VN - Ren'Py - Abandoned - Devilish Business [v0.71] [Bawdy Baron]

Looking good! Structuraly my kinda of game, lille bit of training with a well set background. Well written text and not long to read, balanced. Missing cg but the ones that exist are really well made, specially sis and co/worker.

Devilish Business (v0.51.1b) is in a strange position - that of a visual game with no real visuals. What you get then is a text based game where the text is split into tiny little boxes, a page at a time.

It's so clear that it is supposed to be visual experience that the lack of the visuals just cannot be ignored. The many scenes where you are told in the little text box that a character has dressed up for a date, but you get the same sprite as usual, is like a slap in the face. The many scenes of action where the spite is stood there exactly in the same standing pose as when met in a corridor, or even sprite not there at all, disappoints.

If the story itself were not so engaging, the text well written, one could instantly write this game off altogether. However, it is an engaging story well written. So while this game is clearly not ready yet, so long as you remember that it is really mostly a proof of concept, not yet a first release version and barely a beta considering how heavily this format relies on visuals that just are not there ... well, it has promise.

The gameplay is a mixed experience. On the one hand, as stated, it's a nice story and well written. On the other hand it is a sandbox with very little guidance. In several cases, even the feedback for some actions is misleading and provides no help to realise you need to do it a few more times, against logic, when it didn't do anything before.

For example, you need to send flirty texts to the sister again and again after she refuses you and says it is creepy, with no sign at all it is getting you anywhere, otherwise you can't progress with her. As a result, I got nowhere with her in my first playthroughs and only discovered that from looking at the code.

Another similar example is with the mother. The first time you masturbate in your room it does nothing for you except waste the only limited resource in the game - time. It doesn't do anything positive, and there's nothing to suggest you should do it again. But unless you masturbate after starting to unlock the Mother's past, you can't get anywhere there either.

The code makes considerable use of random numbers to generate the chance of one of the girls agreeing to a scene (such as a date), and has no streak-breaking code. On an unlucky playthrough you might have none of those scenes ever trigger at all. This could be fixed by having a failure to meet the trigger increase a variable counting the failures in a row for that scene, and if it fails more than a given number of times the scene triggers anyway and you reset the fail counter to zero.

Honestly, even a 3 star rating for this is partly based on the potential I see, and on how I've seen the last few updates improve, and largely based on the fact I'll excuse a higher than average degree of poor visuals when the story is good enough. Bawdy Baron has obviously been working hard on the story and dialogue, and with good results. I just think he may have a lot further to go than perhaps he realises. Visually, this game is still at a single-digit percentage of where the finished game will need to be - like this game has maybe, at best, 5% of the visuals done (and probably less).

Remarkably feature complete and well-written for a game that's this early in development. If you've played Lab Rats 1 and liked it, you'll like this game too.

It's unfortunate that so many muppets are marking this game down on the basis of the lack of graphics.

text text text...another million text...oh look a choice....text text text text another million lines...oh look next choice...some ppl really have problems understanding the meaning of a GAME
the author should write a novel and dont waste time of other ppl

A very good game ruined (partially) by a poor election of art style.

The initial premise of the game is pretty dark: the MC, a boy, discovers after finishing high school that he's the son of the devil. Well, actually is not so dark since this devil is "charmer and trickster", and doesn't want the downfall of the human race or something, but nevertheless, the childsdish manga style doesn't fit well AT ALL with the theme of the game. The images of the characters (generic drawings already seen in a hundred of mangas and hentais) aren't adequate at all with the text.

Actually, the writting is pretty decent and the description of the sexual scenes is not bad (although too vanilla. I would prefer more perversion and fetishes).

There isn't a lot of decisions; the game is mostly a visual novel where you have to gestionate your time (60 days) in order of getting a harem of females at the end of the game, but it's OK. Is not a complex premise, but is a funny one. Problem are the repetitive tasks. A lot of "Groundhog Day Effect" in this game. It needs a lot more events for being really funny to play it.

My suggestion for the dev: rework the game. Add a more naturalistic art and dark-styled. I'm not talking about terror style, just not baby-faced manga. Some drawings for the characters and sexual scenes would be enough.

...Or just forget about art and make a text-based game. Since the writting is a strong point of this game, just add more decisions and events and forget about art. Just some avatars of the characters or even better, good fisical descriptions of them would do the trick. But, please, just remove that childish art that destroys the immersion and the mood of the player.

See the title image and you have seen all but 1 of all images that the game uses (excluding background). So mostly text based good text but still just text. Still for a first release it's quite a bit of content.


EDIT: The Author (<- yes since this is more a book rather than a game)
has contacted me (3 years after making the review) in order presumable update my review after all the work he has put into it.

The "Game" is now playable. You only see 90% of the interesting pictures in the preview on the page so that is an improvement. The game portion is a repetitive grind of clicking and clicking and skipping and skipping. Occasionally you get a choice and those do eventually lead to ... Text based sex scenes! And if you do manage to get through those the game also even eventually rewards you with an image like you see in the preview.

Writing is fine. Story is bad not good. But damn it is good at spreading its miniscule amount of content out, so you can see a new scene every 10 minutes.