Ren'Py - Abandoned - Duality [v0.1.8] [Per<3rsioN]

Preliminary review, subject to change in the future:

TL;DR: Great renders, terrible story, terrible sandboxing and tons of redundancy.

I played this without much hope because it's only 0.1. I don't think any reasonable person expects much out of a 0.1 or what is essentially a first release these days.

With that said, I found the amount of content actually quite substantial, even if it's made up entirely of teasing without any meat behind it. The Aunt gets a decent amount of scenes and plenty of variation depending on the choices you make. There's also a few renders and scenes with the MC's immediate family.

However, that only serves to amplify once again the biggest issue with this game and, really, all others like it. It's dragging everything out. Given that the current point of the Aunt's progression (assuming you've maxed all the 'stats') allows you to dry hump her against the kitchen stove, along with her femdomming you into carpet munching her on a sofa... yeah. It's not satisfying.

The sandbox is terrible. There's no real way to review this without saying that it's awful. You have to hunt through messages on your phone at different times of day to progress certain characters, but there's no prompts at all.

Renders are pretty damn good. They're not the sharpest or most detailed, but they're well-posed and lighting is great. The highest point of this game for sure.

Story is there. Kind of.

Overall I found myself pretty disappointed.

I hope this changes going forward. If the content delivers then this may be a game I'd be happy to Patron.

One of the current best sandbox adult game atm. The renders are excellent, animation, the story is awesome.

Will wait for more content!! Goodluck to the dev!

one of the best adult games i have played this year. the renders are top quality and the girls/women are a delight to look at. so much pretty, cute, sexy in this. the dialogs are very well done, clearly by an american dev who knows his youth jargon and slang. the level of humor is quite high. especially the back and forth trash talking with the little sister is hilarious. sexy scenes are very well done and they last long. you can build up your relations with every girl according to your liking (fear/control or love along with perversion level) and that alone is a huge plus in my book, giving the game replayability value. since contrary to some of the reviewers here, i have the patience and IQ to successfully go through a sandbox style game (you can adjust the game difficulty btw) i found no problem whatsoever playing this. give it a try if only for the visual beauty at first.

Another sandbox game that is just dragging things to cover up the lack of content, neither is the story even average. You need to get some pics from your "friend" but she has a "stupid" internet plan that allows her to send only 1 pic per day, Couldn't find a better way to drag the content? There is time skip option but you can't even skip the awful conversation between the person you're getting the pics from, for it's a complete waste of time, i do hope that once there are a few more updates the game will improve, but for now it's just a awful game.

v0.1.3b
Tried an hour to do anything but ~55 minutes of that was me clicking around trying to get anything to happen. There is nothing to do. You have a maid, can't interact with her at all. Then a bunch of other people (a school girl, bar maid, chick with glasses) etc that stand in locations but you can't interact with anyone. locations are completely dead, and can't interact with anything.

There is a few scenes with the aunt type lady but it's just some spying or masturbation, I didn't see any sex anywhere. There is a phone in game where you are supposed to be able to message someone but that part is super buggy and sloooooooooow. It takes forever for the messages to move forward and the UI is buggy as hell, sometimes I had multiple of the same conversations and sometimes I went out of the phone but part of the phone UI stayed on screen.. overall clunky, buggy and unfun.

story, writing and originality are as low as it can get. Ever played a game with 2 sisters("roommates"), a mother ("landlady"/"caretaker") and an aunt ("friend"). ? that's this game, it's like an algorithm went through all games on f95 and accumulated all that was the most stereotypical.

To summarize: no content, buggy phone, empty locations, 0 originality, poor writing, boring world, decent models

Story is dumb and pretty barebones but that doesn't bother me too much. What does bother me is the fact it's not much of a game or a visual novel. A bunch of random scenes you've got to click around for to try to get something new. A whole bunch of locations that have no content (should have just left them out until something to put there dev). Art is nice enough but I could barely keep up a chub.
Might get better in the future, but still a long way to go.

Just wow...

No preamble, just right to the point. This dev is a talented artist and an abysmal writer. Why such a high rating? Several reasons, perhaps. Geared towards those somewhere south of drinking age, this story is written as if someone's sole exposure to erotica has been via cheap (really cheap) porn videos. It's full of sophomoric and trite one-liners that are cringe worthy. It has all the requisite tropes for those not demanding of meaningful dialog. Shower peeking, sleep sex, upskirt shots, etc. Just one immature fantasy after another.

Then there's the sandbox. Like most of its ilk, this sandbox game has repeating scenes ad nauseum. There are a few good sandbox games, but they're rare. Of those that are good, the devs are talented enough programmers to keep the story moving forward in a natural and linear progression. The tendency in the majority of SB games is repetition, however. Repeat the same scenes over and over until some milestone is achieved. Maybe the idea is to add more playing time and thinking more is better. But in this case, more is just boring.

Pros

++ quality renders with good skin tones (no plastic looking barbie dolls)

Cons

- animations. one jerk off scene where the MC hand is moving at faster RPMs than an F1 engine. Just plain silly looking.

--- writing, depth of story, character progression, dialog

-- full of same-old, same-old scenes and ideas

--- poor implementation of sandbox elements

My $.02... find a talented writer and work together as a team.

Wow wonderful renders and nice animations.
I really need to support these guy in patreon
Anyways about the game i liked is perfect alpha dominant
What i missing is rape sex while sleeping .
I hope he will bring more in features

EDIT :
Below review is after i can see it is abandoned :
What a waste seriously, i mean this dev just milked patrons money for 2 years nothing.
I know this would happen but i never expect it would suddenly go like this
worst behavior dev and i can still see he is receiving more than 300 euros month for an abandoning game.

Looking forward to future releases. The writing is good. The build-up and options to get there is really good. Don't mind the sandbox but wish there was more to do. Understand it's early days though. Will Patreon with consistent updates for sure.

So far — so good! Mama's milkers are the best! Overall story is not there yet, but some scenes are hot as hell. Renders are also pretty good. Can't wait for more content! Especially more mommy content!

7/10 Not bad at all. An interesting work, at this stage. It still lacks a lot. From my point of view, it has great potential. What does it mean? You know you can get that well done work. It would be a shame to let this work die.

First off I'll say that this game is looking promising. I'm a fan of sandbox related games and this one fits the style perfectly. The only sad thing about this game so far or really the only thing I find sad is the lack of people to interact with and to explore through their story. When I heard about moving back with the others, I thought there would be more people to talk to other than the aunt. Sadly not the case, but I definitely will look forward to the updates this game has to offer since its growing.

There is a grind for some of these events to occur, but the grind didn't bother me so much since through my own exploration and my own choices and with the power of CTRL and skipping through the repetitive scenes, I was able to see every scene this game had to offer. Definitely a good game with a lot going for itself and can't wait for more future updates.

Best Girl = Tiffany

This is one of my new favorite games. All the models are gorgeous. The element with little sister helping you do your perving is super hot. I am not usually a sandbox fan, but this one is great. I highly recommend. Tiffany is best girl, by the way

The game isn't bad per se, but the execution is.
The grind is unneccessarily high (you need to raise stats, but are only able to raise them at a VERY slow rate), forcing you to do the same clicks and interactions again and again - boring!!!
The overall visual quality is good, the animated scenes are not- very stiff and badly looped.
The women are hot, the variety is interesting.

Overall, I don't wanna recommend this game because of its bad execution. Remove the redundant free roam, make it a pure visual novel and this game might become something really good.

It's good to have a proper corrpution /Blackmail game (that isn't embedded in fantasy world about goblin/monster stuff), as it feels to me like the majority of the games feature only boring vanilla or weird ntr/futa stuff nowadays. Might just be my bias tho, I don't know, nice game anyway. It's sandbox, true, but the navigation doesnt feel too grindy. I guess its still ok imo. good game, looking forward for more.

Renders are really good. The element with the younger sister basically helping the MC is unique. The sandbox nature is grindy, and I don't love that aspect, but I also don't think it's fair to rate a game poorly based on it being sandbox when that's clear going into the game. Some proof-reading errors, but nothing major. It's worth getting into, especially if you are okay with the grind.

This is an exceptionally good start. The game is a sandbox, but I haven’t felt the grind even without changing the difficulty and had no issue in finding events.

I went for the male domination route. The buildup in confidence and the change in scenes related to that was very well done. I wish this would also manifest itself more in day-to-day dialogue with the characters.

The sleep sex is amazing. The fact that the scene continues after waking up is superb, even if you don’t yet have enough dominance to push it through and face consequences instead. Like with general stat levels I wish failed attempts would manifest as consequences/long term repercussions during further events.

The game is early stage (writing this as of 0v0.1.1), so all the things I miss may still be added. It gets a 5/5 in good faith, but frankly it already was a ton of fun.

This game is sandbox, but without all the normal grinding. You can either cheat or slightly cheat to make it moderately more easy. The diversity in characters figures and bodies is the best part about this from other games. And a sister who secretly helps you creep for money? Something different and awesome for sure. Hope to see more of the mom, but in game and not photos.

Great start to a nice game!
Good renders with a framework and backstory that hint at many possibilities for later content.
So although the game now mostly has just the Ruca content, it's well done and scenes for other characters will no doubt be flexed out in future updates.
The choice based system is also pretty well done, scenes seem to change depending on your parameters with a character.
Above all I personally love the dark content such as sleep sex, intimidation & blackmail that the dev is going for.
I hope this develops so that late game content might include more intense bdsm, degradation etc. but of course that is all up to
Per<3rsioN

Also to contribute to the VN vs. sandbox conversation that people seem to feel very intensely about, it's true many sb-games fall flat due to the player not knowing what to do/if there's any content left and the ensuing endless grind.
Considering both the hint on the phone of where to find a character depending on the time of the day + the walkthrough already included in-game so you can check if there's any content you have missed, that shouldn't be an issue here. Perhaps in the future with many more characters things might become complex so that's one thing the dev might keep an eye on.

Anyways overall a sweet start to a game with lots of promise for the future!

Sandbox + point&click + open world - Done bad.

Actually it's not the devs fault, sandbox just be like that, a constant grind with no coherent story structure and dialogue flow.

-Rendered images are of amazing quality.
-Characters are equally amazing-looking and written decently
-Story is good
-Writing is fine

Dare I say it... I think Dev should scrap plans of continuing sandbox, though I doubt they will do that seeing as they probably worked a lot of with coding this "mess".
At the very least they should seriously consider toning down the grind. The thing is that, I genuinely don't understand what is the appeal of grindfests like this... It is not at all fun and while literally "rewarding" when done long enough the journey to get to the prize would personally, probably make me feel like Frodo at the entrance of Mount Doom at the end of his quest.

At the very least Dev should #1 put in hints in dialogue to see exactly what points we will get, and #2 a way to skip time through the phone.

The game as is now, regardless of how much content there is makes it feel unfinished and in many places pointless.

On another note.
The thing I would like most is for free roam to be removed entirely.
If Dev is on the fence about sandbox then I would have made it a VN instead.

TL;DR
-Way too much grind
-Feels very disjointed
-Hate the free roam
+Great models and images
+Good setting and story

2/5 for great renders and good story

Edit: v0.1.2b My original review stands, but some of the improvements have netted it one more star imo. Still wish they had just made a VN.