Ren'Py - Come Home [v8.18.5 Premium] [R.J. Rhodes]

PROS
- It's about what you'd expect from a Ren'Py VN.
- Lots of characters
- Pretty up there artwork and animations
- Most of the characters are very well designed
- Some decent backstories
- Some kinks to choose from

Cons
- A lot of the characters are bland and short lived, or the ones that are interesting have little content/direction.
- You have very few options to actually change the outcome past a yes/no outcome (Do you want to x with x? Y/N)
- Political agenda hamfisted throughout the game
- The kinks that are included in the game are pretty surface-level and generalized.
- Some of the characters just look inhuman to me

This is everything that a sandbox should have.
- Hint system
- Progression tracker
- "Skip time" function
- How many and what kind of scenes you can see with a character
- Whether or not you've seen all the content with a character
- Actual explanations for the game mechanics
- Options to pursue whichever character you want and even block ones you don't want
- Everything. Is. Just. So. Fucking. Organized.
- And the list goes on. It really does. I just can't remember all of them.
Every developer who wants to make sandbox should play this game and take notes. It's not "making the game easier" to have these QoL features in the game.

It's just that none of the character models look good. Some of them even look hideous. That's the one caveat about this game but it's a pretty big one.
It deters me from playing the game but all the game features are so FUCKING amazing that it's cathartic so I can't bring myself to give it anything less than 4 stars.

Seriously, fuck this game. It is so good that I will constantly compare other games to this one. Come Home is a very good sandbox game where you can really persue the women you want. A lot of sandbox games give you the illusion of choice, and you end up having to go through all the storylines to progress. This game is very different in that regard. There are 20 partners you can interact with and they all feel fairly realistic. Not to mention that the variety of women is very nice.

The writing is very good and it actually feels like you are reading a book at times. The basic story is that your father has disappeared without a trace, which causes you to come back home after studying abroad. This triggers various events to happen.

This game is just very good and I can't get enough of it. I highly recommend this one.

[v 5.14.1]
While attending college abroad, you recieve word from your step-mother that your father has gone missing. You return home to your stepfamily and decide to support them as best you can while also trying to find out what happened to your father. While solving this mystery you befriend and date numerous women in the town, all with their own plights and desires.

The variety of girlfriends you can persue is pretty great. Animations for sex scenes are surprisingly smooth. The game is sandbox, but there is very little grinding. You don't buff stats or worry about money. Instead you spend time talking with the girls and taking them on dates until other scenes become available or trigger on their own. The structure of the game ensures that you always feel like you're seeing something new and making progress. The built-in hint system is very detailed and makes a walkthrough mod unnecessary. A solid game with interesting characters.

The only downsides are that some animations choose underwhelming angles, and that the quality of renders can sometimes dip. There are also some kinks that I don't quite care for. There is a gay relationship you can choose to engage in, but it is completely optional and with the click of a button there character simply never appears in the game. There are also several women that don't shave their privates. It adds to the variety, but it is distracting to me personally.

Great game and definitely worth your time!

There's only a handful of games I consider to be perfectly made, and this game is one of them. It gives you the sensation of being in a dream, or movie. The stuff fantasies are made of.

This game is so good! It has everything you could ask for! Stunning female models, story,gameplay, excitement, suspense, comedy, Just a well rounded game! You can tell the Dev spent a huge amount of time on every single little detail.

Renders are mesmerizing, such realistic features and visuals. Animations are top-tier.

I like how the game allows you to choose which character, and when you interact. You are the master of your own destiny. Of course, I went straight for the Milf, but you can literally choose whoever you want! And on that note, the scenes are in my top all time favorites.

I really had a good time playing this game, and I definitely recommend it. You won't be disappointed, this game is up there with all the all time greatest. Dev did an outstanding job bringing his ideas to life.

Thank you dev, for all of your hard work!!!

For starters I am noit a fan of sandbox games, because it is easy to create them badly, there are only few exceptions to the rule and this is one of them. This one is one of the most chill games I have ever played. It is basically THERAPY. Story is a-okay, nothing that special. One can immerse himself in it or not. The main aspect of this game is freedom which is only limited by our own perfectionism. Most of the ladies look rather good, there are some not so good ones of course. Still, the end grade is rather positive. Scenes are really well done, I really like scenes where not doggy style or missionary is the only option(I mean, somehow other devs don't understand that people want to SEE the assets of the female and both doggy from side view and missionary are the worst poses one could have), so yeah thumbs up on this one too. The cast is quite diverse, which in this case is rather good(I am not a fan of the diversity and lmbtabcdefg bandwagon everyone likes to jump on nowadays), everyone can find their favourite match. There are no forced scenes and what I find really unique compared to other games, that it is possible to COMPLETELY IGNORE/blend out LIs, if we don't click with them.
Worth mentioning is the hint system, which is remarkably well done, with it, 100% completion is realistically doable. (well, if one can power through the gay stuff, as a hetero I had a hard time max out the gay LIs)
So the verdict: it is one of the best games on this site, if not the typical story driven AAA type, it holds its own, great job dev!

It's great when you get surprised by an awesome game when you don't expect it.
In regard of update it is wondrous, every time whole characters getting new contents, that needs a diligent work , also after update usually some of complication getting resolved and we are getting more smooth experience .
I like story very much, there is plenty of gorgeous characters , Reba and Mari are my favorites, I wish there was more content for them, it would be very cool.
In my opinion this game has whole package and deserves more attention and it is underrated .
Come Home is an awesome experience, splendid job RJ.

Great game with many options for variations in story lines and one of the best management system for the li's, I've come across. It's so easy deciding which of the many different li's you want to pursue or not. The graphics are excellent and just keeps getting better with each update.

I enjoyed this one. This game is a bit different than the other Renpy games I've played. Is this game good? Yes. Could it be better? Hell yes.

The main plot is the mysterious disappearence of MC's father with a little bit of SciFi mumbo-jumbo triggering the return to his old town which doesn't fit the overall tone of the VN imo but it is not that important because the focus is mainly the dating sim. Most of the characters are not tied to the main story. The game is mostly laidback and chill, talk to LIs, date them and bang them. I was OK with that gameloop.

There is not a singular beeline for dating also. You follow a realistic routine with a little bit of sandbox freeroam and decide who to go for. There are certain time restrictions and dialogue checks for advancement of paths with LIs. That is a cool and ambitious idea to pull off in Renpy but after a while when you consume the most content getting %100 content can get tedious and grindy for some. (for me at least, I gave up after a point) The reason is you can skip to certain days in a week but not a certain time in a day AFAIK.

The models and renders are not that different and handcrafted, you will recognize the presets of LIs and backgrounds if you played a couple of AVNs. MC is basic af too. They are pretty to look at but not great for 2023. The visual quality varies also as this is a long project. Locations don't vary much you will be looking at same locations pretty much.

As to focus on who MC dates, I am surprised by the effort dev put into it. There are 20 LIs available to MC (including 1 homosexual, 1 transfemale, 1 disabled path) with variable race, gender and body types. I am not sure if we could settle down with every one of them because most of the older ones seem like flings or FWBs. Can't know for sure as the game is incomplete but for each of them seems like dev wrote a character chart and implemented it into the game. We discover each with phone calls or dates. A praise is in order.

The only problem I have is all of the LIs are not exclusive while dating and/or banging and OK with us manwhoring. Sure this fits into the character for some but out of character for the most. Yes Skyhill is a small town and people will know of MC's conquests so secretly cheating would create plotholes and not implementable but the design choice of letting us to experience all paths in a single playthrough broke some characters for me. Dev could make some girls OK and some not OK with it so we would have an incentive for a replay. If we were to settle down in the future updates we will break more hearts than needed

Now the adult stuff. Audiovisually an average experience. There are certainly kinks besides mild hetero stuff too. All optional of course. The animations are average at best for 2023 though some of them was hot. No SFX. Fappability varies. NOTE: Voice actor for Kendra was cringy af, doesn't fit her character by an inch. I recommend transferring her recordings to another or remove them completely.

TLDR: This is a good (4-star) dating sim novel with an extensive LI roster, worth a play if you are to enjoy it like this. If you are looking for a porn VN and or a VN with a good story you will get an average grindy experience with repetitive freeroam segments. I can see this game is getting a niche audience.

v4.13.1

I'll try to keep the review on the short side mostly due to my few complaints with the game.
The story is interesting, and mostly well implemented and developed, although has gotten stuck as of late, maybe my impression as I started playing this game's iterations recently. Still, I'd like to see the game have more main story content.
Regarding love interests, there's for pretty much every taste and you can pick what you want to play and what you want to ignore as well, which is very welcome. The "I'm fine with us not being exclusive" thing feels forced on a lot of the LIs though. On the same topic, the relatively normal body proportions the models have are very welcome.
If I've seen grammatical errors in the game, I do not remember them, which again, very good, I love me some proper english games.
The renders are pretty fine as well, so no complaints at all here.
Now, the one thing I have issues with here are the animations, they're bland, mostly uninteresting, short as hell and to top it off, reverse-looped. They have a severe lack of different points of view, and the fact that you can only pick one position per sexual encounter is lame. Definitely the weakest point of the game.
Continuing with things I don't like, the recurring "What do you want to talk about?" question during dates at the conversation topics list is annoying after the third time, and with the amount of dates you need to go to to unlock content, it becomes a pain in the ass rather quickly, but that's me. This also applies to the other sort of "questions" that pop, like where to cum and so on, they don't feel natural at all in the scenes, they should flow from one part of the scene to the next, but instead end up like rehearsed lines coming from a robot.
The UI could use a bit of a touch-up, a black background with rectangles all around isn't the most eye-catching thing in the world, and the rest is the default renpy interface.


Overall, this game needs some serious animations-department improvements and it'd be well rounded.
The one thing kinda "dready" will be the moment when you have to pick one or two LI and dump the remaining 18~19, lol.

Come Home is a sandbox dating sim. The very best one.

You can nitpic about some graphics and some animations some plot points... Whatever. Doesnt matter. It´s huge, it has great characters, great scenes, lots of different women, kinks and that Brandi chatroom is hilarious!

After playing this i only wanna complain about RJ Rhodes lack of courage in making this game a true VN. You know with branching story lines, managing different love interests and so on...
Just a pinch of salt away from greatness.

Great game, great story. You can choose who to romance, the pace you want, and in any order.
The scene selection screen after the introduction lets you know if there's a new scene available. Can be kind of grindy with all the dialogue options to get through, but it's all worth it.
The futa/trans character is more "trap" I suppose, and I didn't think I would like it. But it's well done with some descent character development. I was suprised I would enjoy,.
Give this project a shot.

First game I have seen with a proper Bisexual male protagonist with unique npcs with distinct personalities and stories and sharing scenes thaat makes sense and gangbang which is consensual and not rapey. I think the animations need more frames but thats the problem with the daz3d engine because every game with daz 3d characters has piss poor animations so to say. But I was genuinely impressed by the game.

I've probably played 80+ Renp'y games over the past couple of years. Considering the size, scope, and quality, Come Home is easily in the top 5....top 3.....maybe the best game I've seen. The renders and writing are top notch. The art actually improves significantly once you get past the first few releases, and they were good to start. I can't say enough good things about this game. Super well done and I can't wait for a completed version. Kudos to the developers.

The main story is odd, I won't spoil, but hopefully you enjoy sci-fi/detective stories. The mc seems to be obsessed with letting everyone know about how he was studying in brazil, but yet somehow manage to do absolutely nothing over there, no friends, no gf, no experiences, no traveling around, and he was failing college on top of that, so it feels like he was stuck in his room jacking off for 3 years straight. It feels like a big wasted opportunity.

Around 20 romanceable characters, 70% of them are ugly models. I don't care for "realism" in this case, same reason why I wouldn't watch a movie about a guy named bob doing his taxes. The animations are not great, they feel stiff, and short.

Most of the girls have a self contained story separated from the main story, and each other, but they still feel the need to let you know "you can fuck other girls" anyway(redundant).

Sandbox, you are going to spend a lot of time clicking around, and skiping time to get the stories you want to follow.

Come Home is a very good game that falls much more into the "Dating Simulator" category than "Porn Game". The girls (and guys) look normal and realistic, but the model quality isn't necessarily top-tier.

Don't be misled, that's not to say that there is no (or minimal) sexual content in the game, but rather that you will generally have to progress in a normal human fashion with your Love Interests to unlock it. There are a lot of sex and sexy encounters for the characters, but they are often walled behind sometimes tedious texting topics like "Do you like indoors or outdoors better?" or "What's your favorite food?" It would be a nice touch if there were at least flavor text acknowledging retention of some of these things, but by and large it is usually just a check in the box to advance the story line with no repercussions.

Honestly, the only criticism I have for this game that despite the other somewhat reasonable personalities, every single person will explicitly tell you that it's perfectly acceptable to date/have sex with other people since you're not "committed". This is a typical harem trope, but honestly it doesn't seem like the Dev is intimating any sort of harem ending, so the dialogues just seem unrealistic for any otherwise monogamous person; any multiple-relationship suggestions could really be omitted unless the Dev plans to have the MC marry all 20 characters.

I had to change my review structure a bit for this game, I'll ignore main story and writing this time. Just say it's good enough. Light harem without much of drama.
1) Gameplay: It's like like 20 (LI count) different kinetic novels in one game, sometimes they're connected, but mostly can be played separately. No boring grind. Nice UI. Nothing is forced, choose and have fun. Just play and relax. No routes though, linear progression/all content in one run, thanx God (+)
2) Character plots/personalities: OMG, I've never seen so much totally different characters with original plots, believable and lovable personalities, in one game. So much original stories I've never seen in other games, so much fresh content for for Me. (+)
3) Character desighn: Characters are not models or pornstars or smth., so much different body types, clothing styles, some has tattoo, some are not really a beauties, but they're all as believable and attractive in their own way. No cringe petite girls with mega boobs or smth. (+)
4) Sex scenes: short but satisfying enough animations, nice scenes, nice renders, a lot of creativity, believable (as with characters), they maybe can't blown your mind with graphics but surely fits Just perfect. (+)
5) Content: game is not yet finished but I think (and hoping) it Will be. For the moment game has enough (good quality) content for many hours of playing, it's already enough for two avg. games. (+)

It's quite a good game overall, with lots of original, high quality content. Not a perfect game, it has some flows but not worth mentioning tbh cause it's more depends of tastes.

Excellent story driven title with a bit of everything. R.J herself is very passionate about the project which you can see in her regular updates and blog posts on Patreon. The girls (and guys) have very unique personas and sexual interests, making it easy to quickly find who might be best suited for the player.

A lot of potential with this one.

This is a nice, light game with quite a handful of characters, which are quite interesting. The plot itself is not very important, the accent is made on getting to know a person you liked. There is no drama or hard choices, nothing is forced on the player. All in all, a good relaxing game.