Ren'Py - En-Fem-E No. 9: The Factory [Final] [Silk Savannah]

Dev learned how to do 3d animations and transitions on ren'py and went to town with it. With terrible results.

Pros:
- Works fine
- Okay-ish soundtrack
- One or two scenes are hot

Cons:
- All. the. damn. transitions.
Every time you need to move somewhere you need to wait 5 seconds for a slideshow of your character moving. Every. single. time.

- All the animations.
Pointless things like the one on post #2. Game is littered with them. Every single ones takes seconds of your life and gives you nothing back for them.

- Story.
It sucks. It just doesn't work. The game implies you have a choice but it's a linear game. It's pretending to be a VN but there aren't any routes.

- Pacing
It's at the same time short and way to dragged on. The transitions, animations and unskippable voiced lines just serve to pad the runtime of an extremely short story into a very short story.

- Combat
As with the transitions he put in and every other ren'py game trying to be clever, it's a bad system tacked on an engine not designed for it. This one is particularly egregious since the choices on attack don't seem to mater. You choose between light, medium, and heavy attack and the game rolls a die to determine if you hit or miss and the damage. Yes, every part of the combat is determined by RNG.

- sissification
There isn't any. This is the second short game in a series of three short games and all of it is in the first one. Not that it's good, but at least it exists there. This one doesn't even have that going for it.

- voice acting
It's bad, unnecessary, and unskippable.

- lack of content
For how much time it makes you waste it doesn't give you even drips of porn back. And what it does is short, badly animated and with terrible moans.

I have no doubt that this game, this entire series even, is nothing but a psyop.

What really saddens me is that for the time it took to make this terrible mess, with all it's manually created transitions and the amount of single use 3d animations, I know that we could've gotten a much better game had they invested that time wisely.

the factory is better than the previous game but unfortunatly is it short. i know it is a demo but u know

i hope it will be more updates for this game and not every time for every update a new game xD

OMFG!!!

You have to sit through unskippable titles and animations for minutes. Then you get asked one question, you give one answer, and the game is over??? With no warning??? Fine, so we'll just restart the game. Again, unskippable crap that you've already seen, which goes on forever, before you're back to where you were? Any time you want to do anything, you have to endure some CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK walking animation. Again, you can't skip or speed up this crap. Okay, so the dev wanted you to choose a particular choice. Fine. Next decision? Choose one, and you go to point B. Choose the other, and you...go to point B? The only difference? A point of some kind or another. Dunno what for--you're never told, although I guess it's for doing what the dev wanted you to do from the start.

The MC has absolutely no agency, whatsoever. You lose if you don't demean him at every stage of the game. Because after "training," you get thrown into some mini-game where the rules make no sense. And if you've resisted the "training" (consisting of the usual trope sissy images and videos), you can't finish, and you're stuck without a way out. If you do manage to find a way out, then it didn't make any difference what choices you made before you got there. So, what was the point?

Once you're out of the factory, you go through the same mind-numbing set of animations that are pointless, time-consuming, and boring any time you have to travel anywhere. You can't skip it, so you start to dread having to go anywhere. The combat system for the mini-games makes absolutely no sense at all. It's all random, no matter what you do.

And don't get me started on the nightmare-inducing character models used in this, er, game. Overall, the game looks like it was made in the mid- to late-90s. Think Leisure Suit Larry, except without the humor. Or any sexual gratification.

The first "game" was mildly interesting and showed some promise. It was a little short and suffered from the same lack of MC agency, but I figure that's what sequels are for. But this isn't a sequel. If anything, it's a bad, singular rendition of a particular kink that's not well-designed or -implemented. If the dev wanted to make a (terrible) B-movie, they should have done that. Since there aren't any choices (you either perform a particular set of steps or nothing), it might as well have been a kinetic, linear story and have been done with it. Pointless clicking to perform mundane tasks, then tapping your fingers on the table waiting for the pointless animation to finish. I gave up after an hour of these pointless activities. This "game" is not fun, not sexy, and certainly not entertaining in any way, shape, or form.

As it is, the game is ok and that's not a bad thing.

Reasoning:
-1 ⭐ for pacing and UX
-1 ⭐ for lack of choices

Animations:
As mentioned by other people, the pacing and user experience needs work. The game has many animations that it uses as transitions from one scene to the next. These animations have a slow wind up and I think all of them are unskippable. I found it infuriating to be forced to sit through them. Especially the getting in the car animation.
The speed of walking should be increased and cancelable ideally.
Fade to black and back in again should be faster for my taste.

User Experience:
Opening your inventory sometimes breaks flags that an animation has finished and breaks some UI elements. So don't open your inventory while stuff is happening.

Lack of real choices:
The game lets you chose to sign a contract or not. If you refuse you die. Shortly after you're told that you're special. That does not make me feel like I am special. Instead it makes me think of the author of the game, breaking my immersion. The lack of player agency clashes with the way the game presents itself. It wants to make you feel like you are controlling the character and can do whatever you like when in reality you just have to sit through the animations that trigger whenever you click anything just to realize that that's not what the game wants you to do at that time. So. Either remove the rails a bit or do away with the unnecessary clicking. There are a couple of things that you can effect. But doesn't seem like it changes much.

The author has never learned how to play games without bugs and lags. The plot sucks. The scene loads for a minute. And this damn interface that doesn't disappear during scenes. It's horrible. Why finish the game if you can rivet a bunch of the same type of boring "new" games.

I downloaded (itch.io) and finished the full game. I very much enjoyed it. The game is very linear. More of a graphic novel with a few puzzles (not that there's anything wrong with that), but quite enjoyable if this is your genre.

The downs were the animation sequences that you have to endure. For example, every time you leave the apartment there's the get in the car and drive away sequence. Good for extending game play but then scenes like the feeding machine are only used once. Also, some things like the click rate you have to achieve for one of the mini games is ridiculous.

The author obviously spent a lot of time on the art. I thought the renders were good and the time in training wasn't grindy. Several hot scenes could have been repeated in the game play, like the gloryhole, but the author chose to only use them once.