VN - Ren'Py - Conspiracy [Ch. 1 v0.9 Exclusive Edition] [Remendo's Pvt Lmt]

I don't even know what i just played
story was a snoozefest all i saw was text text and more text
Renders are good
no choiches
No bugs
Unless you want a game where you read alot o wouldn't recommend this

English:..........6/10
User Interface:...8/10
User Experience:..6/10
Art:..............6/10
Dialogue:.........4/10
Story:............3/10
Opinion:..........3/10................
Avg:...........5.14/10 [2.57/5]

I had a very long, still in progress, review of this going until I closed a window by mistake. Part of me REALLY wants to just say "forget it" and move on. Mostly because this is some of the most generic, by the numbers, shovelware, incest tale, mafia story I can think of. (Since all of them blur together being so uninspired and samey) And if you're like me, you know exactly what you're about to get if you haven't tried this yet. Patreon avoidant self-censorship for the most braindead fetish that makes no sense. A sexually repressed and neglected housewife. Two girls that live with MC, one is caring and in love with him, the other is mad he doesn't love her. A boilerplate Mafia story about MC's dead/missing parents. Barely passable robotic translation. Characters with one personality trait. Storytelling from the camp of characters boldly exclaiming to the camera their wants, motivations, and the like. All with the same DAZ models you see everywhere. The ONLY and I mean ONLY thing that sets this apart from the rest is the UI isn't default. But the dev also made it so you cannot make text instant, making the game feel like an absolute slog to trudge through. So lets get through this (again)

The story opens to the tried and true(completely overdone) "MC wakes up and internally monologues about his life." He introduces you to his whole NOTFamily. I say it like this because it's a bunch of patreon avoiding nonsense that we all know what it wants to be. Anyway. We meet everyone fairly quickly, they give their one line of character exposition as follows: Michelle the caring older NOTCousin. Level headed and easygoing. James the NOTUncle. The generic big business man that neglects his model wife literally only to facilitate the mother figure getting with MC. Diane, the NOTAunt. As I said before, she's neglected and lonely and surely won't start thinking of MC in that way. Then Mia, the other cousin. She's grumpy and I'm fairly certain it is 100% because she loves MC and is mad he has a girlfriend. Speaking of girlfriend, Jennifer, to current time in writing, has zero personality. MC literally just says "She's beautiful and I asked her out on a dare." She has the least lines in the entire story so far. You also meet black friend, nerd friend, and hot teacher. They giver their one line, and it all feels very empty and I guess that makes me happy it passed by so quickly? Either way, the characters feel like animatronic characters, not individuals with noteable personalities.

The first thing that happens is MC invites Diana to the obligatory clothes shopping scene where he'll no doubt see her changing and get a preteen boner. Then you get her asking James for a date. But big business man has to comically dismiss her, I'm sure he won't possibly skip the date they made. Skip through the actually pointless school visit, it only introduces the teacher. After class they ask what they need to do, so Jen, the forgettable girlfriend, says to go to her house. But this thrusts the first lewd scene on you with MC saying "We can't, remember what happened last time?" As Jen's mother, that has never heard of a bra, walks in on MC eating her out. But... ALL of them would be going, not to have sex. Why would that be an issue? Anywho, they go bowling instead and you get to see the most laughable, lazy tweened scale and rotation "animation" of bowling pins getting knocked over. But what does this scene do? They don't talk, nothing happens, and they just leave. Why was that put in? MC and Chris leave, and you get to meet Ashley. A detective that tells MC his parents faked their death because they wanted to get away from his dumbass. Actually it's inevitably because mafia wants to do bad with family. So she shows another poor animation to MC and he, rightfully, asks "How can I trust you?" And she just retorts with "Lol trust me bro" and sent them home. Cool? Thanks for the call to action I guess. So MC returns home to find Diana drunk, upset that, SHOCKER, James stood her up. But this switches over to MC getting his first peeping scene, instead of the usual mother-type getting drunk and sexually forward with MC. All-inclusive with unskippable image pans of Michelle in various states of undress. Which pushes them to the nightclub.

Michelle and Mia want to go to the club to blow off steam, which prompts the "DONT TELL ME WHAT TO DO MOM" fight scene and you get a choice. But this choice doesn't matter. He either says "Yeah, I'll go to the club with them to make sure they're alright." OR "I don't know, they're mad at me, but I guess I'll go with them to make sure they're alright." What kind of non choice is that? And the audacity to give you one updoot for family? But, whatever, let's keep moving on. MC doesn't know where they went, so nerd friend from earlier is a super hacker that tracks the girls' phone so MC can show up? Okay. Then you get one of the non-nuked sandbox areas. In this section, you have to do something you're not told about nor have you ever had to do before. Read writing on the wall for a terminator quote that has no spaces,and isn't my most memorable quote from those movies. I tried "I'll be back." not only because that's my quote for that, but I also couldn't go back manually, so I never thought the poorly shopped word on the wall was the answer. ANYWAY. MC gets in, dances with Michelle, the teacher gets drunk, because similar events all have to happen at once. So SHE gets drunk and gets lewd with MC. Which transitions into the garage scene where bad guy essentially yells "Haha I'm not getting consent" as he molests Michelle. You get another non choice right here too. Mia brings a bat, fails to knock them out, then MC finally does it, and they scoot away narrowly. Showing a scene where Michelle thanks her hero and Mia doesn't get to, confirming our earlier thoughts about her.

MC gets a nightmare, Diana fights with James, Jen fully invites Diana to the shopping event, all to speedrun the next morning. And can I just say I'm so glad the bartender from the club is also the cashier at the one clothes shop in every DAZ game ever, just so I can point out she has the same hair as MC. It's kind of hilarious. Lo and behold, Diana's clothes scenes happen, more unskippable pans, then MC T-poses during a blowjob with Jen. Sexy. And you get hard pauses during the sex scene right after. More fun. Immediately after, Ashley, a former police officer, sends a dopey college kid to follow up on a lead she has... For no reason? Then Sarah says she knows where the molester is, so he goes alone to... Fight them? He barely was able to get away, what the hell is he gonna do? That all seems glossed over, but no, it's that disjointed. Initiate an MC and Sara kissing scene, to hide from the bad guys, where they look like they're floating and MCs hand clips into her abdomen. More great visuals. And then MC and Sarah try to inject themselves in this mystery club for NO reason. I don't get why they want to get in, all they want is to find the guy that touched Michelle. All this scene needed to be was Sarah saying they're regulars. But no, gotta get MC a kiss from female version of MC. The next day, Amanda talks to MC about the drunken lewd, but because plot contrivances are easy, her ex boyfriend suddenly bursts in as she says thank you for understanding, and gets super jealous. So she says MC's her boyfriend and they grope each other? THEN MC explains the situation that just happened to her, and since her brain wasn't active at that time, she says "Oh, okay thanks." Come on, man. Then MC and the goonies make a plan to follow that police lead I'm sure you've forgotten about.

Sarah assaults someone and gets a mask for MC, so in order to get it, she wants to dry hump MC. So you get to see a scene between the same character, it's again, pretty funny. Day skip to the goonies pulling the fire alarm to follow that lead, but the ex of Amanda, vice principal, finds MC, who provokes him with how he likes Amanda, so he assaults a student because of the pushed misunderstanding. That would end a career. But, like everything in this, don't think about it too much. THEN. Cut to black. Why would you cut there? Two things could happen, he assaults again or gets caught and fired. But whatever, jokes on me, I guess. I'm the one that went through this at excruciating detail and broke down most of what was wrong with everything. Could this be fixed? Maybe. The way to do it would be expanding on characters, be less obvious, and don't be the same as every other game on this site. I WISH the writing had as much care put into it as the UI. But it doesn't take long to customize the UI, so maybe the same amount of time was used on each. Who knows. If you read through all of this, you're a trooper, or a kindred spirit. But this light novella of criticism should shine a blazing light on what not to do with your writing, if you're making one of these.

I really can't stress enough that I am tired of giving three star reviews that all sound the same. But all these games are the same. The English in this is laughable at worst and stale and robotic at best. The UI is very customized, but they made it so you can't have instant text and MC's name is pure white so it disappears into the blown out renders. The UX suffers because of the text speed, non choices and remnants of the useless linear sandbox that they couldn't quite get rid of. The art ranges from kinda good stills to floaty, clipping animations. You see the same DAZ models everywhere and its hard to mess them up. The Dialogue is so stale, banal and weirdly moves too fast all at the same time. Flesh out a conversation, have people talk to each other that isn't just MC explaining what happened. MC is the most boring character in any story, let the rest of them have the limelight for a minute. The story hasn't even started yet. MC got a redacted envelope and four half assed lewd scenes. It's also short as hell. But really, there's nothing that I can't see coming a mile away that I'd even come back out of morbid curiosity. I hope it gets improved for the people that might be fans of this, but it's so by the numbers and predictable, I don't see me coming back to rereview this even. Do I hope I can eat my words and there's a silent revamp of the story and characters? Sure, I love eating my words so everyone gets a better product. But that hasn't really happened at all on any game I've played on this site. If you want more of the same, and a safe story where I'm sure the girlfriend will reveal that she like to know MC is with other women, and he gets all the answers handed to him, here ya go. Otherwise, I don't even think there's enough smut for the lazy crowd in this to latch onto. Best of luck dev, but this is just not for me.

The Story:

The story has potential, although it feels kind of rushed. A girlfriend that appears out of nowhere will make players feel disconnected from her, unless that's the point. Family members that took you in and gave you love feel more like strangers than people you might owe your life to. The narration is forcing the player to feel stable, even though everything feels so fleeting. The conflict added to the mix does not help either; it just makes the story feel hollow.

Making MC spend more time with the people around him before thickening the plot would solve this issue, though it would slow the story down a bit.

Point and click:
Clicking on floor waypoints and people seems pointless when there is only one option. One of the better uses of this is clicking the doors in the changing room and the timed action part of the game.

Camera pan:
The up-and-down camera pan on some of the characters would not skip after clicking. The only way to skip it was to click the skip button, making the player skip some parts of the dialogue and having to scroll back slowly, hoping not to get stuck on the panning part once more.

Renders:
So far the renders are good.


Overall, it's not bad for an amateur VN. It needs a bit more work here and there.

I'll continue to follow the progress, for now keeping it at 3 stars.

Pros:

• Okayish plot / story​

Cons:

• A lot of blank characters (mannequins) for fillers.
• Characters are meh, not really appealing.
• Forced to cheat / show your junk to teacher / be kissed.
• After the animation, it was hard to click off of (had to click and space bar many times to go to next scene)
• Hardly any choices, felt like maybe 6 choices max.

Can't say I will be following for more updates, I wish you the best, but don't see this being a game for me.

v0,4 review

The good:

Renders look good. Dev also tries to pose according to scene (facial expression, etc)
Progression feels ok. Not much to tell yet, we didn't delve much yet into anything. But the scenes we got were well-placed, I'd say.
MC feels like it can stand up for himself. Not the loser type we must endure a lot, at least. That actually is a major point for me.

The bad

While not horrible, some facial poses do look weird/off. Not in a quantity I'd say you would just expect them to happen, but a few times they did.

One point I would like the dev to consider is to not add fake options and unnecessary clicking.
There is no need to ask to click an arrow to progress ahead where there is no other option to choose, any other path.
There is no need to ask the player to click the pillar to hide when there is no option to do anything else.
This is just more code for the dev and more annoyance to the player for no real gain. It does not really add interaction for the game.
Game over choices that happen too soon should be carefully consider as well. Not a problem yet, but adding choices that just gets you a game over, not adding a fun twist or pun just as a joke, pr any info, etc, once again just adds friction (more clicking) for no real gain.
As v0,4, it is not really a problem, because the content is not dense yet.
But it certainly seems it could be....

The neutral, could be good or bad later

Amount of content is not much now. Not too little either, but certainly could be improved

Conclusion

All in all, there isn't much yet to get a good grasp on the game.
I decide to put this review just because it was too low for the actual content.
While I do agree with some or understand most of the criticism, this one, so far, is at least above average.

Ps: I don't know if it was the Incest2Mod or not, but skipping text does work (ctrl). Just mentioning bcz I've read somewhere it didn't. In case you're like me and like to do a 'scan' to see what type of content to expect xD

It's too frustrating to play because of UI choices, like refusing to honour instant text - you always have to wait for the annoying typewriter effect.

There's also unnecesary fiddly clicks - you have point to click arrows pointlessly, there only one choice/direction so there's literally no reason to have the extra point-to-clicks

The animations are a bit poor, like fighting or cars crashing, they look really out of place and removed from the flow of the game

Every white character is given weird twisted faces for no reason even the LIs, so there nothing attractive to see, which would have been nice, since the conspiracy story is so barely there/slow paced that it is not interesting

You also get no choice over sexual content like who sucks your dick, no matter how hideous.

So to summarise: no choice/control and everything is slow

v 0.3.5.1

Renders are good.
Game Progress is slow.
In this version, the developer has actually listened to us and some big changes to the game like adding the password graffiti at the wall.
And it seems that proofreader has done a great job replacing the entire script up.
Game is looking good after those changes.
Personally I liked the game because of renders.
Giving 5 stars because of the changes only.
Hope to see more content in the future.

v0.8

EDIT: language has much improved but still has quite a few basic errors.
art looks a little better but that design is still the worst.

V0.3 review (with some removed)

so far the whole thing is so run of the mill as to be monotonous as the dead parents back story is nothing new. the story has zero hook in place from a writers point of view so all there is is a weak attempt to hook with imagery. throw in a terrible opening to a conspiracy plot and it just falls really flat. if you are not attracted by the girls, you have no reason to be here.

but the worst aspect by far is the sandboxing. you are directed to click on the screen for no discernible reason other than to move scene to scene, nothing different to moving dialogue forwards, so why have it? to stop the auto read function for no choice. very poor design choice.

TV sitcom dialogue, so-so art and crap design. clear to say i am not a fan. i gave it another go and raised rating to match the improvements but still not enough for my taste. not likely to revisit

on the plus side, i hit no errors so at least they can code.