Ren'Py - Completed - Forbidden Fruit [v1.0 Final] [Lustration Team]

After years of following this game it's finally "done" after a fashion if what is said about the team falling apart is true.

This game has a lot of good ideas and ideas that weren't exploited anywhere near enough and in amongst all of this are a lot of bad mostly gameplay focused ideas that drag so very heavily on the game.

Repetitive mini games are bad in general and have no place in erotic gaming. End of Story. This game at the very least does let you skip 99.9% of the games and the one mini game that you can't skip is extremely easy to beat in a few mouse clicks. That is how it should be done if you are going to have mini games in your work.

This goes for battles as well. Without putting ALOT more work into the battle system that frankly I think Renpy is not suited for anyway it's best to just skip all the battles and save yourself a lot of headache.

The art is good, the animations are ok but a bit over used with repeated reskins. The character designs are very solid as they blur that line between bestiality and anthropomorphic so there is something for anyone that sits on either side of that fence.

You can tell early on that Patreon cast a heavy hand over this game as pretty much any incest content that was once in this title was mostly scraped to the point that the tag is misleading at this point as I would say the loli tag as well.

Finally the writing. After years of playing this game over many version I can safely say the writing was never really clear and the broken up and often blind mission guidance makes it so you don't care about the two dozen lines of dialog between characters only that you figure out what you need to do next.

This is again why if in your game if you have a "quest" then you must have a "quest journal" as well unless you are actively railroading the player anyway.

I typically hold on to complete games but given that this game ends on two links to the new project by one of the team members I can't truly call it complete.
While I look forward to testing out the remake it would appear I'm not completely left unburned. I certainly wouldn't be quick to give money for the project without some serious and considerable updates across the board.

I just finished this game. I have a lot to say, and at the same time not very much.

First of all, we're talking about what we're all looking for. Characters and scenes.
Speaking of art, we've clearly seen worse. I've never seen a scene where I thought "oh no, that's ugly".
The animation isn't the best, but it does the job. On the other hand, many scenes are just reskins of previous scenes.


Let's talk story and gameplay.
The story bored me after half an hour. So, since I still wanted to see the scenes, I activated the holy trinity: Skip unseen scens, skip after choices, skip after transition. And I still found it annoying. Apart from the mediocre story, the game makes you go back and forth with your mouse, interspersed with ultra-repetitive mini-games.

Special mention for those who played the game following the dialogues. In the last chapters, in the dungeon exploration and in the sea, it's just horrible. Sometimes it's boring dialogue, followed by the same mini-game 2 TIMES, and ending with 3 FUCKING FIGHTS! Even skipping them, I found it horrible.

This could have been a good game, but there are far too many flaws to make it so.

I hope their "remake" will be better.

I don't know how to feel about this.



Truthfully, I don't think the project is bad. It certainly has some good ideas, and a lot of the project seems to be everyone throwing ideas at the wall, trying out everything that they can. However, the lack of direction that should bring exciting ambition or experimentation, ended up devolved to a cookie cutter dungeon crawl at the later half. I don't think a lot of value was lost, but I don't think the team knew what it wants to be, nor what to do. That's to say, gameplay wise, it is a mess.

Art wise, I think it looks nice and unique. One of the few strong point of the game is the fun, interesting art style that reminded me of early 2000s comics on the internet. It's not something to write home about, but it is compelling enough. The "animal", "furry" and monster people stayed consistent and there are many scenes involving them. Sadly, they are often not compelling, story wise. But, on its own, the art is worth a peak.

I don't think I am qualified to talk about sound, but the game's tune and sound effects are not that bad for a small project.

The crux of any good erotica video game is the marriage between gameplay, story and erotica. In this aspect, the game took a nose dive after a decent start. The lost in island and adventuring, discovery with erotic elements was fun at first, but then the gameplay devolved from a little bit of adventure game into dungeon crawl just feels, bad., lazy, uninteresting.

All in all, I would recommend, well, try out the free version and unlock the buggy gallery. It's not worth the money.


Now, for more juicy details. Let's continue on.
The Patreon owner has a fallout with his team so they split. While I have not heard from the other side, the developer claimed his friends in his team was trying to seize the Patreon from him. In any case, in my opinion, the game is a huge mess and both sides are at fault. I wouldn't give any money to either of them.
Let's start with what's really wrong with the game. The Patreon locking contents are one thing, as other mentioned there seems to be a focus on that instead of actually making more of the "game". It would be fine for the developers to try to prevent piracy, but they priced parts of contents behind extremely high prices which are quite unreasonable, all things considered. If the game is great, polished and nice to play, like Paradise L***, I would honestly be fine with all of the shenanigans. However, I agree with others, the game is so buggy, so lacking in creativity that the only person who really should receive the money should be the artist. Even then, there were tons of reused scenes with characters swapped in. It just doesn't make sense when there's so many game breaking bugs and the weird gallery bug that persisted forever, to give them any benefit of the doubt that the developers were just milking off the artist. In any case, the Patreon leader didn't bother to address the existing product bugs and problems and just make his new project, nor did the original artist and the programmer who failed to fix the bug made any statement. It seems to me they were all contend to milk the project and price the product as high as possible.

Really, I thought the game was a nice gem despite all of the shortcomings. However, seeing how much care they gave to the project at the end, I think it's best we stay far away from the successor project and the other game, "Genome". Let's this serve as a lesson for all of us. If we see project get stagnant and developers being more interested in making money than improving the product, jump ship as soon as possible, no matter how much potential it might hold.

So this game has big potential. It does not deserve the 1 star ratings at all.(however I can understand the frustration in some places)
Its an okay game lets say a 3, 3.5 stars. (I gave 4 to bring some balance to its unfair rating)

Pros:

very few "non-gay" furry/anthro themed games are here so its a rarity
animations and the artstyle are good quality
chicks are hot
male and female protagonists
skippable mini games
lot of scenes (its a bad thing as well)
paywall is absolutely not that bad, you only have to pay for the continuation of some of the scenes, but you get 80% of the good stuff for free
the story starts well...

Cons:

but later it becomes a total mess
pointless relationship system
too many pointless sex scenes(and if you have an option to say no, then please make the scene skippable its just an if-else branch anyways)
waay too much dialogue during the scenes(gals literally can't shut up during cock sucking)

and OMG the BUGS are strong with this one, to be honest its atrocious..

so a few examples:
- translation errors (sometimes missing, sometimes the character dialogue is messed up)
- dialogue is not in synch with the animation in some places
- broken gallery
- scenes with feral dicks missing(no .webm for them)
- few scenes are unavailable during normal gameplay(you have to edit the code for that)
- ratu & leo's first introduction scene happens twice
- and many more

tl,dr
With a soft rework(especially in the writing and the code) it could be easily an awesome game. Right now the mentioned flaws are holding this game back.

My suggestion for @Magic Fingers is to take a step back and release a BIG bugfix, and instead of making 5 new xxx scenes just flesh out the characters and their relationships (don't give up the relationship system, its a good idea)

btw I created a more or less bug free version for myself , made the missing scenes available fixed some translation issues, the dialogue pacing etc...(Im editing the code since the first release) so I can help with the bugs if the dev is interested.

For full disclosure I heard that this game heavily cuts content for free players so I spent $12 for the premium version.

It's a fine but not fantastic game. The translation is very obviously written by someone not fluent in english, but there is never a point where I didn't understand what the characters were saying. I'm also a big fan of the art/animation, even if it isn't the best 2D art available. The story is also fun, if not particularly original.

There are however, several drawbacks. The first is that it is buggy. I had the game crash on me twice which was obviously frustrating. There is also a very common occurrence where a new character is speaking, but the name of the speaker doesn't update (you can tell a different person is speaking via context), which builds on the confusion from the poor translation.

The most frustrating aspect of the game however, is it's just overwritten. There is so, so, soooooo much unnecessary dialogue. Even during sexual encounters you get two people having full conversations. At some points I just had to start skipping massive chunks of conversation because it was both banal and seemingly never-ending.

Honestly, idk if it will ever be a great game since it would require someone to trim the dialogue with a chainsaw, but it can still be an enjoyable experience.

Bad writing,weird glitches. what everyone else mentioned. and the dev does not communicate here anymore, sensibel i guess since most of it is well deserved hate. oh and they are making a new game, lol lmao. If you want a poorly translated russian game there are many others

decided to give it a chance. but it's bugged as hell.
for starters the intro is on "auto-continue" - you have dyslexia? sorry dude you have to start it over and over again to read everything. you say why not going back? well going back shows screens with text that were not shown previously... so who knows what those were... but that's not the only issue, it looks like it's missing text/sentances. while it's talking about the father suddenly it's talking about the mother, but not from the start, then returns to explain something about the father (but again with missing context) then jumps to the middle of the kid's story... what an intro. you can't understand shit.

still i'm like, ok maybe the intro is bugged, let's give the game a chance. so i start playing, but they are constantly talking about events that never happened. "remember when i helped you with the lianas?" noo! what lianas, i haven't seen lianas in the entire game. "i need to find this lion that let those plants rape me"... plants? lion? what i never saw a lion, nor any plants raped the girl.
what the actual fuck?

To start off with the game itself, it is fun to play where mini-games are fun and interesting. As this game is still in progress, it doesn't have a task bar for the story to progress and some viewers on this site would still be stuck on the first chapter.

Sex scenes themselves aren't repeatable and only show on the gallery but are fap friendly and cheat friendly for those that don't want to keep playing the mini-game (skip on the top-right corner).

Downsides unlike the previous version with the involvement of armor and weapon stats, this version is just for patreon (pay-to-see content for +12$ for full sex-scenes of recent chapters unless the working code was shown on this site).

This shit crashes and breaks every few minutes. I've never seen such a disgusting game in my life. The author does not make the game for free, instead of sex scenes for donations, it would be better to bring the game to mind.

A rework done right! They restarted the whole game really early on which usually means its as good as abbandoned but this game thrives from it with regular updates a nice art style, good story and great scenes.

Much of the "boring" content like minigames are skippable and the game has actually 2 full fledged characters to play as with seperate stories and scenes for male and female.

Many criticize the monetization of the game which i think is actually quite fair, only the very end of a few scenes is put behind a paywall which is probably less than 5% of the game. So you get 95% of the game for free with no strings attached.

If the developer ever adds pregnancy for the female character, especially with the non human characters the mods will have to add a 6th star to the rating system.

Got baited by the loli tag so I gave it a try despite it's horrible reputation...
yeah, well... burned myself, rightfully.

I don't know if I can even say a single good thing about this, aside maybe for the graphics of the backround? The areas are depicted quite well, although the characters aren't interesting, or attractive at all.

The minigames are quite simple yet really annoying, due to the amount of time you have to spend doing them in order to, usually, get money.

Sex scenes are already there but I yawned several times during them. Just the most common positions you can think of while half of the actors is cut off from the pictures. I've seen worse animations but it's still bad, especially if you see just a hip with a dick from one side and a hip with a butt on the other side, basically without a clue who's fucking who.

Paywal... well, you can play the game for free but if you want some different dressess for your characters, furrie's reproduction organs to look more animalistic rather then humanish, or many other things, you have to pay for it. (I didn't had the patience to keep playing this in order to discover more paywal blocked things...)

Writing isn't that bad, if you forgive the devs that they aren't native-english speakers, I'm glad the dialogues aren't consisting only of "okay, ok, no, i see, fine..." and other simillar words.

I'd saw the biggest downer for me in this one is that scenes, often locked behind annoying minigames, are really unrewarding/unsatisfing. Go through few different tasks, finished by a mouse-labyrinth minigame which you fail threetimes on the way, only to see someone getting spanked... no, thank you

I'm not sure what the point of having a "Visual Novel" and the putting in puzzles, especially ones that cannot be skipped.

The shell game is about as idiotic as it comes and to force the user to win 10 times straight is a deal breaker for me.

It isn't a game, it isn't a VN.....which makes it....nothing really.

This game is a mess.. The interface is terrible. You will have a terrible time trying to figure out what to do and when.

Too much grinding aswell for scenes that are not satisfactory at all.

The characters are shallow and, allthough they have potential, its all wasted with pointless dialogues that lead to endless minigames and grinding without giving you many hints and forcing you to was lots of time for a very simple scene.

Like many others have pointed out already, this game had the possibility to be one of the favourites on this site, has a little bit for everyone.

However the ATROCIOUS paywall squanders this entirely, horrible bugs and crashes doesn't help either.

This is not where this industry should be going and it's reflected in my score

The devs make more effort for paywalls than for actual content of the game. Was promised a "better version" when remaking the game, it's even worse than previous one.

I'm all in to defend hard-working devs and encouraging to support their job whenever possible. This isn't how you get supporters, this is beyond EA's level of greed. Don't buy this crap.

It's pretty sad, the art and premise had everything to be one of the most loved and supported games on this site imo. Too bad these devs are greed as hell.

All my reviews on other games were to encourage people to support devs on patreon and stuff. This is my first review to encourage people to NOT support these devs by any means. And I hope it will be the only game I will do it.

I have never seen a game with so much p2w mechanics in my life, this makes EA Look like a good gaming company, you even lock a gallery behind a paywall, get over yourself dev.

Probably the worse most scamy game on this website

The game is the clunkiest renpy game I've played in a while. Even after setting the game to English, the language still regularly reverts to another language and what English there is doesn't always make sense. I also get a lot of repeated lines. The interface is difficult to understand and use. I muted the game pretty quickly, so I can't speak to music/sound effects. Hiding all the interesting content behind an expensive patreon paywall makes all the mini-games and the click-fest seem like a lot of work for not enough reward.

The story is really interesting but sometimes i get lost of what is actually going on.
This is kinda unique game for me, havent played any similar games before.
The animations are really good, but with the recent update they are broken for me.
There were few bugs before the remaster but lets hope this one wont have any.
Grammar is alright, havent noticed anything to ruin the immersion.

The reason its 3 stars right now is because the animations are kinda broken and i know the game can be even more improved and better, until then it stays 3 stars

Anything approaching a decent scene has now been locked behind a very high monthly paywall - without that, the game is low content and frankly not worth it.

It used to be a fun concept and game but the dev clearly thinks it is worth AAA status (which it isnt) and, in the spirit of this site it feels more like an attempt at fishing for money than a fun game. The score reflects the disappointment.

content is declining.
cost is increasing.
multiple delays from devs. after significant time delayed they released a net negative content release. tried to spin it as new content. seems deceptive.