Ren'Py - Blossom of Pleasure [v0.411] [Bildur]

if i could give this game 0 stars i would. for those who are curious to test it out the tags list a number of odd tags. i was interested in the pregnancy/impregnation multiple woman aspect. but there is like most games these days a bdsm tag. so lets say this first. if you are not into bdsm or like me have a general aversion to medium level to hardcore or extreme bdsm then carry on. don't even bother with this game. io thought it was like most games that it would be optional or light....NOPE...you have no real choice in the matter this game is CENTERED around it fully. you don't get a choice with it regardless if it's targeted on the girls you despise or love dearly and would not want to use it on them you are still force to use it because that is the MAIN KINK in the game.

So like i said if you have an aversion to that level of BDSM and humiliation or femdom any of the other affiliated tags that come with that area...don't even bother with this game. move on to other avenues.

To be entirely fair to the game, I have to admit that I played maybe twenty minutes of this game, stopped, unlocked the gallery, looked at the scenes and made my judgment. So take this review with a grain of salt – if someone actually finished this game, please feel free to weigh in.
I played v0.38 of this game, it has the bdsm, male domination and female domination tags. It’s supposed to be a sandbox game about a dystopic society where women took over and feminized all the men. You are supposed to either break this status quo or submit. You should be able to play submissive (fdom/msub), dominant (mdom/fsub) or switch (play most of the scenes of either route).
In reality the dom-path is so underdeveloped that is has almost no scenes and those that exist in the gallery are at best some light domination, rough sex and mind control. There’s one scene of you beating a woman with a belt (short and boring) and another of you humiliating a woman (you can also let another woman do this and she’s Imo better at it than the MC). Most scenes are vanilla or rough sex at best. The creator doesn’t seem to actually be interested in Mdom.
I’m not interested in Fdom/msub, but in the interest of completeness I skimmed through the fdom scenes – there’s a lot more content there – chastity, humiliation, device bondage, spanking, cock milking (and being forced to eat it), domination, scat, watersports, latexdommes,…
It’s pretty obvious where the creator's interest lies – and even there it feels like an inferior version of a certain other game.
I can’t speak about the mechanics or how tedious the grind is, but I saw that you have limited energy each day for actions – shrug.
I also haven’t read prose that purple in years, it’s like the creator grabbed a thesaurus and a bunch of shitty bodice rippers and went to town (main reason I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it).
So – fazit – maybe give it a try if you are into femdom, but if not, don’t bother.

V0.41

those HTML games where devs try to paywall cheats are a neon sign that design flaws are abound. why would any game need them if designed correctly?... is my way of thinking.
very few small devs seem to get sandbox, roaming games right in the design and this forum alone is rife with cheats for games that some will still vote top rating for, while also posting cheats, or for cheats. it boggles the mind.

my hope that this one would be one of the few exceptions was short lived, and yet....for some unknown beguiling reason i am rating 4 out of 5 stars?
i have no idea what it is that compels me to play and play. game design is bollocks and i still keep going. even the imagery is not that great to me.
the story is not floating my boat and neither is the kinks, as some are the anti-boner in my shorts.

yet much like the crisis in middle life game (see? avoided using it's actual name as per rules), even though i should dislike it, i just like it.
like a walnut, i am not exactly fond of the taste but can't seem to stop myself cracking another and another...hours seem to float by in minutes.

worth a good rating for making time dilate

It's incredible to me how many authors genuinely believe that word vomiting onto their screen makes them competent writers. I swear it's such a consistent trend with some of these AVN writers that more often not, they'll bite off more than they can chew. I had an immediately sinking feeling when they gave us options for the level of description we wanted, because it shows they can't evne comprehend the concept of "less is more". Alas, that was exactly what was delivered.

Conceptually, I like the idea of exploring a matriarchal society, but I can think of maybe two AVNs that have actually been able to pull it off, and both the devs are (to my knowledge) women. Perhaps being women allows them to write female characters better than some people who have likely never felt the touch of a woman. Here, it's just...weird. The men apparently just got tested and lost all muscle mass, and also the size of their dick? As if a woman's biological sex drive for men just...has no concept here? It's just so WEIRD for them to make the story this contrived, but spend such a ridiculous amount of time going around and around on storybuilding that is so bad. I mean, they literally have the MC start a cafe job in the EVENING. You know, the period where people are all going home from work, and so don't need to go to a cafe. These SIMPLE things are just so irritating.

Visually, it's not bad really. Is it especially good? No. It has this weird smoothness that just doesn't look extremely appealing, but it serves it's purpose.

People will also likely take issue with the sandbox mode, which is really just a way to pad out the time and make you feel like it's better because you actually spent time in the AVN.

The sandbox on this game is so bad that makes impossible to me to give more than 1 star. The story, the renders are good but what does it matter if the game style is annoying and unplayable. If it was a vn it would be a great game

Blossom of Pleasure starts out as a great game with different path choices.

MC lives in a world where dominant women have the saying. During the story, you will experience a change of life, and can chose to alter your position towards women.

Since ther are different path options (sub, dom, switch), you have soome unique encounters.

But all of a sudden, that sandbox game changes to an management system with idle gameloop. While a progress bar fills up, you earn money, invest money so that this bar can progress faster, repeat until you cash in the rewards. that rewards can spent to manage your sex dungeon/prostitution ring.

That management gameplay doesnt respect the gamer, and can be ignored to play the story. IF there is a story! Since the management gameplay had been added, the story had not been continued.

There arent that much good game with sub/dom, and bdsm on F95. And up to now 0.41 build, this game wont even be a good one.

This a pretty great game, the world building is great, the characters are interesting, the art is very well made, has tons of fetishes and customization and offers 3 different paths to play.

Hope to see even more fetishes in the future!

Interesting game that has a ton of options.

Graphics - Top notch. Many renders to depict various different scenes.
Dialog - Fine. The fastest option is best. The other acts like an AI that i wordy.
Story - solid premise. Not much moving during Chapter 3.

Progression - Weird. Everyhing make sense, until all of a sudden the game becomes a management sim.

Options - Good. Sub, switcher or Dominanat. All 3 routes have separate renders.

All in all, I would come back for the story, and skip the management side of things

Story/Character:
The story goes you are a man who is in a world where women have power over men and have discovered a way to subdue men to become their beta. However, you discovered you are blessed and are the chosen one, where now you can seduce & charm any woman. Honestly, the story was so boring and didn’t even bother playing the whole game. It just has no cohesion and no interesting story plot. The dialogue is poor and has many grammatical errors.

The main character is such a boring character. No personality or substance to him. He feels like an inanimate sex toy throughout the game. The other characters feel bland, not memorable.

Content:
There is an okay amount of content in this game. Like I mentioned before, I didn’t finish the game just because of how bored I was of the game. I do have to commend the many fetishes and kinks in this game. Many fetishes will appease lots of people, but also might gross them out as well. There’s scat content apparently, but luckily this game lets to turn off fetishes/kink you don’t like.

Gameplay:
The gameplay is a sandbox-free roam with a 4 event cycle a day with action point gameplay. The overall gameplay, I think is fine and works as it’s supposed to. It’s clean and easy to navigate throughout the game. Just one of the biggest bothers to me in the game is the fucking loading bus when you switch from the house to the city map. It just destroys the flow and continuity of the game. I don’t think it's necessary to add that loading map as it’s a renpy game that does require that much power to load a map. It's also feels like a bit too grindy for what the content offers.

Visuals:
The only redeeming factor about this game is the visuals. The renders are great and are eye-pleasing. All the female models are hot and the proportions are perfect. Some textures of some of the public hair are very detailed during the close-up shops.

The UI is great. It’s clean and has a certain level of polish to it. It adds personality to the game, where it’s sorely lacking in it.

Sound:
The sound design is average. There’s background music that adds ambience. The sex sounds are kind meh, but still much appreciated in the sex scenes.

Honestly, I was just looking for a fun game to play and this wasn’t really it. It’s boring and lacks any kind of personality. The only thing that keep me through it was the visuals and how hot the female characters. If you’re looking for a below average game with lots of fetishes that you can explore and experience this game, then this might be for you. But if you're looking for a game that’s worth your time, then this isn’t it.

Kind of disappointed in the pregnancy content. Half the sex scenes don't have a visual difference as you're looking at their back. And even worse the only character with a dialog change is Karen who you can't have pregnant sex with. Half the reason I kept going was because I wanted Lara to comment about being pregnant, and yet it's just another day for her.

Also what's the point of the cookie clicker-esque game? I thought it was how you'd build prestige seeing how we're not allowed to use the money it makes, but you get WAY more just by having kids. I guess maybe if I spent days working on it, a reset might be worth more, but this goes on to a larger point that this game is not giving me the impression of respecting my time.

This is probably all due to me choosing the dom path, maybe the game has a lot more content for a sub, as the amount of fetishes you can disable seem to be exclusively for the sub path. I should have expected as much given that it seems to be the dev's fetish, but if that's the case why even bother with a Dom path? Just commit to the sub and focus on that. So with all this said, I don't think it's a game for me, or anyone else with other things to do given the time eater this is.

P.S. Switches don't exist, they're just subs who are so submissive that they'll dom if asked to,

I keep forgetting about this game and downloading it while going "Why am I not playing this?"....and then I remember.....the grind...the needless, needless grind. it's like the illuminati of grind, in that you have to grind one system to grind another. Grind within grind.

Good Points
+ There is the path that exists in the game, and like always it's a good point for writers to give another choice to players and not force just one path. And paths feel quite different I should say, for example in DOM path you can't even go back home because of how much you changed, and has to stay away from authorities.
+ This game has the most detailed settings and menu I have ever seen in any adult game, honestly, I'm impressed with the level of effort put into settings, it's very detailed and almost everything is customizable.
+ Sex scenes have animations and they are somehow decent.

Bad Points
- The story is quite bad, especially how a lot of bizarre and funny stuff is getting told with the most serious tone by the Narrator or people who live in this universe makes things quite weird, the game tries so hard to be serious about things should be gag content that makes things quite poorly-written. Heck even Lara was spitting facts with saying ''And which airhead got the idea that all men should have tiny dicks?'' lol
- Some dialogues especially nearly every dialogue of Riccarda are quite nonsense, and she thinks she is making any sense makes most of her scenes quite cringy...
- Sex scenes have animations, but the positions/angles don't look good at all, better angle/position choices are needed.
- Despite Three Paths' existence, some scenes in Chapter 1 are unavoidable even tho you don't wanna go that path, and again despite Three Paths' existence Dom's path feels neglected, it has very little content compared to others, which is weird considering it should be main path since the story goes on that direction, MC being chosen one to overthrow mistress empire, etc. And aside from that it feels too villain-like, considering things we learned in other paths and actually some people who thought wasn't bad, but they got bad treatment from MC in Dom Path, it feels like Dom Path is done poorly.
- On the switcher path MC is still using his real name, which is a very dumb move considering the whole path is about doing things from shadows, there should be a scene where we have to choose another name, like a codename for the MC. And he saying things like ''Our identities camouflaged'' makes no sense either. Does this dude seriously think his identity is camouflaged despite using his real name?
- The game is a sandbox, and everything takes too much time and effort, it's fair to say that the game is too grindy and does not respect your time at all and that makes gameplay quite boring. Heck even with cheating, thanks to can only get 10k money or prestige, it takes ages to get some stuff, imagine even cheating you add your own game is being grindy! WTF?!
- Limited actions thing seem annoying and kind of nonsense to have.
- The placement of the next button on the save page should be right next to numbers, with the current way it's kind of annoying to use.
- The design of MC is a well-known asset used countless of times in adult games.
- Aside from MC other models are not good either, MC's mother's tits, especially her nipples are kind of ugly and her skin doesn't look good. Or like what's wrong with Sophia and her saggy tits even after she kind of changed herself because of needing a new identity? The only good-looking woman in the game is Lara and even her tits look very low quality.
- The game has some problems with quality, textures/renders are not detailed enough, especially for most women's tits, exclusively nipples look very low quality seriously what kind of low quality texture is this?!
- Secret room makes no sense at all, it says secret room, yet it has windows! Are you telling me no one released there was a room there despite seeing there is a window from outside?!

For The End
Honestly, aside from how detailed the settings are and the sex scenes having decent animations I don't see anything good about this game, especially since it is grindy makes the game quite boring, you can cheat, but if you are forced to cheat what's the point of the game in the first place? DEV seriously needs to up his game and fix the problems I told, otherwise this game isn't worth the time you gonna spent on it.

Normally I try to spend some time discussing each aspect of a VN by breaking it down into categories and then aggregating a score at the very end. However, "Blossom of Pleasure" is a VN that has little respect for a player's time, and as such doesn't warrant a full on review (it also wouldn't be fair to keep bashing the dev).

Issues
The game itself is built upon the premise that you will have the option of exploring two main paths: Domination or Submission. Each path is either explored exclusively, or you can opt for a "switch" role, which seems to be there for players who want to see both sides of the main story. This split, however, means that the total content of the game is split in half in terms of actual content for each path which progresses the story. That, in my opinion, is a huge "no-no" when writing a script for a plethora of reasons, but the prominent one is the lack of any sort of quality control.

...That is strike 1...

The gameplay loop has absolutely no respect for the player's time as you WILL spend dozens of hours just grinding various point values to progress each characters story. The reward you obtain after spending hours of grinding said points is either a minor story progression scene, or a half-assed lewd scene with rigid animations. The actual "reward" for engaging with the core mechanics just isn't enough to justify the amount of time sunk into performing senseless tasks.

Thankfully, there is the option to cheat these values to their max despite the warning from the dev stating your "enjoyment of the story will be diminished".

... Strike 2...

Perhaps not as egregious as the first two issues, the actual writing for story favors long monologues that overuse metaphors. For example - when describing the "mother" - the dev used 3 metaphors to get the same point across about her personality being cold and calculating, or the fact that she is playing a game in which she has an advantage in. The whole point of the "Visual" part of "Visual Novel" is the ability to convey several lines of descriptive text into a single image that conveys the exact same point.

This issue persisted throughout the ENTIRETY of chapter 1, only for Chapter 2 to implement a different writing style and actually taking advantage of imagery rather than descriptions. There wasn't even a gradual transition of writing style, so enjoy that whiplash.

... Strike 3 ...

Closing
I never enjoy writing harsh reviews of VNs due to the fact that solo devs are having to wear many hats when pushing out updates. However, when a dev actively chooses to implement gameplay mechanics and writing styles that show little consideration for a player's time they end up making a rough situation worse.

My advice to the dev (please don't take this negatively as I'm being genuine):

• Pick a theme and stick with it. Either focus on a Submission story, or a Domination Story.
• Cut the overall grind requirements by 80%. Very few people enjoy timewasters in erotica
• Streamline your writing style to focus more on dialog rather than descriptors. You have the massive advantage of using visuals to convey key points without needing to write several extra lines of narrative.

There is massive potential for this VN that I sincerely want to see succeed. You have a great foundation plot wise, home in on that and the players will appreciate it!

Really eh game
Pros:
+Great renders
+Nice premise
+A lot of scenes
+Straightforward grind that isn't too hard to understand
+Good guidance to triggering scenes
+Fetish filter

Cons:
-Time management, "Do X at Y time for Z to happen"
-Real life time management, the grind takes so long this feels like an actual job
-The game doesn't have the advertised tags it claims to have, in my several hours of playing I only stumbled upon very few of the tags, I have not unlocked every single thing but apart from basic femdom, watching women do erotic things, getting spanked and kicked occasionally, there really isn't much and I have doubts most the fetish filters do anything at all.
-Grindy, I came here to jack off man not play knockoff cookie clicker.
-Scenes while many with excellent and varied renders, are very short in terms of what happens, its 90% dirty talk/teasing or in case of Riccarda random nonsensical philosophy.
-Text wall, I am again here to jack off not read a Shakespearean erotica.
-The grind is not worth it, I would be content if there was like 5 minutes of erotic content after every 15 minutes of grinding but no, grind grind grind and occasionally get a sneak peak at someone nude while grinding.

The game can really become good if the developers change the approach to the game. It seems to me that you need to focus on one thing (in my case, I would like to see female domination). Because trying to sit on several chairs irritates both camps and you scare away the audience. There is a good story, hot renders and characters, but there are too many grinds and useless scenes. I hope the developers will decide to rethink the project, rebuild it taking into account the existing renderings and give out a game in the genre of female domination. In the meantime, unfortunately, I can't put a higher rating.

Was okay as a concept, but too much grind and doesn't know what it wants to do.

Dev is going to have to make a choice at this point and then rework everything with that choice. Do you want a femdom setting and world or do you want maledom turn the tables? Trying to do both just annoys everyone and slows down dev time, forcing insane grind and repetitive content.

At this point even if that was done, you'd have to get the word out. But with how it is now, it's hit a real dead end.

This game is a very confusing one, I am not an super organized person and sandbox games are just not for me. Still I tried and regretted it. Some contents are easily missable, You have to grind same dialogues everyday with different characters in different rooms at different times until you hit the minimum required RP to see a slight dialogue change with a character. There are too many icon layouts with different info to follow which stress the sh*t out of me. I have played many aaa games, but I don't think this game worth the time considering how little you progress compared to the time spent. Sandbox games are a cheap trick to stretch a minute long content into an hour, and this game is the proof. 99% of the stuff here is nonsense and re-reading a newspaper is more interesting than playing this game. So don't waste your time playing this unless your life is boring af and you have nothing else to do other than playing it, but also be prepared to be overwhelmed by icons n stuffs.

I liked the models and the scenes. Dialogue was fine and the setting was ok. I only played through the submissive path as it had the scenes that interested me the most.

The clicker sandbox part of the game seemed quite pointless but perhaps if the game grows in the future and lasts longer after you gain access to it, there'll be more time to passively grind it.

My biggest complain would be the way too long descriptions that happened during some scenes where it would use 30 different adjectives to describe how warm and cosy a lady's private parts are. If it were an HTML game for example I could just roll my eyes and skip through those paragraphs, but here you need to click through a dozen text boxes to get the scene moving.

I'd still recommend anyone into femdom to check it out, it doesn't take too long to unlock all the scenes as you don't really need to interact with the grindy parts of the game unless you really want to 100% the game and gain nothing.

Score is 3/5 for a game that's in development, and I can see myself coming back to it in a few months to check if there's been more content added.

Was really enjoying this one and then Act 2 happened and it's like a completely different game altogether. In the second act of the game you are introduced to a ridiculous clicker/stonks 'game.' Get used to it, because this is your life now. Money is useless and you need the new blue money to pay for everything and to progress the story.

So after grinding for a few hours to acquire the 10k blue bucks you are rewarded with an empty house. I should mention Act 2 you will be pressing the skip button a lot. A few days go by and the older 'roommate' stops in to deliver some dialogue about la resistance and you get a boring facefuck scene and a FADE TO BLACK sex scene that only Ray Charles could appreciate, but don't worry you can revisit that scene every night.

What happened? The game had great writing, the music was good and matched the tone and atmosphere and then it's like Act 2 comes along and it's just not it. How does the shopkeeper girl get a more meaningful romance than the older roommate who is supposed to be 'the one that was always nice to the mc?'

If I was to rate just Act 1, it's an easy 5/5. It had a good story, nice world building, good dialogue and characters that felt authentic and part of that world. It's just such a stark contrast to Act 2 that feels empty and the progression loop becomes press skip button lots of times. I am wondering if it's just a matter of there are 3 paths now instead of 1 so there is less of that attention to detail that Act 1 had.

tl;dr solid start that went off a cliff, hopefully it gets back on track somewhere down the line

I'm taking a rather categorical view of a game from which my experience has been, let's say, lackluster, if not downright disastrous.

First of all, the game's general setting plunges us into a gynarchic dystopia, where, as you'll have gathered, women dominate instead of men, to sum things up very roughly. What's more, the game doesn't go for subtlety when it comes to setting its scene, its narrative implications, the motivations of its characters and their personalities; everything is summed up in broad terms.

It's a classic story of a world dominated by women (a premise very similar to Karlsson's Gambit, though not as good), in which our male character seeks to either emancipate himself or resist, discreetly blend in to survive, or totally submit to this new established order. At the very least, that's the backstory; it's more of a basic pretext for introducing scenes of a certain kind.

However, the developer seems to want to give us a sort of compromise between a male character more submissive to women, or conversely more rebellious and macho seeking to free society from the grip of women; to this is added a switcher choice which is only there to unlock scenes of average flavor where we are sometimes submissive, sometimes dominant.

Initially, we evolve in a "family" (or roommates/friends, if we respect the Patreon rules) of rather ordinary women by porn standards (very generous bodies, a very rich house, a superficial lifestyle, shallow personalities), also occasionally encountering other women of lesser importance, who on the whole are not very beautiful (generic models of poor graphic quality, apart from one acceptable model).

The game never seems to want to clearly define its line between more or less hardcore and humiliating femdom content and lighter, super chad male domination content that's a little silly around the edges; on either side, we have poor storytelling and very unsatisfying, caricatured sex scenes.

As far as the game design is concerned, this is certainly where the problem lies: lots and lots of grinds to unlock very short, mediocre scenes, very poorly animated, generic moaning sound effects already seen elsewhere and pathetic at best, with little or no music, improbable and tedious sandbox content that doesn't justify the investment-reward ratio in terms of player time, a world map that we're going to say is funny so as not to be mean (xD), dialogue boxes too small for rapidly scrolling text, long and mostly meaningless dialogues.
In short, I'd say that at this stage, the game doesn't have much to please or retain a potential audience, so let's see what the future holds. Personally, I'd be quick to move on to something else. The technical weakness of this title and the grinding present ad nauseam very quickly made me drop the case.

I have the impression that a sort of fatality or curse strikes all games that contain a potentially interesting femdom theme, which is rather sad for me as someone who appreciates this type of content.

Here's my opinion, which reflects my vision, but which seems rather coherent to me, because in my opinion this game certainly doesn't deserve 5 stars, and a single star seems appropriate in view of the low standard presented to us.

Have a nice day, folks