Ren'Py - Ethereal Bonds [v0.2.3] [Sea Studios]

Personally, I love the character models, but I don't think this game will be worth playing for several more updates.

The QoL of the game is very slow and grindy. Moving between rooms in adds long fade in/out effects that adds lots of drag. Cleaning up the room and making the bed is pointless once you have gotten all of the points from the quest.

The vandalized locker quest is a slog. Hints are too vague, forcing you to click on every item in every room to figure out what to do next. "What can I give the janitor to make him talk?". How the hell am I supposed to know?

I hope the game gets more streamlined, because I love the art style!

I do like that there are a lot of small repeatable dialogs with characters, but they don't actually achieve anything.

Nice characters and promising storyline, being a fan of thickness, I enjoy this game very much. I like the design and the characters attributes. I recommend it, it easy to grasp, not too fast not too slow.

I honestly don't know the game the previous 4 reviewers played to give it 5 star but it wasn't the game i played.

Another stupid sandbox game with more empty locations with nothing to do and game mechanics that force you to hunt and peck hoping the next location will have content. Why? seriously why bother making locations that are 99% of the time pointless! with zero content in them?

Hey got told to go to school and check my map under the quest journal and there was no school location to go to for a fucking week! Again this is just poor design choice or piss poor QA. Aka can't be assed to actually test the game. Why would you talk about something you can't do for so fucking long? There is no content and you made a shit game when you are better off in a sandbox game just skipping time periods!

Nothing is going to make this game fun if you spend more click wandering the game seeing and doing NOTHING then you actually get content for. There is nothing to do and to make matters worse this game does the multiple time periods method so you spend all your time clicking empty rooms. To be clear a character that does nothing and repeat the same route line in a room is an EMPTY room! There is no content so why the hell was that created? What is it with developers that think sandbox is fun when they can't be arsed to actually add content to the location?

Event driven content in a sandbox is going to be BORING if there is no reason to ever go to a location in your game except for events. Sandbox ONLY works if you have tasks aka REASONS to enter the space/location and do something. And that task as to be tied to mechanics that create an interesting core game loop. hunt & peck is not content!

There is no point to this game. There are no mechanics, no story, nothing after an entire week of nothing to do. I didn't care that school opened up as there was NOTHING to do there either. A quest telling you meet people ISN"T bloody content! why the fuck do I have to click to this room and then click on this person and do that over a dozen times to meet your characters especially when it is done all at once?!?! So you aren't meeting these people organically based on the story NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO you are hunting & pecking through the rooms just to meet characters. Imagine creating a compelling narrative that actually introduced you to people in the story when it was relative? Imagine! Or Imagine a dev that just set up a scene when you automatically when to a location and meet each person without the stupid hunt & pecking hoping for content.

The game mechanics have taught me to never look for content because it doesn't exist and skip days because nothing ever happens and if that is your game is sucks balls and if that isn't your game then stop teaching the players these lessons because every day i learn that nothing changes in a room is reinforcing me not to go to that location and every instance of there being nothing to do in a time instant tells me not to bother looking because nothing is going to happen.

If you don't have a core game loop of mechanics developers stop turning a VN into a pointless sandbox.

I love the characters ! The sandbox aspect is really cool since there is some secret that you have to find. Also the dialogues are pretty good for a first version. Can't wait to see new characters and the first sex scene with the milf.

Models: 9.5/10
(Thicc Lord Lives up to his reputation for sure!)

Story: N/A
(Yet to have one..)

Gameplay: 5/10
(Just a good'ol "point and click" game)

UI: 7/10
(Pretty much straight forward to understand, I don't know anything about building these types a game. Just another eater/beater

TLDR; Definetly worth checking out! If you like models from "Golden Boy" and "Demon Boy" this one's a well-executed, **at least for this version...** Sandbox of those games.

Team Sandbox!

Good-looking renders and a decent v1. I must wait to see whether it's as good as the Demon Boy saga. I have one suggestion that may look better rather than using the cube room thing, you can use an actual room.

Best of luck dev!