Others - Hard Times in Hornstown [v8.42] [Unlikely]

First of all, I apologize for any grammar mistakes.
so to start. This game has 8 years of production.
8 whole years for a single project.
And what is the actual result of all those years? this sad project
This game is bad at almost everything.

When you start playing, there are no indications of what to do, no quest marks on where we are supposed to go, and no help at all on how to increase the MC skills.

You meet random characters; they trigger specific quests; you don't know what quest to start; you don't know what skills they require; and you don't get any alerts as to which skill is required to get good results with said character.

Without the playthrough, you cannot do anything; this issue alone makes the game pretty much unplayable.

Another problem with the game is the fetishes.
You start a quest, advance through it, and then get stuck with a part that demands a fetish you don't want.
Plus, the game forces gay fetishes on the player way too much.

Another sad issue is that there is not a single-sex scene in the game. You can play for hours and hours, but all you get is the same repetitive scenario: a single 3D render on one side of the screen with no emotions or animations. With the dialogue in the middle, you read the script and imagine the scene in your head.

The story itself is not great; the game failed to deliver a solid story and failed miserably to provide good 3D renders and quality graphics.
Sincerely, I have no idea how this game is still in production. Why would anyone waste a single penny on this game?

It's a shame, the way this game is designed makes it pretty bad.

Lots of talk about how you have choices w the fetishes and such, but you really don't. For example:
If you choose to go down the housekeeper route thinking it's for a relationship w her, then you're wrong. It's more of a cross dressing something or other. (Why there's a housekeeper makes no sense anyway.)
If you choose to seek knowledge from the older lady that occasionally helps you but you are against homosexual content, then tough.
If you choose to help find a missing girl, but are against certain fetishes, then tough.
If you want to purchase the robot but don't want to fire the housekeeper....tough. You aren't given a choice.
....It seems to be the same with most of the content. You start these tasks/quests, get half way into them, then find out there are things/fetishes you are against but there's nothing you can do about it other than abandon that quest. Pretty soon you just have a bunch of half done things and nothing else to do other than get to the bad ending and restart.

The same things pop up over and over and over when you are navigating.... A guy not walking fast enough while talking on his phone......constructions workers stopping you, a drug dealer stops you....etc.... same scenes over and over.

Currently there are also only bad endings according to the overview.

Very strange...this game has semi low ratings but still pulls in almost $6000 per month on patreon.

Right clicking and hitting Back sometimes works and sometimes not so much.
Horrible ui and it still has lots of problems.

Mainly, I guess, they should warn you before you start the tasks about which fetishes are in them, or at least give you a way out.
Unfortunately, there isn't much content in the game if you aren't a huge fan of gay content but if you are then there's quite a bit. Even though given how the overview is written you'd think there are tons of choices, there really aren't.

***Also..don't forget to block it in your firewall as it wants to connect to the internet whenever you start..

From a technical point of view, this remains a really well-produced game. The website, the payment tiers, the renders, the writing? All very well realised. The problem is that the game fundamentally sucks.

Having played around with it a number of times, I think the problem lies in the way that the dev approaches sandboxes. Most sandboxes start you out with nothing but hooks and opportunities to grind. You might wander around and find nothing but you'll see glimpses of more interesting stuff and conclude that you're not strong enough, not smart enough, not charming enough, or that you've missed some step in the quest-chain somewhere. So you go off and you grind, and you explore, and you come back. Sometimes you might make a really bad decision and need to re-load but stuff takes a while and is always well signposted so you can never fuck up too badly.

This game takes a very different approach: Rather than presenting you with hooks, and inviting you to explore, it will throw stuff in your face. Oh... you thought you were trying to seduce the maid? Well tough shit, you're being feminised now. Oh... you thought you were getting really jacked? Well tough shit, you're a literal imbecile now.

It's not just that the game hurls fetishes at you, it gives you no real choice as to when and how to engage with those fetishes and if you mess it up, you're locked out forever. Start your game again.

The result is that you never feel in control of your game and because you never feel in control, none of the quest-chains are all that satisfying. Everything seems random and half-finished because you are either forced to deal with a fetish you don't really like or you're locked out of a fetish you did like because actually that fetish is only accessible if you happened to start the quest chain after you had done a few other things.

The ingredients are all here and dev cooks with real energy but because they messed up how fetish-based quest chains work, the entire game feels off and no amount of extra scenes or characters will ever change that.

The game is so vast, but at the same time so empty!
All of the paths you take, you have to commit, as if you miss any event you are locked out of that path. There is no coming back, which is super frustrating!
The UX is so painful that it's crazy, you have event prompts, but have to attend other event beforehand, which puts your over the time threshold means you are locked out forever from the other event (as time value can be randomised and sometimes you work till 5pm, sometimes till midnight etc.)
The H-scenes are hard to achieve and very few inbetween, playing first time without a guide it was a massive minefield and not friendly for new players at all, with the walkthrough mechanism that is given in game the game becomes bit easier to follow, but still nowhere playable level.

The game should help players finish branches rather than punishing them for missing an event.

All over the place in content, but none of it seems finished. It's all like a 5 course dinner but nothing is all the way cooked. Some of it is, vast majority just kinda sits in limbo. The game is actively infuriating to play without their patreon perks, it has no business running so clunky in its own app no less, the screen doesn't fit even on a 4k monitor. It's got a lot of good don't get me wrong, but the bad offsets it quite alot.

This game has great potential... and that's it. I honestly like the overall idea and kinda enjoy playing (that's why it's 2 stars and not 1) but some stuff makes the game feels like a chore.

UI is messy and buggy : the display often just goes all over the place and you gotta reload a save while the text sometimes lacks the clickable link needed to progress so you end up stuck on a text/blank page and must reload a save again.

Gameplay is repeatitive, you often can't choose when you wanna deal with an event as you gotta follow them right now or they'll never appear again.

The way stats works is unfair, as you'll have important stats checks early on yet it's pretty long to increase fitness and charisma (especially charisma). And most of those checks can't be dodged because they're from events that are triggered automatically whatever you do.

Without UI bugs I'd give this game 2.5 stars, as the experience would at least NOT be so fucking frustrating.
Fixing forced events on top of that might pump the grade to 3 stars, although lack of visual sex scenes (beyond just description and nude models) is kinda sad given models exists.

EDIT : I tried giving it a new chance today and the game had 3 UI scramble that required a reload and 1 full blank page without the possibility to reload in 30 minutes. That's it.

I've replayed this game now for the second time after 3+ years and it still sucks.
The initial body transformation is fun, customizing it to personal preferences is a plus, but that's pretty much where positives end.
Events are boring and samey, there is a lot of unnecessary waste of time busy-work, clicking, skipping time and grinding (if you don't cheat), but the actual content is dissapointing, on top of that female MC and majority of NPCs are straight up ugly.

UI Is obscured I'm not really sure what I'm doing.
This game looks promising But I didn't manage to even get out off the house at first.
You are bombozed with lots of text, some are meaning less some are not, what is important for you? who knows.

There seems to be quite a bit of content in this game and from what I've played quite a bit that would interest me.

Unfortunately the UI is horrifically bad. Navigatin around the Ui takes forever and it very frequently broke in the downloaded version.

There also is a big ad banner right above the useful parts of the UI.

If the UI were better and it broke less frequently I could see myself playing it again. As it stands now the grind to get to the scenes through a horrific Ui just simply isn't worth the effort.

I got to give this game a poor rating.
To its credit, it has a lot varied content and you can do a lot in it. However that conent is very shallow, lasting a page or two and the game is rather unforgiving.
Your choices matter. Honestly too much. It is way to easy to soft lock yourself and often if you want something you can easily lock yourself out of it.

The main reason I am giving this 2 stars is the pay off for those choices is far too little for the effort. I found myself pulling up the walkthough for the content I cared about and even that is written to give you a 'challenge' rather then the answer. Even then I was rather unsatisfied with what I got.

Version: v6.3

Do be warned, this game has some very niche fetishes, everything else is just appetizer.
The biggest gripe i have about this game is its buggy nature, its very easy to fuck this game up and soft lock yourself, i would know, after around 5~ hours of gameplay i managed to lock myself twice, which is kind of impressive. The main issue about that is the fact that this game has a lot of different story lines and path, that if you intermingle two of them, chances are, the games program is going to get clapped.
Moving on, i cant really enjoy this game, its heavily text based, which is not a problem by itself, no, the problem is, that i cannot really get into this game, it just does not have a good hook that drags you down deeper into the game. Its a mixture of boring writing, grindy progression and having too much choice, with too little time.
One thing i will give this game though is its pretty detailed customisation and plentiful of path and characters to experience, even if i had quit this game and wont enjoy most story lines, i can still respect the diversity that this game offers.

It just doesnt not have a magical touch that could make it great, thats all.

I tried to get into this game many times and never could stick with it for very long because I never discovered any overarching story. I found no motivation to continue doing anything other than repeating the feminization process. I think all of the "side dishes" are there for a great game but the main course is either missing or yet to come.

Played for about an hour probably and saw one or two scenes. It seems like the main kinks this game wants to support are where most of the content is (basically all things non-cis). It's cool that the dev wants to be inclusive but they really ought to just pick a lane and make a good game in it, as many people like myself are going to have a bad experience otherwise.

The best game of this kind I have ever played so far. It's huge, and there are so many options. Only problem is that maybe it's gotten too big and it can get buggy at times and hard to keep track of all the plotlines.

I absolutely adore this game and would heartily recommend. It contains lots of content which is updated regularly. Story lines are well written and involve multiple options for relationships with as many fetishes as you could imagine.

Decided to give this game a chance after some of my questions were answered in the discussion section, whether or not
I could avoid content I did not find appealing and stil lhave access to a significant part of the game's storyline.

So be advised, If you do not like : Gay, trap, futa/trans, female domination, sissification and have no interrest in any storyline involving them 80% of the game (arguably the more interresting part) will be locked to you.

All you will have left are some pointless random encounters and some fetch quests.

If you do like them, more power to you, as it stands,, this game holds little appeal to straight men( at least to me) Make of that what you will.

well
well
well........

i tried the online and the offline Version and it COULD be a wonderfull game with many Kinks but...........

i startet 7 diffrent games 3 with Save editor (moneycheat) and 4 without... if you rollback game is broken..... if you go away from computer for more then 10min with open game... broken.... sometimes you reach an event where the game breaks without reason next time it works..... sometimes a game event happens or a story element which breaks another path (longer workshift and Trisha was gone forever) a call from lady Thorn and Sugarmommy was gone forever...... Prostitutionpath did it like walkthrough to become highclassescort... never happened although i ONLY!!!! had the nontrash clients for many many days and running away from Jimmy nearly every day..... and and and

this could be such a good game but so many frustrating gamebreaking things without an option to correct something after many hours played only 2 Stars...

This is a solid sandbox style game with a lot of different experiences. None of them are particularly deep but well worth a playthrough. The game has improved a lot over the course of its development and offers pretty much something for everyone. All content is avoidable.

The game is criminally underrated on this site. What you get is an enormous sandbox, allowing for every type of playthrough. The game is amazing for roleplay, as you can make any kind of character. Yes, there is a deviation to MtF transformation, but let me introduce you to my current protagonist Mr Long Dong: He is a typical black muscular dude, who works at the construction site, once a week starring in porn films, and enjoys visits to the night club in a leather outfit, where he dominates young rich girl. And yes, he made penis enlargement. And he dumb as fuck, but extremely charming.
I love how this game creates characters and stories, that differ heavily from one another, but always alive and fun.
Sometimes you notice repetition, sometimes the open world is falling apart, but this is to be expected of such a large world. What I feel lacking is more pictures, as currently there only portraits, though well made, and I wish there were some action pics as well.
I recommend you to try this one to feel the true sandbox vibe and freedom this game provides, and if you don't mind the heavy text-base this game has.

boring game, the walkthrough is not useful, can barely explore or even survive without reaching a bad end. wastes a lot of time doing grinding and no clear way to view stats. also no way to see which stats affects the success of actions until its too late and you hit a bad end.