VN - Others - Finding Color in the Ashes [Alpha v1.81] [MooncatcherStudios]

The art style is adorable, the progression isn't slow or fast! I rlly like cozy games so this game is super nice.

Lucy is genuinely like, one of the cutest heroines I've seen in 18+ games, I like Ellie and the Scout too, they're pretty cool! for an Alpha game there's a good amount of content, I fw the fracture heavy, non fracture and fractured scenes r different!

The companions are a nice touch.

I think the game is pretty easy though, but maybe that's a good thing as its a pretty cozy game.

Has the potential to be a really outstanding game. Only suggested change I'd say so far is - consider granting XP when the guest are given a room, rather than when you check in on them, and then if you want to you can check in on them to get a little something like +2 strength or a random reagent or a +5g tip.

I love this game. This is the best h-game I have played, mostly because it hits all the right buttons for me personally. If you have any interest in "cozy" games or management sims, and I'd even argue any VN-adjacent genre, then you have to check this one out. It's the only h-game I play through from start-to-finish after each update. Characters are really charming, combat is novel and engaging, music, sound design and art are all incredible.

The gameplay might not be for everyone if you want to simply mash buttons and faceroll content to get all the scenes, since this game does ask you to engage with its systems to unlock all the content. Once you do, it feels rewarding to make small (and crucially unstressful) decisions that progress your save, even outside of any R-18 content. This is what they've managed to do especially well; it really is a cozy management sim once you recognise that any "setbacks" you might encounter are extremely temporary.

The management side of the game is challenging to optimize and play "perfectly" if that scratches the right part of your brain, but it's important to note that there is little-to-no downside to making mistakes. Any shortcoming can be made up for within a couple of days. In fact, some of the h-scenes encourage you to make "mistakes" to find them which I really really fucking love like holy shit please please please make more scenes like these

The combat is a really interesting system that can take some time to get used to. Once you develop your character far enough, however, it really does become faceroll content. If I could provide one critique, it's that the combat encounters can feel like a chore when you reach the faceroll stage and have the best weapon/skills. It would be a nice QoL addition if there were a late-game skill that ordered your dice from highest-to-lowest so that once you're strong enough you can just click through them without having to read the faces of the dice every time.

The aspect I adore the most is the art, not just because it's good, but the not so black-and-white design ties nicely into the game's lore. It also means that development is moving faster than any h-game I've been aware of, since they can churn out high-quality updates and polish older content using only line and value and not having to spend time on color in the art.
I'd really encourage everyone to give this game a try, the team behind it is clearly ambitious, have a cohesive vision and are doing a fantastic job on executing it so far.

Super solid game, i wish it was already finished cus grinding it again is gonna be less fun than the first time unless it remembers save (idk).

- Overall music is carry in this, its super chill and pleasant to listen to, im actually suprised how good tracks are, worth playing just to listen to songs (there are like 3-4 long tracks)

- Artstyle is good, everything is done well, H scenes are hot although you dont play game like this for H scenes, they are just cherry on top, H phasing is done well, story is interesting enough to feel its worth reading all the stuff characters say

- Gameplay loop is a bit boring, especially early game is super hard with supplies and you barely hold on, but then it gets easier and easier. I played few games like this before, most popular was living with sister monochrome fantasy and even though you end up doing same thing over and over i still find it very relaxing and fun. There are different types of games, this one is fun to chill out for a bit when you are in the mood.

The art style and dialogue are cute, but the gameplay loop is absolutely terrible. Insanely repetitive and it feels like you are constantly running low on everything so you're often playing catch-up to get all the resources you need to progress. It leaves you barely having any time to actually interact with the characters and see their scenes; and when you do, you can't help but feel like you're wasting time.

There's a ton of potential here but only if the developer can find a way to make the gameplay less of a repetitive slog.

Finding Color in the Ashes isn't just a porn game, but also a very well-made management simulator. The game features relaxing music, animated scenes, appealing visuals, and also a well thought out storyline that allows for the creation of an emotionally engaging experience. Though there are also minor quality-of-life things that I would love to be added, such as a full-screen option, and a more in-depth walkthrough, I believe that these things are not significant enough to lower my evaluation of this game.

The game is wholesome AF, offering a heartwarming and relaxing experience that’s hard to find elsewhere. From the moment you start playing, you're greeted with charming visuals, a peaceful atmosphere, and gameplay that feels like a gentle escape from reality. It has a cozy vibe that makes you want to just sit back and enjoy every minute of it.

One of the strongest aspects of this game is its variety. There are so many different ways to play, whether you enjoy exploring, customizing, collecting, or simply soaking in the environment. It doesn’t limit you to just one path—you get to choose how you want to enjoy the game, which gives it incredible replay value. You can try new things each time and always find something new to love.

The story is also surprisingly deep and emotional. While it doesn’t scream for attention, it slowly unfolds in a way that connects you with the characters and world. It’s subtle yet impactful, and that makes it memorable.

Overall, this game has tremendous potential. With its wholesome feel, strong storytelling, and variety of play options, it stands out as something truly special. It’s the kind of game you keep coming back to just to feel good.

One of the very few games i actually enjoy the story and art style.

However, if you get past the early game, the mid-game combat system is too easy to defeat monsters and the H scenes with the girls are quite rushed (the game is tagged as a 'dating sim' but it's too easy to sleep with Lucy and H with other girls).

This game simply gives the cozy feeling of sitting by the fire without anything difficult or harsh in the game.

In the future if things get better I will come back to rate 5 stars.

1. The fighting is great, your equipment allows you to select dice that are randomly rolled to combine to value that determines how much damage you do. You pick the dice because the game offers skills that can crit based off if you picked multiples of the same number. So let's say you roll 5 dice. You can select 3 of them to be your Attack Value. Let's say you roll three 4's, a 5 and a 6. Most people would just pick 4,5,6 but if you picked all three 4's, you can crit and do more damage.

2. There is no save button. But the game auto saves the start of every day, the days take maybe 2-5 minutes depending if it's a heavy event day or not, and you get 3 auto saves. Pretty hard to mess anything up BUT there are events you may accidently trigger and have to reload if you wanted to save that event for a potential third option you can only access by progressing a character's relationship far enough, that was my biggest issue with the saves personally. And it's also really hard to straight up lose in this game, I literally have no issues with the balance of food or alcohol.

3. There's an option to sneak into the girl's room because there's a bonus animation + dialogue if you made Lucy horny enough and advanced far enough where she takes a dominating position.

4. The MC literally doesn't even talk a lot, so might just be self projecting a bit too much. The initial dialogue options affect your starting stats.

5. You have to manage maybe 4-5 things, and the reward is more gold for better equipment + gifts which results in more exp and more h-scenes.

6. The game get's a bit repetitive in lines, but it's also still developing content slowly over time, and there's at least 2+ hours worth of gameplay here.

So just a quick overall how I feel about this game:

Gameplay - 5/5: There are some issues like the game feeling a little tedious with the day to day, but the combat is fun and well done.

Visual - 5/5: Girls are cute and look great, CG's are reused which kind of sucks but each CG has different variations with different clothing on or off. Some CG's look a tiny bit off but that's fine, overall great OC and interesting girls. The backgrounds also look great as well.

Sound - 4/5: Lot of the same music and stock sounding noises, but what is there is fun and serviceable.

H-scenes - 5/5: I wish there were more but they are being added slowly. Biggest issue I have is that the scenes that are there sometimes feel disjointed or move too quickly, you go from talking to them to clicking a flirt button once to fucking. I wish there were some kind of on wheels build up to get there as well as more dialogue with the other girls. Lucy is the only one who speaks during H-scenes as of now, but having more dialogue during them would be greatly appreciated.

Overall- 5/5: It's a great game, great porn game, and a fun time. Worth the download and support.

This is missing all the marks of a great H game.
Hot scenes, hot story, entertaining and rewarding gameplay loop, corruption/seduction, engaging story.
Even RPG stats and EXP progression feel very off the chart and wonky here.

I am not sure whats going on with the guy above and ad-hominem attacks on other people who write reviews, but it is clear who cannot rate H-games and has no experience with them. (Check how many reviews I got, vs him).

What we have here is a very wonky/frustrating inn management gameplay with only 2 actions per day and you are constantly out of everything, food, wood, maintenance. You have to manage a dozen of things for the same time and there is simply no reward for this. Inn upgrade system is boring as hell, you can improve storage for 50g to get +1 alcohol, food, what?

Worse than having to manage 4-5 resources and stamina as well, you have to buy certain ingredients and materials from "weekend market". If you are missing something that you need, you might suffer for the entire week before you get a chance to go to shop again and restock.

There is no save button, no gallery. There is autosave function and I did not find that comfortable to play. The game is punishing wherever you miss any single item, don't have enough alcohol, or food you are doomed.

The fighting is boring and it involves throwing dice twice per each turn, and you cannot skip it, you have to manually pick a dice every time.

I don't share sentiment that the art is great in this game, it is rather generic, black and white, below average.

There is an option to sneak into girls room, after which she puts a lock on it.
Why such an option exists in the first place? To troll player?

Overall a very vanilla story, where MC feels like a cuck. He is a servant for our Damsel in Distress that falls on him out of nowhere, and requires a hiding place as well as food and other resources.

After playing 30-40+ days and reading the same boring lines over and over again,I have simply uninstalled the game.

It's an early start, but what's here is exceptionally promising. The more amateur aspects of the art are likely to get better with practice, but the concept is incredible and incredibly well executed. The character writing and pacing is so good that it's still a five out of five as it is, it's just that the art previews more readily in a thumbnail and it's worth addressing first.

'Fractures' show an alternate version of a person superimposed over them, and the artist has already added scenes which make use of this to show three simultaneous poses; The normal pose, the fractured pose, and the third pose for how they combine into something more than the individual parts imply.

That's genius. That's so inspired, that's so clever. And I find with works like this that when someone is capable of being that inspired once, they're going to be bringing that kind of small brilliance to the whole work.

A masterpiece in the making, that is how i fell about this game, there is just no enough 18+ scenes, i hope they add more things soon. Overall the gameplay is what i always look for in games, legit haven't found it in other games.

I got 177 days in before I felt that I had earned and seen everything there was on offer besides the brewing max upgrades. Gotta say that I really enjoyed it! I was not expecting there to be so much content in the alpha based on the pictures in the first thread. After seeing the blowjob I was ready to call it and move on but I kept going and I'm really glad I did. I look forward to seeing where this goes as the dev continues investing and updating. I know I'll be supporting along the way!

Review for ver. 0.8

Art 4.5/5 - Excellent at what it does. Some people might complain about it burning their eyeballs, but I just inwerted colors on my PC. Would appreciate it there was an ingame option for that. there is also problem with animations I elaborate on in "sex" part.
Music N/A - Not my style, and I usually don't rate music anyway, opting for my own playlist in backgroud, but I have to admit, that it fits very well.
Gameplay 4/5 - While most of what's there is a solid foundation for future game, there is no denying that there are some pacing and balancing issues as of now. According to the Dev, these issues will be resolved as more content comes in, but if I were to judge it as of now, I wold give it 3. Also, it needs some sort of backlog to read back after accidently clicking twice,and maybe an optional log af results after a combat to see what stats, exp items, ect. you have gained. There is a short animation of gained items as icons, byt it dissappears too quickly to check both it and stats.
Story 4/5 - Main point of interest IMO. While nothing revolutionary, there are reasons why tropes exist. This game knows what it is, and does it better than most. Pacing issues from gameplay part are showing themself here, too, lowering final score by 0.5. would be 3.5 if treated as is, or 4.5 if completed while sustaining this level of quality
Sex 3/5 - Scenes are somewhat short animations with a few lines of dialogue in between. Scenes themselfs and art is 4.5, but lack of speed regulation and no option to skip to the next part of the scene makes revisiting them an annoyance. Could use gallery of some sorts, too, as there are few semi-secret variations that one could easily miss.

Overall 4.5/5 - Mostly because it shows solid foundations for what is hopefully to come. Play it, if you want a nice heartwarming fantasy romance with manga style art.

The game is deeper than it look and the gameplay is quite satisfying.
Yet it still have much more potential, can't wait for more updates and the final version [even then, it should be quite easy to add more content]
Hope this game keep being as good as it is

im all in for the cozy cosmic horror! sweet relationship building between the resource management and bits of combat and leveling.

the dev is very engaged and seems to be committed to evolving the game as it grows

if youre curious just grab it. if you love it like me support the dev

Alpha 0.5:
This is actually a good game, it would still be good even without the porn. Dev could make a SFW version and still work. Combat is well balanced, the female character interesting, upgrades and daily/weekly routines work perfectly.

My only issue is that there is no build up in the relationship, it goes from friends to blowjobs and sex without ever kissing or going on a date or something. That works for corruption games but in this case feels off. Other complains could be with cluttered UI and things like that, but being an early version probably will change.


Great work, hope it develops a bit more the characters and their relationship and backgrounds etc. the gameplay is already solid.

[Review of 0.05 version on itch.io]

I initially clicked the link to this game for the trainer tag, but really the girl is so charming and she gives so much positive reinforcement, she ended up training me. You will want to protect her, make her happy, and have cute vanilla sex with her in no time.

So far the game is pretty cozy in the summer season. I'm really interested in seeing how hardcore and difficult the Fall and Winter seasons will be. Will the author keep it casual or is there going to be more monster attacks? How lewd and hardcore will some of the sex get? Will we invite guests of the inn for threesomes and orgies? (god I hope so)

The game's story snippets and enemy designs are actually kind of dark. There's also supposed to be something that happens at high distrust/fracture apparently but I didn't encounter this (but I also didn't really try for this, other than seeing fracture variations on sex scenes). I mean if there's an "evil run" like with some Princess Trainer games I'm all for that.

Anyways, if you couldn't tell from all the 5 star reviews, this game is fantastic. I will definitely be following this game. It's great for 4-10 hours right now and has about 6 fappable scenes, including some great blow job scenes. The gameplay is engaging and not as punishing as other time based trainer games. There are *a lot* of days in Summer for you to recover from wasted days.

My hope for future updates is possibly more waifus, or more creative scenes for the waifu (exhibitionist, slutty outfits, group, more hardcore, what have you).

Gameplay wise, I would hope for more ramping danger and maybe even a chance to move or restart the inn in a different location (or maybe the war comes to us). The world building is pretty good and it really seems like an alive world with lots of stuff going on in it.

_______

Below is a quick tutorial, since there really isn't one and it's a massive wall of text that no one wants to read. But you don't really have a time limit in the demo so you can flub around.

**TUTORIAL / MINI GUIDE**

• You have to increase your attributes to 50 and 100 to gain more dice. The dice improves your combat and how much yield you get from an action. Thus the gameplay is to scrape by a meager survival while trying to level up your stats (ideally in increments of 50).
• Eventually you level up (they really need an alert/notification bubble when you have enough XP) and getting a combat skill will really make combat easier for you. Winning combats safely will get you a steady supply of food so you can start earning gold from visitors.
• Combat: Damage and blocking is straight forward, you add dice to deal damage. At first glance it's confusing when you can only add one dice (you will always want to add the die), but the system becomes more apparent with more dice as adding too much dice costs stamina.
• Dodge: This was the most unintuitive part about combat. Dodge is different than block in that it's all-or-nothing. It's also incredibly hard to do early level because you have to add enough dice to beat their damage. The text says "you need to roll 3 or higher to dodge" but you don't actually roll any new dice, you have already rolled the dice and you are adding to the sum. It's pretty strange the dodge UI doesn't automatically add the dice for you (it makes sense later when you have to start paying stamina)

Similar to Sister Seikatsu, but with less incest and more actual gameplay. Looks very promising, and is fun to play even at this stage. Also, the girl phasing in two when she's shy/horny is hot, as is the rest of the implemented cohab mechanics.

Looks incredibly promising.
The art direction is the main hero here.
Combat and management are good and uses solid systems promising some variety.

Story is ok so far, a bit of worldbuilding and a girl who has a background and personnality.

Only thing left for this to be a great game is to deliver on the mature content. For now there is very little given the early stage of devellopement.
What little there is is doing an ok job.

I will be looking forward to incoming updates of this one.