not a big fan of, but it's palatable. Great game overall

Pro:
- a few girls look good/normal

Contra:
- a few girls have such big breasts and asses that it just looks abnormal
- story could have been interesting but the boring writing destroids it completely
- almost no choices and the few you have don't impact anything
- because of the lack of choices you can't choose the girls Ethan (MC) should go for
- most lewd scenes are about anal

1/5 Stars

I had to give up on this one.

First another V/N where the MC has a ridiculously over sized dick like some kind of genetic mutation, a trope that has gotten old. I'm not sure why some Devs don't like realistic proportions.

The sex scenes aren't very sexy, especially the anal ones which you aren't given any choice over.

The MC is disturbed and worse. He's no better than the supposed bad guys he goes after. He's even a dick about it when getting a blowjob from either his sisters and the anal sex scene with Monica in the hotel had a gross ending.

The writing is not good and there were times when my thought was " what, who talks like that?" The plot gets a bit convoluted and at times it feel like something was skipped over. It goes from point A, steps around point B and straight to point C.

Not one I can recommend.

The disjointed English is inescapable, and occasionally causes considerable miscommunication and confusion.

The story concept is great, and the world building is interesting, but the plot is poorly constructed and wanders around at random without any sensible progression.

This really isn't a game where there are many choices for the player to make, and the choices you can make don't seem to have any significance to the direction of the story.

The renders are adequate, but not impressive, and the scenes are so repetitive and formulaic that this seems to be a showcase of the creators fetishes more than an attempt at creatively engaging the player.

This lack of choice, and absence of a clear direction, makes this game a long, frustrating, perplexing, story on rails that I eventually started just skipping to get to the next scene, which usually ends up just being the same scene with a different girl.

I like this game a lot. It's very good.
The ladies in this game are hot with a lot of variety.
I like that the mc is a badass who goes through hell and back to save someone he loves.
the game has great renders and the animations are well done.
Amazing harem game.
Keep up the good work dev!