VN - Ren'Py - Abandoned - Elysion [Ep.5 v0.30] [palemaster]

Damn, this was a surprise! The characters feel unique and attractive, story and dialogue flow are perfect. I never felt bored or out of place.

MC is a cool giga jaw chad guy, there are no annoying/bitchy characters that MC sucks up to for any dumb reason like in most other VN's.

Render quality and especially the artistic angles are very good. I loved how the shots were taken.

Really a nice premise that already made it to my top games. Quite the good stuff.

i played this game and wanna share my thoughts about it.

first of all, well done by palemaster.
i like the renders and the animations.
YOU did a good job.

So let's go into detail:

Pros:
We can enjoy a bunch of really fantastic renders.
The render quality is improving from update to update, which is really great to see.

He also put some good animations into the game. To be clear: each animation with 30 fps needs 60 single renders for only a 2 second animation. so i like the one he did.
never forget this is an early stage developement. great job as well

he uses some nice lightning. most of the characters looking awesome. as a daz-artist i can say, he put a lot of work into it. i enjoy the girls everytime i see them

in addition i like the text mail implementation. It feels real.

Cons:
I cant complain about anything.
Maybe he can use more sfx and slow burn from time to time.


All in all:
The game is an early development stage, but has got great potential.

[As of Ep 3 v0.2]

Having played from start to finish, the game has a lot of ups and downs.
Ultimately it landed at a 1 star for me and here is why.

Pros:
Gameplay is interesting, you have to manage different relationships with different women throughout the story, gaining love, lust, and authority points with them.
Their are a good number of lewd scenes of varying quality
Some of the later animations are some of the smoothest i’ve ever seen.
Yumi’s character design is super hot to me.

Cons
The early renders have poor quality.
The early lewd scenes are not animated, just a couple renders flashed back and forth.
No explanation as to what the stats mean or any indication they do anything.
Forced relationships: The player character starts the game in 2 relationships and has no control over them.
Forced sharing: The game lists its NTR as avoidable but the main character’s 2nd girlfriend, Yumi, who is arguably the main love interest since she is on the banner and gets the majority of screen time is already married. So MC has no choice but to share Yumi with her husband.
Characters act insconsistantly: During the Elysion scene with Julia, no matter what option you pick, (cheating on her, fucking her infront of people, or just sitting back and drinking), She abandon’s you at the swinging club, leaving mad. Which if you choose to just drink with her, makes no sense.

I’ll end this by talking about the “Twist.”
In episode 3, it's revealed that the namesake of the game, Elysion, refers not to the MC’s Spa but to a Swingers club. The reveal that the game’s main focus will be shifting to be about this Swinger’s Club and sharing MC’s love interests felt like it came out of nowhere. Especially considering one of the first thing’s MC laments is how much he hates his ex wife for cheating on him and getting pregnant with his (step)daughter. So It makes zero sense that MC will suddenly be okay with swinging. So far you only have 1 of your women brought there, MC’s GF Julia and it nearly ruins their relationship, so if this is what will have going forward? No thanks.

Overall, the story just feels really inconsistent. Like the Dev tried to jam two competing ideas together: Swinging sex club + MC managing a budding harem and rebuilding his life after tragedy and it just does not work. The game had its flaws but up until the story shift, I liked the game and thought with some ironing out, it could be something fun, but the Elysion reveal tanked it for me.

Hopefully people find this review useful.

Holy shit! Now THIS! This is how you start a VN.
Damn good writing. Great premise. Excellent renders, and fucking awesome story!
This has got to be the most overlooked game on F95, right now. I loved the second chapter's trip into absolute debauchery at the sex-club. Cool to see someone taking risks with a game, even though people are complaining.

Really interesting beginning with varied choices and paths that leads to different outcomes. Very good renders with realistic and hot body types ( No XXX cow udders) MC is a mature man, whom behaves, and talks like a Chad and also has a unique model I have not seen before in Adult VNs. There is choices to follow love or domination paths. Different style of girls from teenage to matures. Overall very good.

Update [Ep. 2 v0.15]: I like where the story is heading so far. There seems to be a lot of perverted stuff ahead, but also A LOT of different choices/routes. And even though that may seem nice at first, branching out too much also slows down development and reduces the amount of content per route. I hope the dev will keep that in mind before we have another game with a thousand different routes all going nowhere. English is still pretty bad, but it's passable I guess...

RATING: 3,5/5
But since this is the first review let's round up to 4.

Positive:
The renders look good and the characters look amazing! Especially the 'daughter' and her friends are hot as hell! The camera angles are a bit strange sometimes but overall the renders look original and detailed.

I also really like the setting: an older guy (somewhere in his end 30's) working as a 'massage therapist' in a spa, a daughter figure, his ex wife's sister and some other smoking women. So far it has all the ingredients to become awesome! But...

Neutral:
The story balances somewhere between good and average. It's too early to tell, but the general idea seems ok. Not super original but good enough. It looks like you can choose between different paths (like a sub/domi route) with most women, which is nice.

Also there is technically no incest in the game, but at this point it would still be very easy to slightly change the story and create an incest patch, so hopefully that will be implemented later.

Negative:
The grammar and the use of English in general is awful! And that also negatively affects the dialogue and the story. A real shame and if the game wants to reach its full potential this really needs to be improved in the future.

If I could give the dev some advise: PLEASE let a native English speaker proofread (and rewrite) the game if you want it to become enjoyable.

Conclusion:
So far the game has all the conditions to become great! I just hope this won't be another game with beautiful characters and a promising plot that gets ruined by a cliche story and terrible grammar. Definitely a promising start though.