Ren'Py - Black Incense [S01E01] [Himeros Studios]

Extremely promising start, although I think the writing is overly verbose at times. I especially like the potential for cheating content. Hopefully this game gets a lot of attention and updates.

Good luck to the dev.

Slop all the way down.
From art unchecked for frequent jarring errors (in addition to everything being yellow, everybody has huge mouths with demon teeth, eyes looking different directions, and changes hair and clothing color between images), to writing you live in the south of England and DRIVE south to France in a few hours (English channel?just need a ramp and enough run up!) No care was given by the devs about plausability of any part of this waste of time. And every single thing takes so, gosh, darn long. Club scene virginity loss? A page of single line comments about sound, smell ect of a club, none of them sexy. Does a single one get mentioned later in the story? Of course not, the AI doesn't rerember they existed.

Your born 2006, so 11 years old at school is 2017, and school years spanning covid, and yet we see no isolation but dense campus and celebrating with booze up house parties... at 15 years old?. Yet the clothes, styles ect make it look like it was 1966, literal candles light the libraries, school road is dirt (you wear a boys blazer+tie as a girl and every uniform is different in style and color) and hospitals are yet to embrace the "jet age". By 18 the only bit of tech we see is the back of one laptop... yet the year is 2024, so we should actually be seeing drones filming graduation, VR headsets ect. This "UK is clearly still stuck under Marget Thatcherism so remains backwards" timeline conflicts badly with a UI style that is cyberpunk hacker, neon glow and square pixel fonts, "signal lost" type blur on menu backgrounds, low fi beat on short loops of little context ect to give an impression of left over parts from the clearance bin, thrown together by a child that's ecstatic to show their parents that it worked at all.

I don't mind AI art used when you can't afford an artist, but why the second that people use these tools do they decide that their time is so much more important than the audience, and that the game should be as long as possible, clicking past endless pages of saying whats easily inferred, and often already shown. "Helping you write" cannot mean bulking it out, it must mean condensing it down. Deliver the most emotional impact for a given time the reader has, not the most "content" per hour as creator. You can't enjoy this as a story. You can't enjoy it as porn. You can only observe it like an infomercail on midday TV thats midly less boring that just watching the drier go around at a laundrymart if your phones flat. Its slavagable, but its an uphill battle to get from here, to anywhere remotely where you want to be.

Nice example of how to properly use AI illustrations. It is intruiguing how all the stats are going to influence the story after the prologue. If there were soft animations too it would a 10/10. Can't wait for next udpdates.
Nice work, keep going

Hmm, so 20 years back.

From then on, Lifepath shamelessly ripped off another game—but it was well done, even though I wish some scenes had twice the number of images, as there's sometimes a lot of text for a single image whose scene has already changed.

The text itself is well-written, and the artwork is good (yes, I know, it's AI, but I'm not joining the general hate-filled debate).

I can't say whether the text is also AI and has been adapted.

I haven't finished the prologue yet, because work is calling.

It will be interesting to see what the next updates bring. Will an original story develop, or will it just be more of the same old stuff that's already been done in other games?

This game is already on the way to become one of my favorites. The writing is great, you can lose yourself in this story. There is barely anything in the prologue that has to do with occult stuff but I found myself always having the intro in the back of my mind, anticipating what is coming. The choices and customization feel satisfying.

The only negatives here are quirks of the AI art (grotesque hands, some wacky faces, ...) and the limited music (though the music is still well chosen).

What a fantastic start to the game! This definitely reminds me a bit of Eva Kiss' work which I really love, and the setting looks like it could be really awesome. Himeros definitely is setting a high ambition but from what is out so far one of the most promising games in a long time, I will 100% subscribe for updates

I like the RPG mechanics, the skill checks, the overall theme.
The music is acceptable, though limited.
The writing isn't bad.
Some of the AI art looks unnatural and weird.

The game promotes a promiscuous lifestyle, which I find disgusting in real life as I do in games. That's just my taste. If one likes to play a character in a throwaway society, traveling the world to gather "experience" and "finding themselves", or the notion that losing one's virginity as early as possible is an achievement, this game is for them. Since that doesn't seem to be avoidable in the game.

I just prefer RPGs where relationships between characters are a central element, where they have value and matter long term.

Because it depends on the taste, and otherwise isn't too bad, I give the game an average rating.

The AI generated art is absolutely horrible and downright creepy, look at the mouths and eyes. The unavoidable sex scenes ruin this game for me that touts such customization. The story is hot garbage as well.

Good good lesbian scene and am very excited to cuck the boyfriend I hope in future updates? Lots of good art and good writing and also the music was very good as well. Well done dev keep it up thank you for the good game

God damn this is a pretty massive prologue. Hope the dev can keep it up but had a lot of fun playing this several times through. Hoping for even more lesbian content as well in the next release. But defo going to watch this one