Review for Forbidden Thoughts [v0.1.6]
Overall: 2/5 - I saw this game was on its 3rd update and had a decent list of tags, so I gave it a try. Unfortunately, it's still very rough.
Renders: 3/5 - The female models are decent although maybe a little too similar-looking to each other. The quality is mediocre at best. The renders are about where VNs were in 2015. On the upside, it makes the download size very small.
Animations: 2/5 - Some are OK, some are absolutely terrible. For example, watch the sister's mouth during the blowjob/deepthroat scene. WTF is going on with her lips? The resolution for animations seems to drop by about 90% when switching from renders to animations.
Writing: 2/5 - It's poor. I think there's supposed to be humor that is completely lost in translation. The dialogue is so unnatural it doesn't just break immersion, it prevents immersion altogether.
Sound: 3/5 - I don't care for the music. It's not terrible, it just feels like I'm on hold on a customer support call. Some sounds like the phone are good. The sound of mom masturbating was too soft. Maybe it's supposed to be, but I could hardly hear it to understand what it was.
Story: 2/5 - It moves way too fast and most actual storytelling is missing. It's not clear why the MC literally just woke up one morning and wants to fuck and dominate his mom and sister, nor why some girl at school appears to have a clandestine plan to turn the MC into a sexual predator. Is the player really supposed to fill that in, or just not care? It just doesn't make sense overall, and the parts you can make sense of seem very adolescent-like.
Gameplay: 2/5 - It's a VN, so there doesn't have to be much gameplay, but most of what's there is unnecessary. I'm not really sure how all of the choices impact the story. However, a lot of the choices are just single options. Why even bother? There was one WTF choice, where the MC is at a coffee shop talking to Adelle, then the player is given the single choice "Go Home", the next render is MC standing in front of a door with the options of "Enter without asking" and "Knock". The player has no idea what door this is. [Edit: I went to try to figure this out and, while you still don't know what door it is, if you turn up the sound all the way, you can hear something that is supposed to be a woman masturbating. I could barely hear it with the sound at 75%.]
Bugs: 2/5 - Several language issues where the game switches to Russian dialogue even though the selected language is English. Save/Load interface is unusable because of overlapping UI elements. This bug prevented me trying to see what changes when you select different choices. Some standard Ren'py user interface actions (like right-click to save) are disabled for no apparent reason.