Ren'Py - Haremence [v0.12] [Arpel]

This review is on version 0.12.

I have a hard soft spot for the "Mind Control" genre, so this one has been on my list to check out for a while.

Haremence is a pretty standard game. Effort has clearly been put into the visual details, and the girls are universally rather attractive. There is an obvious intent to tell a story and develop the characters into individuals while allowing the player a certain degree of freedom when interacting with them.

The issues start to arise with that interaction. At this time it is rather limited, and the employment of the actual "Mind Control" by the player isn't really present very much at this time.

The sorest points however, and the ones that really do bring my opinion down, are the language, actual storytelling, and knowledge of subject matter.

The English is...not the best. It's serviceable and I would call the speaker fluent, but it doesn't feel native. The actual grammar is fine, with just a few common mistakes here or there, but it's the word choice and way the sentences fail to flow together that make them foreign.

I have no issue with the direction the story takes on a high-level. It's very typical, but in an adult game the story is secondary and serves mostly as a catalyst to deliver the "content". My issue is actually related more to the character definition and stems from the language issue. Primarily, the characters don't do a good job on communicating through their dialogue and they tend to come across as rather stupid.

Here's a specific example:

Lastly, the subject matter. One of the characters is supposed to be a brilliant hacker. This isn't out of the ordinary for games but she...isn't. Many of the explanations or commentary she gives don't make sense.

Effectively, the visuals and concepts are both good and fine, respectively. However, the game is in need a pretty significant low-level rewrite to give it a sense of quality.

Version Reviewed: v0.11

Overview: Harem Hideout

Story: You and your pretty research buddy accidentally discover a mind control device, and unfortunately for you at least two evil organizations know about it immediately. So you go into hiding with several other genius and also gorgeous girls who have invented technology that would be too dangerous in the wrong hands. Your job is to corrupt a waitress and get in everyone's pants.

If you've played one of the more popular hotel relationship sims on this site you will be familiar with the interface. There are rooms you click on to advance the story, although sometimes the story advances in other places as well. The story itself is a mishmash of dating sim and preventing world domination, although the world domination story usually takes a back seat. For example, your lab partner was kidnapped almost immediately in the story, and by the end of this version you've done almost nothing to free her. This one doesn't seem to have a good quest tracker, but hopefully they will add one soon.

Your "job" is to basically practice using your mind control device on a local cafe worker, getting her to do increasingly lewd things as you slowly grind up the relationship.

Gameplay: Kinda grindy, and needing to hunt around for events is a bit of a hassle. There is a sort of quest tracker where you can click on the doors and sometimes it will tell you what you need to do, but that doesn't work very well and usually the doors offer no hints. Overall it's not too bad to play, but it could be better. Navigation is another area that could use improvement, there is a big menu you can go to that gets you to several places, but not all. To get to the cafe you have to be in your room or the bar for example. To get to the generator room you have to be in the living room or bar. The navigation menus could definitely be improved.

Graphics: Honey select, and there's sadly not much special going on in the graphics. Backgrounds aren't just default assets and everything is done reasonably well, but you probably won't be wowed by what you see in 2023. The bar has been raised over the years.

Conclusion: This was close to a 4 star thanks to the slightly excessive grind with the cafe worker, occasionally clunky navigation, and only partially functional quest tracker, but the story was good enough to get full marks. I really hope that the player uses his weeks of experimentation to improve his device so it doesn't take for fucking ever next time we need to mind control someone. I think the full mind control grind is around 35 interactions in this version, but there are nowhere near that many different scenes to play, so you spend a fair bit of time sitting on the control key watching it zip by.

I really like those mind control scene for Yuki,
hope next version can get more mind control scene,
and we can do more harder thing on Yuki.

If you like Nano-control, and mindless mind control,
you probably like Yuki mind control scene.

Rate Version: v0.1

For a first release, it's pretty good! Girls all have unique characteristics, more into the mind control aspect of it though so Yuki is a favorite. Story's still setting up future events and for what it is, it's OK. Animation on the 3d cutscenes are pretty decent but I'm no animator so take that with a grain of salt. Overall pleased with the experience and hoping to see more.

I'm not one to review, or even play a game this early in development, but I'd like to see this game continue.

Anyways, as a whole this was pretty good, especially for a first release. The UI is clean, there were no missing images or other bugs that break the Ren'Py engine, the story has me intrigued, the characters are interesting and distinct enough from one another, the renders have clearly had a lot of effort put into them, and there was plenty of content for a first release. All in all, this blows most other first releases out of the water.

Now for the criticisms.

1. The English is a bit rough around the edges. I'm pretty certain the writer is an ESL (English as a Second Language) speaker because there are a lot of small things in the dialogue that are either grammatically incorrect, or just don't seem right. None of these language errors made it difficult to understand, but there are a lot of them. Some of the more picky people on this site might be put off by this. Just to pick out a couple typical examples:
   • "as new your mysterious companion said" would be better as "as your new mysterious companion said"
   • "How can possibly be an email address without it?" would be better as "How can there be an email address without it?"
2. The process of controlling Yuki is a little too grindy, in my opinion. Needing to mind control her 6 times to increase the control level by 1 feels like too much. After the second or third time, I'm holding down the control button to skip everything. Personally, I would opt for reducing the mind control requirement to 3 times per control level. This would reduce the mind control grind, but maintain the narrative idea that the mind control needs to be repeated several times. Since Yuki is the only character you can mind control at this point, it's not a big deal now, but this will start to get annoying once you can start mind controlling other characters as well.
3. My only UI complaint is that using grey is not a good choice of highlight color for new text messages. I'd probably suggest going with some shade of yellow, but I'm not a color theory expert.
4. Once more characters and locations are added to the game, the sandbox nature could start making it a lot more annoying, and a lot less fun to play. I'd suggest the devs make sure they get a hint system for story events up and running sooner rather than later.

So overall, the only reason this wasn't the full 5 stars is because of the quantity of minor English errors. Everything else is just nitpicks with room for improvement. I enjoyed my time playing this and I look forward to playing any future updates.