VN - Ren'Py - Friends in Need [Mini-Sode: Blue Valentine] [NeonGhosts]

Beyond the renders I have almost nothing positive to say about this game.

Admittedly I stopped playing before all the LI's where introduced, but the first 3 or so where enough for this to get the Alt+F4, delete, empty recycle bin treatment.

Starting with the first LI. The game starts with her and the MC working together, he's likes her but is too much of a coward to make a move. (yet later he became this super dominate guy and on dark path rapes women, yeah right.) . The LI then hooks up with the new guy at the job and gets into a world of trouble resulting in her coming to the mc and prostituting herself to him to get money. At this point she realizes she loves the MC but still goes home to her trash BF and later runs away to even worse conditions and eventually comes back to the MC when she's hit rock bottom and looks like a cliched washed out porn star. Why didn't she go to him right away? I would have had more sympathy for her then, than 6 or 8 or however many months later. All I wanted to do was slam the door in her face, but sadly there is no option for that.

The next LI is some stupid bitch spoilt brat. Again as much I tried to ignore her she kept turning up like a bad penny you can't get away from.

The 3rd LI was decent, but being forced to deal with the two previous ones despite having no desire to interact with them at all, she couldn't make up for it.

Devs seem to forget we play these vn's for escapism. If I wanted shitty flawed people, I'd go outside, there are enough of them there. It feels like the dev actively tried to make each LI as crappy as possible so we wouldn't feel bad about hurting them on the dark parth and thats what he was trying to push the player towards.

As a harem romance game, this one fails terribly. As a dark rape sim, it might be your cup of tea, but not for me.

great game, great renders. great story. the story with the girl you love but her ex abuse and the money part really gat to me as something similar happend to me in a way. she did come back. i forgave her and she went away agian. she said i let her slip out of her hands to tell it bluntly. and short version. so i can relate to the story. great feedback of the DEV love a good dev that takes q&a and asnwers and take notice of us small peasants.

cant wait for future updates. hoping for a steam realease at some point? <3 keep doing a great job NeonGhosts your having a great game with amazing renders and good story

Animation: Well rendered, realistic posing, and detailed scenes. Job well done
Scripting: Conversations carry and convey the personality of the characters saying them.
Plot: Perhaps a few hints of overarching plot but mostly dealing on a relationships by relationship level for now. But the plots seem genuine and thought out.
Typically I'm not a fan of games that have multiple paths (because I'm not patient enough) but this game threads the needle of giving a chracter multiple relationship options but not locking them out of all the content (unless you're being really thickheaded with your choices). Looking forward to more update, though I might wait for a few to drop so I get more content

Great story, nice girls, and lots of kink, if you like sex to be more that just put it in and out that game is for you. I loved dominating Nicki. Lack of animations is a downside. I hope someone will create a walkthrough mod, cause there's a lot of choices and story lines to choose from.

Good game with impacting choices. You can be an asshole or a gentlman .And the most amazing part is you can be evil for some character while being kind to another character in single playthrough .And the story seems good(not amazing though) .And their is not a single virgin character .Even 18 year old are not .So -1 stars from me.It is as of 0.4 and i have still not finished playing .Might change review later.

Friends in Need is an innovative game that shows that certain formulas can be improved to capture the attention of a public that would not normally pay attention to it.

Normally, these kinds of games are quite similar to each other and the greater the number of female characters, the less the difference between the models and their personalities. But this is not the case. The developer(s) have achieved, through a well-developed story, that each female character you meet in the game is unique and appeals to the player in different ways, making the experience incredibly exceptional.

For me it is a great experience that I recommend it to anyone, regardless of their personal kinks, since as each female character and each situation is so different and exciting, I am sure that most users will like it.

That being said, what would make this game a 10/10 would be adding animations to the sex scenes. The captures are quite good, but it is true that each player has their preferences when it comes to seeing the sex scenes, for example: there is a scene in the bathroom and I personally would have liked another angle to have been added where I can appreciate the girl's ass. Still a solid experience and highly recommended and if it comes out on Steam I will support the developer and buy the game.

I love this game and the ability to play as the nice guy or an ass. It adds to the replayability of the game and makes life a lot more fun. Being able to treat each woman like a princess or a slut just means it's a game I can keep coming back to

One of the best games because of a believable plot, choices that actually matter. Would be nice to have music, more animation and sound effects but as it is its a very solid game. English is good as well. For a reviewer who was complaining that "docent " in not a word in English, i suggest they check the oxford dictionary

At the beginning of the story I felt as I'm the MC. Maybe because I also went through MC's life difficulties. The game is very immersive, with exelent writing and decent visuals. Sex scenes are very kinky and BDSM/dom/sub fetish options for all of them. It seems a bit text-heavy at times, but that is needed for it to be highly immersive. Keep in mind that the many subtle choiced really DO matter! This offers you the added value of replayability.

What can be improved: Add Sound, or atleast background music. Translation. While most of the text is in excellent English, there are some figures of speech or words which are not even in English. Like "docent". Another was calling MC's dick "numbers" (I suspect author is from Eastern Europe). Anyway, that can easily be fixed.
Third thing is: MC's clothes are atrocious! Sweaters in the summer or in the bar? That certainly breaks the immersion.

Keep up the good work!

One of the better stories I've come across, with a plotline that isn't unrealistic. Good amount of characters, while still keeping each individual and unique. Only lost a point because their isn't any music, which would help the overall experience. Looking forward to further updates.

A hidden gem, worth of being up there with the big leagues. If you are a depraved scoundrel, the patched non-vanilla version will be the best non-con fantasy you'll find on this site.
If you love romance, the characters, especially Ashe, are really nicely written and there is plenty of content to explore.

Overall, choices really matter, but are also intuitive so you don't need walkthrough. And you can really make each playthrough your own.

Great game

Absolutely amazing game, the amount of choice you have to mold the MC to your preferences and complete autonomy about fucking and rejecting girls makes me put this game at the top of the pyramid of adult vn's. The MC has a unique model, although I think he looks a little older than they imply his age. I enjoy every character and while I find that some of them aren't great romantic or sexual prospects, I was given a choice to be friendly and relaxed with them. Games like this are rare on this site and everyone who enjoyed this game should support the creator, I will be a fan for every update.

Deserving of a 5-star rating as one of the few games here, Friends in Need has excellent, relatively mature, storytelling, excellent renders and excellent animation. The storytelling becomes ever so slightly long in the tooth from time to time but nothing problematic.
Generally, very well made and well-written, with a lot of nice scenes.

A bit too preachy but otherwise good. Maybe three star.

Strange bits:
The MC is ~30 and having sex with a really young looking teen. (you define her age) He keeps telling her to keep it a secret from her parents otherwise they wouldn't be able to keep having sex.
It gets too preachy about the lgbtqa+ charity. (Since he's rich he donates to different charities). The second time they're talking about this org it kept going on about how wonderful it is and so forth seemingly ramming it down your throat a bit too much. Doesn't do that w other charities asking for money, that I saw. But maybe it does later...I dunno as I deleted it.

The game really tries to 'force' Nikki on you. I thought she was gross and wanted to get rid of her but there wasn't an option for that.

The graphics are not fancy however they are really good. The colors are somewhat muted which is very nice and goes well with the game.
The girls all look good but for some reason several of them have their hair really tall on one sid of their head and no/very little hair on the other side. Otherwise the rest of the graphics/backgrounds fit right in.

It's been out for ~ a year and a half and had 6 updates, I think, so that seems ok. At least you don't have to wait a year or wonder if they abandoned it.
Like I said, I'd rather given it 2.5 stars if possible, maybe 3.

It could not hold me. The start with some choices is nice, but that was all. The Sexscenes were boring, and the story was not good. It is sometimes really confusing and some things just don't make sense.
For me it got boring, so I just made it halfway through. I had hoped for more...

review as of v.0.39

This is nice. Really nice. I will admit, after the first sex scene, I expected this game to be kind of a throwaway power fantasy. Buuut I was wrong.

The writing is pretty good. Some parts of the story felt like unnecessary filler, but those were few and far between. For the most part, it was an interesting read that I didn't want to skip.

While it does feel a little linear at times, there are 2 distinct routes that you can mix and match between characters and treat them however you want. And what's nice is - both routes are equally satisfying, none of them feels tacked on, so no matter what you prefer, I think you'll enjoy yourself.

The characters are better than I expected. Most of the ones I didn't like at a first glance grew on me (Ashe and Brit specifically, but I guess Pepper too, although she certainly was more interesting on a con route), and great characters were great throughout (Gabby and Mason are the absolute best and I want more of them).
The only one that didn't grow on me at all was Nicki. In fact, not only did I dislike her more, the more her story progressed, but I think her design past the first encounter was a severe downgrade, which didn't help her case.

And I really hope there will be some Wren content in the future. She seems awesome.

The render quality speaks for itself, the girls are, for the most part, gorgeous and unique.

Other than that... despite a relatively low version number, there is more content than I expected, which is a plus. But at the same time some girls feel a little more neglected than the others, and there are clearly more to come, so I hope quality doesn't suffer because of quantity, and the dev has a plan about where this is going.

Nevertheless, despite my minor nitpicks, I think this game is an easy 5, and I'm looking forward to more.

Amazing, things are complicated, there is power fantasy but not too much, each character has real emotions that if you are empathetic to, you will learn to know where they will generally lie. There is consequences but not too much to feel like you cannot have fun. The writing and character development for this game is phenomenal and I might say even the best I've seen. A must play if you're a sucker for story, romance, and of course having a bit of a harem.

Version 0.39
One playthrough took about 8 hours. In this time I only played one possible option. With each girl you have multiple routes so there might be some replayability ( personally I found the way I wanted to interact with them so I will probably not )
The story is well written, enjoyable and the characters feelunique. The renders are also clear.
I didn't notice any music which I don't mind usally I turn it off anyway.

So, would want to give it a 5 but I can't. The renders are amazing, the story is really good and it feels great to play the good guy in this one. The problem to me is how big the cast is. I love 95% of the girls and they look great and all the thing is they are just too many and have no idea how the dev will finish them all without having a feeling like one girl has way more content.

Went back and forth on 4 or 5 stars, settled on 5 since my complaint is limited to the darker content that some may not even be interested in.

As a wise man once said "With great power comes great fuckability". Our hero is a sad sack who luckboxes his way into millions, but success that comes to easily doesn't bring satisfaction. It brings beggars. In walks the one person he cared about, and she's begging for money....

We get to choose the reactions, we get to choose how to take out our frustrations, on the characters we meet. There's three ways to go if you have the totally unofficial patch attached. Which you should. You sick fuck. You can be kind and help people, you can exploit people for favours, or you can just force it because you're a rich local celebrity and nobody can stop you. These moments of choice radically change the way a scene unfolds, and with future consequence. Even the dialogue in the build up will occasionally change what you can do, or how a character might react to what you do.

The scenes, whichever path you go for, have some great renders, different and realistic body types and aesthetics (I really appreciate that in a game, not everyone needs to be giganto-titted athletes), and good sex. The love interests so far come through as unique characters, another massive plus. The dialogue throughout the game is pretty damn solid. Few clunky lines or misspellings.

Onto my criticism: the relationships have branching paths but much of the in-between dialogue is shared across different lines you took. Sometimes that creates the feeling that the person you're talking to has forgotten what you've done. You've exploited, humiliated, and shown utter contempt for someone, and then they're just sharing casual banter with you. I'm sure it's not easy to change that but it does break the immersion now and then.

The biggest praise I can give is that my first run I went full on criminal at the beginning, and then with the next character, and then the next, and then I actually found one sympathetic enough I just took care of them. It's great when the writing actually leads you to make a decision not only on the smut you want to see but on how you actually want to approach them based on how they're written. Minor spoilers about that character (a trans one):


The patch certainly gives you access to some heavy hitting stuff, and as someone who enjoys the darker side of psychological torment it's a real good thing. Still, I was surprised how good the other routes were on my second run.