VN - Ren'Py - Friends in Need [Ch. 8 v0.57b SE] [NeonGhosts]

I was pleasantly surprised by this game and it is executed well overall. The story is good and the writing is excellent. The graphics and character models are superb and lifelike. The personalities and character development of the cast is excellent.

I do have a few minor complaints with the game.

The cast is too large IMO. It will take forever to bring an in-depth conclusion to each character unless most of them get treated like side characters. I would have preferred a smaller cast with more focus. Sometimes I forget about half the characters because I haven't had a scene with them for a while.

The MC is rich but he often lacks intelligence and wisdom. I would have handled some situations way differently. For example, I would have never allowed a boyfriend to be with a model during a photo shoot. It's just asking for trouble. I would rather send the model away then do a shoot with her boyfriend present. If the boyfriend insists on being present, the model loses the job.

It's kind of hard to swallow the bad choices that Nicki makes throughout the game. She is supposed to be one of the game's main love interests but most of her choices are dumber than shit. It makes it hard for me to want a relationship with Nicki based on her stupid choices. I only did one playthrough of the game and was mostly a good guy (with some grey area) and looking back I should have taken the evil route with Nicki. She's too stupid to be anything other than three holes to fuck.

Still, these are all minor complaints and the game is brilliant overall. The writing and characters really set the game apart from so many others! The character models are also well done so it's a win win for me.

Only a few sex scenes are animated but to be honest they don't need to be with how well they are done with just renders and writing.

There is lots of content to play through which is a big plus.

There is also a lot of mystery in the game as far as choices go. It is unclear how many of your choices will lead which I really like.

Aside from a few minor complaints the game is one of the best on this site. I highly recommend it and encourage others to give it a try!

Easily one of the best AVNs I've played. The CG is Daz based, but it's easily in the top 5% of Daz CG.

The real standout is the writing, and the variety and quantity of choices. The character writing is exceptional by the standards of AVNs. The characters are generally likable, and when they're not likable they're still interesting and wll written. The game does a good job of making the adult elements relatively plausible while still keeping a satisfying ratio of pornographic and non-porn scenes.

This game handles its dubcon elements with finesse, striking exactly the right balance between portraying the situations seriously, while avoiding the worst sorts of grim consequences that could realistically result from these scenarios. Unlike in some games, I feel like I can tell that the creator is writing dark pornographic fiction, rather than something they aspire to act out in real life (except maybe in roleplay).

I feel like the dubcon "route" is the strongest (the game doesn't actually have strict routes), but the noncon and more vanilla choices are well handled too. If you don't hate all Daz art and enjoy AVNs, this one is definitely worth trying.

Best VN I've played, possibly ever. So many options and paths. Writing is exemplary. Hope this continues for a long time to come, and I'll be supporting this Dev throughout any and all future projects!

i really like this style of games and its choice structure (similar to Banking on Bella, Personal Assistant, Regional Manager, and Desert Stalker) I wish there were more games like this but it feels like there are only the games I named above with the same style I'll be looking forward to updates this is arguably my favorite game

I'm a fan! It's decently written, the renders are good and I appreciate most any game that gives you the chance to be kind of a piece of shit. Not that I avail myself of the option often, but it's always nice to have choices.

I though it was just a generic storyline but man. This is one of the best Ive played. Beautifully written.

Author perfectly nailed each character arcs. It aint even generic harem. All character feels alive. Like they actually have depth. Hoping for more. This easily comes to my top 5 best AVN ive played.

Same level quality of the top games out there such as Eternum, Desert Stalker, Being a DIK, Fresh Women, College Kings and all. Id say. This developer have what it takes to be one of the best.

It's a story where we decide how money can affect the main character after he becomes rich. The idea is good but the execution is terrible. There is neither sound nor animation in the game. The gameplay consists only of unnecessary endless dialogues. The developer has made the game very boring by extending even a simple event that can be explained with a single line with pages of text and same scenes. The renders also look extremely bad. That's why the game doesn't offer anything interesting or seducer. The illusion of choices that was tried to be created in the story was very weak. Because the game doesn't even really let you choose. Even if you try to be evil, in some scenes the main character makes the exact opposite decisions on his own. For me, it was a disappointing game that I couldn't understand why it got so many positive reviews.

I don't like it at all. The girls aren't interesting to me, and not great looking, and the sex scenes are bleh.
There's drama and stuff, but it's divorced from any real plot, so it falls flat.
Plus, some of the drama comes from the protagonist just being stupid as fuck.
I know humor is subjective, but I didn't see the humor other people have talked about.

I tried to do an evil playthrough after doing a good one and it felt bad to do bad things to these characters. Which I think is a mark of good writing. The scenes are hot, and the writing is good. Everything I want in an erotic vn.

Just finished chapter 3, went with non-dark route, wanted be a good guy. I was cracking up on some of the dialogue, very nicely written. The renders/character expressions seems to improve as the story goes. I appreciate the not-12-year-old-porno -logics with the plot. Wish the dev could add sound/music later on. Keep up the good work.

Played v0.57 – Visual novel with the male domination tag and a male MC.
A great game – characters are awesome, story is interesting, graphics and design is good and the sex scenes are hot. The MC came into a lot of money and used it to turn his life around.
The main draw of the game are the different approaches the MC can take – do you romance the girls, do you use your position and money to coerce them, or do you violently rape them and use both to keep them quiet (for the latter you need the taboo patch). There are a lot of options and your choices influence the story quite a bit – sure the main plot is pretty linear, but you can change the characters and their feelings and reactions quite a bit. Also most of the characters are connected in some way and by following their storylines you discover tidbits and background information on others.
As for bdsm there’s mostly domination, spanking, choking and humiliation. So far we only got one scene with handcuffs and one with gagging. Depending on what kind of relationship you pursue the scenes are harsher or kinder. But even on the romance route most girls (or maybe even all girls) can be dominated and enjoy it up to a certain point. If a girl likes you enough you even get to press her boundaries whereas they might not be so enthusiastic if they don’t like you as much.
Or you just blackmail them and don’t care about what they like.
Coming full circle back to the games choices – if you press a girl too far she might even leave completely, trimming the game’s branches and also making the characters seem more alive and have some agency.
Definitely recommended, even if the bondage part of bdsm is pretty light so far and the game concentrates more on domination.

One of the most satisfying story. I feel my choices matter and my altruistic heart is jumping from joy ... before and after the jizz.

Story: 5/5
Lewd:4/5
Graphic: 3.5/5
Animations: 2/5

Cant wait for more content to come.

One of the best games here

Your choices really matter!

You may play like a complete asshole or like a bright knight
Or even something in between.

It's not a harem

Don't forget to install patch or directry update patch file with `true` - it unblocks additional choices

Friends in Need has an unusual gimmick: it allows one to choose whether to play the MC as a good guy or a bad one (or somewhere in between) individually with each LI. While this seems appealing, in practice there are a couple of problems. One is inherent in the concept: it requires multiple separate paths for each LI and each scene. As there are already several love interests—with more seemingly in the offing—the combinatorial explosion of scenes required is dragging the story to a standstill. If you like to play through every possible route with every character, this may not bother you: there will still be lots of content. If, on the other hand, you prefer to just play through the story once, this problem will become very apparent. In the last update, my path didn’t even feature a sex scene.

The second problem I have with it is that the dev’s portrayal of the range between good and evil is...strange. On the good side we have a MC that is the white-knight sort, riding to the rescue of damsel’s in distress, vainly hoping that somehow this will make their panties drop...well, that actually works in-game, anyway.

The evil MC is a crazed psychotic rapist, who would quickly land in prison (or a mental ward) in the real world. Mad dogs aren’t evil, in my book: they are just broken. While I would be quite interested in playing a dark character who was in control of themselves—a Machiavellian sort—I can’t get into playing a lunatic.

The intermediate paths between white-knight and lunatic seem poorly differentiated, and are difficult to navigate without referring to a walk-through constantly. I think this could have been done a lot better if the dev had put more thought into developing a realistic light-to-dark scale, and telegraphed the choices so the players could tell which ones would keep them on their desired level of gray.

I suspect that the first problem—the combinatorial explosion—will keep Friends in Need from ever reaching a satisfactory conclusion, but it is an interesting experiment, and probably worth a look.

Solid writing for an underpinning linear plot with significant variation depending on your interactions with each character, with a good range of characters - these look and feel like different people.

The characters and their reactions are consistently believable in the context of the story (and on multiple play throughs), and your choices have consequences (and the writing hints at significant future escalation of some of those consequences), which I like.

This is an excellent game - easily one of the best I've played here, and in a couple of decades of playing VNs and AIF - and I'm excited to see where it goes next.

>>>No animations at all<<<
Nothing REALLY impressive about the story
Mostly daily basic boring shit
Most of the good reviews are based on the patch where you can do some extreme suff (see the tags), and because of the paths you can choose (good, asshole, and the patch unlock the "rape route")

But, what is the point of having moral choices, if all of 'em are boring?
You can see the first character at the start of the game as an example:
You can be kind
You can humiliate her
You can assault her (patch)

You feel no impact in any of your choices, because things happens too fast, you have zero connection with her, and you have no options to tell her to fuck off.

meh

It's rare to find a game where the writing is the standout feature.

It stands out in the details: characters have distinct voices, subtle changes in the narration or dialogue greatly alter the meaning and feel of different scenes, there's a lot of text, but none of it feels like a waste of time.

It's also exceptional in its broader storytelling: characters respond to situations in surprisingly believable ways, making different choices not only unlocks different lewd scenes, but significantly alters the main character's arc and the emotional tenor of the entire game.

And that arc is continuously responsive to player choice because the writing is strong enough to change the story through its words rather than through all new scenes. Between the two extremes of virtuous nice guy and violent psychopath are many gradations that allow the player to effectively construct a coherent psychology for the mc.

I do distinguish between storytelling and plotting. There is not a lot of plot in this game. it is in all respects character driven, and your choices affect characters, not the overarching story. But again, and most importantly, the writing is so good that the possibility space feels huge (with the taboo patch). You can create a sweet comedy, a tragic romance, a horrific thriller, and more--and it all has real emotional heft.

Finally, for those who are interested in non-consent, humiliation and violence, this game does it better than any other that I've played. And that is because it takes it seriously. There are certainly games with more over-the-top scenarios, but none of them are able to imagine the psychological effects on both perpetrator and victim in any of those scenarios. Here, the believable psychology of the characters serves to elevate the intensity of the kink and rape scenes, making them both more erotic and less exploitative.

I can only think of one other writer here who is writing at this level. This is a real gem and I can't believe it took me this long to find it. I hope to contribute to the author's Patreon for many years to come.

Premise of the game is the MC is an older dude lucks into big bucks because of crypto, starts up a charity and alot of decisions can be made in the game around being a helpful nice rich guy or bit of an asshole creep to women down on their financial luck. Other than that, nothing much to the story.

The main feature of the game is you can patch it and make extra sadistic, rape choices in the game. It also unlocks incest options as the MC seems strangely obsessed with his sister.

The MC is mostly a blank slate, whose thoughts are influenced by the decisions made in the game. So players get to decide what's driving the motives of the MC.

What's also good is the choices do have an effect on the relationships and scenes that unlock in the game. There's effort put into variations in the conversations, even unlocking topics or outcomes based on player decisions.

For example, the nice vanilla routes have characters exposing their real thoughts and secrets, where the asshole route would have it uncovered through the MC using his money to find out secrets to blackmail characters.

I experimented and you can be rapey with some love interests but then have a change in personality and the writing actually covers those situations, which I thought was interesting that it covered that permutation of choices.

Ultimately, the vanilla choice is the better route and I don't think the story really puts enough characterisation into the MC as to why they'd do the patch rape choices.

There's no animation and the game also lacks music or sfx. The renders and the design of the love interests are ok. No gallery or anything either.

3.5 stars

Pros

Writing:
This games writing is excellent.

Every character has unique personalities, with unique quirks and their own way of speaking. How one writer can write so many distinct personalities is beyond me.

This game has managed to make me care for every single character regardless of whether I find them attractive. The writing is simply equal to any other great and greater than almost all of it's peers.

Writing part 2, the MC:
Even the MC has great writing. He gets upset with LI's when it's natural to do so. How to react further is up to the player, but he reacts in a normal way. He doesn't suck up at all times afraid to lose goodie points. He's charming, nerdy, dorky. His dialogue tells you so, not someone calling him those things.

Choices:
The choices are really well implemented, the fact you can treat one character one way, and another character a different way without being railroaded into your character acting the same way in every situation is a breath of fresh air.

Cons
The writing being so good kind of carries the game though. That's good as being an excellent writer is a great starting point. However, there are some elements that definetly could be improved.

Lack of audio:
For one the game has absolutely no music or sfx.

Good music and sfx usage in games are very underrated. It can not be understated how big of a difference it can make for a game. It doesn't have to be a big chunk of the development time, but decent sfx and music can elevate a good game to a great game. Some well chosen music could elevate some of these moments to new heights.

Also moaning sfx during sex-scenes to me elevates them a million times over. But that's subjective I guess.

Naming savefiles:
Another small fix that would be incredibly helpful is the ability to name the save files. This game branches a lot, which is amazing. But that makes me desire this feature.

Visuals/Graphics:
Finally, the last con is as mentioned by a few the visual quality. This to me is less of a con than audio, as it takes longer to master great renders and animations. Which means I feel more inclined to lower my expectations.

The graphics are serviceable. Thanks to the great writing they can be both spicy and appealing. However, it's still a decent step away from the best out there. The animations are very short, and there aren't that many of them. However, the visuals seem to be getting better with time. I root for the developer to improve.

Other positives on the visuals, I really like a lot of the character designs, the variety and some renders are worth admiring.

Final Thoughts

Best wishes for the game:
My hope for the game is that audio gets implemented and save file naming and animations and renders keep improving over time. And of course that the game gets finished. With audio in a future update I will bump rating to 5 stars.

Best wishes for the developer:
My hope for the developer is that their next game uses the skills they have aquired, making this one to make an even better game than this one. They have the potential to be one of the best devs out there.

TLDR
Amazing character writing, with improving graphics weighs up for lack of audio and makes the game a reading experience (with plenty of meaningful choices) truly worth experiencing.

Marvelous VN! I'm enjoying it a bunch!

The writing is simple but witty. You're not just being good or evil, the writing displays the reasons to be one way or another, shows you the possibilities of taking either path.

The writting carries you well. If you wanna make a good decision, it makes you doubt.. same when having to make bad ones. Good, evil, neutral path all are worth trying.

So it's easy to connect with the MC. You're building your character and thinking about your actions, having second thoughts and pondering yourself, be for good or bad. Not just searching for different scenes.

And of course, the girls react different according to your past behaviors.

The way you meet new characters is perfect too. Feels natural and harmonious. Since you have free time and lots of money to explore new projects to get into.

Honestly, I was never bored reading this. It has a good pacing and the dots are well joined when progressing the story.

Yeah, sometimes the setup is very convenient.. and it looks like you're the only male that can be a good guy in a city full of trashy guys. The visuals aren't good at the beggining and some music/ BGM could be nice too.

But the game exudes passion.. and I'm interesed in all the girls. I love the little details they may have, be in their looks or way of talking. And I'm truly worried about their problems and eager to fall more for these ladies.

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Uncomplainingly ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆