A towering and ambitious icon of the nsfw vn community. One of the first Ren'py games that I discovered, which, along with MilfyCity, set the tone, tools, tropes, and presentation patterns that subsequent harem vn's have mostly followed. Under continuous development and serial expansion for many years, the number of renders (and file size) is staggering.
The story is proto-isekai: your grandfather left you, the MC, a hotel in a strange land with strange rules, but nonetheless inhabited by people with surprisingly common problems. It begins gently, but like a long-running telenovela or endless Dickens novel, it gradually changes its focus to increasingly (unnecessarily? unsexy?) grandiose world-spanning stakes and subplots.
The MC takes in and cares for a range of cute but directionless waifs and a couple of jaded milfs: an angsty 300 year-old teen elf slave, an angsty teen heiress slumming as a pizza delivery driver, an angsty last-gen teen sexbot, and a passel of angsty teen college girls with personalities ranging from a-cup to d-cup. And he gently helps them work through their mundane concerns: getting a job, dealing with family dysfunction, being less of a bitch, inability to achieve multiple orgasms without the MC's help, needing a new 'slutty schoolgirl' outfit for picture day at school, or forestalling an impending AI singularity/race-war, or whatever...
The low-fantasy world building is intriguing and deep, with racial and cultural conflicts spanning generations impacting the MC's day-to-day life and interactions. The narrative implicitly comments on the interrelationships between colonialism, patriarchy, religion, natural rights, and capitalism. Many of the minor characters are extensively developed, despite their smaller roles: your grandfather's unrequited (much) younger mistress, an openly neurodivergent minor LI (#bestgirl), sex workers trying to survive dangerous jobs and masters, religious grifters, self-righteous slavers, greedy politicians/plutocrats, addicts, and the prerequisite overly-friendly-yoked-guy-with-russian-accent, etc.
After a while, if you insist that your 300 year-old teen elf slave shows you her panties every day, eventually she will fall in love with you. Then she will start wearing one of your shirts when you let her sleep with you at night, which is incredibly endearing and twee. And she will wake you up with a scheduled-task morning blowjob, which frankly, makes me, as a reader, regret my own relatively incomplete morning routine. Once they pick up, the lewd scenes are frequent, nicely motivated, and often have unexpected payoffs or character development. (Like the dungeon olympics with a troupe of exotic elven chattel, or the once-innocent 300 year-old teen elf slave, now so lewd and sexually frustrated after 40+ days of panty flashing that she acts out by breaking things in the kitchen until the MC finally fucks her senseless).
But despite its detailed and coherently presented story events, HH remains, at its heart, a not-so-subtle incel fantasy. Females, and especially non-human females, are so infantilized, sexualized, and marginalized in this society that the MC just admitting that his LIs are probably sentient is white-knighting worthy of their undying devotion. The LIs are themselves just cute little bags of insecurities, body shame, daddy issues, and immaturity; generally naive and petty to the point of insufficiency; driven by porn-logic to devote themselves to the unremarkable MC. Meanwhile, the MC spends his time growing potatoes? (click cick click), occassionally buying a new outfit for a girl so he can take pictures of them (click click click), bowling? (click click click), listening in on harem squabbles, beating his loyal girlfriends repetitively in his dungeon (click click click), and confronting mobsters and various powerful factions that want to subvert his hotel, steal his robot, or maybe just not have their teen daughters caught up in a cultish, physically abusive monopolycule?
From a technical point of view, the ancient HoneySelect engine and 201x-era assets have constrained the visual style across the long-development history. The early renders and animations were impressive for the time, but later phases have not brought any improvements, so the visuals feel dated, plastic, and frozen in time now. And I feel like Runey's evolving vision and serialized development process has similarly hampered the story. Given the hindsight afforded by years of development history, it is pretty obvious that a lot of important concepts and characters could have been introduced earlier and more clearly, a lot of exposition dumps could have been left on the cutting room floor, navigation smoothed, and clicks per activity could have been (greatly) reduced. And, as other reviewers have noted, the tonal dissonance from switching rapidly between the story arcs as they independently ratchet up their stakes, and the general lack of agency from the wall-flower MC are very distracting.
Gameplay-wise, HH is not very grindy _per se_, but mostly a tedious search-for-the-event sandbox overworld that requires lots of clicks and screen fades to discover the fun but short kinetic chunks of content. I remembered all those clicks from the first time I experienced it, and it hasn't gotten much better. There is a small amount of grinding, farming repeatable scenes (I'm not sure _who_ plays harem games to literally farm potatoes?), and thumb-twiddling to unlock some features, but comparatively, the content-to-grind ratio is not nearly as bad as a lot of more recent sandbox vns/games, where the grind apparently _is_ the experience. (At least until the late-game, when a ton of syls are suddenly required to unlock certain arcs.)
Overall, this is a 4* game, I think. It is well worth a reader's time and appreciation, both for its epic story as well as for its genre landmark status -- but it is showing its age. It was probably a 5* game 5-years ago, and would easily be a 5* game today with a modest technical, visual, and editorial makeover. The story is servicable, the LIs are immature, but also often complex, earnest, sexy, and fun to hang-out with, the low fantasy world-building and lore is (mostly) consistent and well-presented without becoming _too_ tedious or overwhelming, and there is a _ton_ of content to click through.
