Ren'Py - Abandoned - Hero's Harem Guild [v0.1.2.3b Public] [Komisari]

I've just finished the 0.1.2 version and kept playing it thinking something interesting must happen - since so many reviews are positive.

The plot had some promise, but the main character is a total pussy to the point that its embarrasing to see use your own name in the playthrough. There's no charm, only awkward conversations and "virgin" attitude wherever there's flirting going on. He even refused girls from having sex saying its too soon.... like what kind of a 14 yo writer is this guy, really.

The girls are also swarming around him for no apparent reason, respecting and falling in love artificially. Here's a transcript of "leveling up a girl" :
- Oh, by the way, I like your long hair.
- Wow, thank you sooo much! You really know how to compliment a lady...

Animations are fine, but the whole fake lust just made this a full turn off for me.
Gameplay is repetitive and tedious, there's no real satisfaction of earning money or upgrading stuff.


There are LOTS of other harem games out there, I wouldnt recommend this one not even if I'd get paid for it to be honest

Gonna be real with you here, this game is a damn good game.
It looks great, it feels great, it sounds great and the built in hints are very useful. Dialogue is well written and at times quite hilarious, its refreshing.
Also dont be fooled by the low build number, its got more game in it than majority of games with much higher build versions.
The MC suffers from mild case of harem protagonist syndrome, im hoping to see more development of the MC as he becomes more successful "hero".
There's some roughness in models and animations but Im sure those will get buffed out as game builds on.

One of few games that make me play from begining to the end. The progression is very nice and the story is very good, also the animations are very fluid. If you like a game where you can recruit your crew, this is the game.

The game follows a guy forced into the role of a "hero" after surviving a demon encounter, and being separated from his family in the process. Trying to rebuild his life, he will recruit lovely ladies for his guild, and form his personal harem.

Story:

The story is a high point of the game. The writing is very strong, with moments of humor, and emotion, held together by a very likable cast of characters. The girls have very different designs, personalities, backstories and struggles. Unlike most harem games, they don't just live in harmony over the love of the MC. They bicker, feel jealous, form friendships, making the whole thing feel more belivable.

Design:

From a design perspective, the game is a sandbox that goes hard on RPG elements. You need to send the girls on tasks, gather and sell resources to make money so you can buy things, earn affection points for the girls to move the story forward, and spend experience points to unlock features and other quality of life improvements. While it does help you feel like you're playing a "proper" game, it gets pretty grindy at times, so prepare to sink some time to get anything done. But for all the RPG elements, the lack of dialogue choices feel like a wasted opportunity.

Graphics:

As good as a Koikatsu game gets. Everything is very high quality and the UI is one of the best i've seen, full of details. The H-scenes are great, making very good use of camera angles and POV. You won't find much better on a Koikatsu engine.

Overall, its a game that will demand some time investment from the player, but rewards you with a good story, characters and high quality scenes. A must play for anyone into Koikatsu games

Extremely good. The characters are great, and I spent a solid chunk of time without any of de lewds without being bothered by that. The renders aren't amazing (I'm not losing my mind over how good they are), but they're not bad, and they're used well, so that doesn't affect my rating; I could easily rate this 5 stars with the current renders. More importantly, they all have personality (even if I'm half-convinced that two of them were liberally copied from a certain anime which I won't name out of fear of the retribution of weebs angered by my labeling it as such - I mean, Evie is so totally Neo - mute, pink hair, a bit freaky and violent [if in an exactly reversed way], uses signs to communicate with similar mannerisms). The characters aren't all amazing bastions of holy light, but they're also portrayed in a - well, I'd say "human" manner, but not all of them are

The story is shockingly consistent for something found on this site (no offense to any devs / writers who might happen to read, I've played both roles [on non-lewd projects lol] and I know it's not exactly trivial ). "Hey, uh, remember I mentioned a while back that there's a goblin outpost... you took care of that, right? Right?" I dunno, I just really like the flow here.

The one thing keeping me from giving this five stars is a subtle problem which you might not notice on a sufficiently powerful computer: the performance is downright atrocious. I don't mean that "it doesn't run good on my machine!!!," I mean that it doesn't run as well as it can by probably an order of magnitude and I'm pretty sure, from a backtrace, that it's using a ton of calls instead of jumps in the scripts which are inflating the call stack more and more the longer you play thus causing a perpetual growth in RAM usage (and a severe degradatation to performance on e.g. backtraces, where it has ludicrous elements to count). That said, performance is - for now - acceptable. It ran well on a pretty mid-range laptop (2GHz top speed), even if not as well as it should have. However, I can easily see this becoming a bigger problem as the game expands if nothing is done about it (technical debt, in other words). Of course, it's not as simple as just pressing a magic speedup button; it'd probably take consistent concerted effort and a solid block of time to fix, which would detract from the continued progress of the game itself. One solution is "just get a better computer," but a) that's a terrible answer unless you're talking to someone who is literally using a 686, and b) I have a better computer, but this has the nicest battery life, and is my go-to for lightweight work such as running (nearly every other) Ren'Py games. This is the first RenPy game I've used which consistently keeps the CPU at full load while it's doing approximately nothing; normally, I can hard-cap the CPU at ~1.3GHz (to further extend battery life) without a noticable performance impact.

One reason for this is that the mechanics of the game are more complex than most point-and-click Ren'Py games, which is a positive. The game is genuinely enjoyable, isn't a generic VN, and is definitely worth a try.

My one other annoyance is that there's almost no Ari content at present Overall, there's quite a lot in this for an early release, so I'm content to wait for content

Been following this game for a good while, every update brings more life to the story and world. Every change that's been made seems to have been done for the better. The story drags you in pretty quick and all the characters bring their own personalities to play as you progress. There's characters you'd start out finding annoying then there's Jimmy, Jimmy's the homie. This game is so good it doesn't even need the spank material to be enjoyable.

I really love the game, it has different gameplay and the atmosphere of the game is really good i love it very much i appreciate the effort of the creator of the game and thanks for making it, just wish that the next update will be very soon, i'm sooo exited of this game realy fun to play and very different from the other games here...

rly good game, the plot feels like watching an anime, mechanics are fun and you can upgrade skills to make it less grindy over time. You unlock more rooms for your harem and there is nice comedy and drama. Only downside for me isq the animation on this kind of anime like engine that feel quite repetitive and doesnt allow a lot of creativity.

Great Game / Story. The setting is superb and the characters actually make sense. The game is also loaded with limited events as well! So stoaked for all updates and I look forward to anything this developer makes.

The game is awesome. Good animation, grinding system is good enough, well written story and well built character. How ever if you're some kind of a retard alpha male who thinks male MC - the hero have to fight monsters as an RPG style, then you should reconsider palying this game.
The game itself deserve 5 stars, but Jimmy though, the sole existence of Jimmy makes the game god tier

Really fun, pretty girls and a lot of work behind it. Finished it in 2 days, waiting for more. Really hope to se some thresomes and footjobs soon. There are some bugs (guild board doesn't earn you money, and a fish in the market pond makes you crash), but it's still a pre-release version and it's quite big as it is.

Wait, this the prologue? Wow! This game is already longer and more complete than a lot of "complete" games.

I had never heard of Hero's Harem Guild until I went to Renpy.org to find out what Ren'Py was all about after playing dozens of games. I saw that HHG was a sponsor and looked it up - damn glad I did. The artwork is not my normal preference and was a little bit of a put-off at first but really grew on me as things progressed, especially with the expressiveness of the faces quality of a lot of the animations. I came to appreciate that the artwork fits the style of story being told. The girls are all appealing in their own way and have their own personalities.

The story took a little bit to reel me in, but when it did I really got into it and am looking forward to see where it takes our Hero the Girls, and Jimmy ( more about Jimmy in a minute)

The biggest downside for me is the "points grinding" required to build affection. Maybe I'm just bad at it, but several times it seemed like I spent many game-days just talking to and spending time with the girls to build affection points to progress. I'm not saying that they should be jumping into the MC's pants quicker, but I couldn't do anything but "spend time with her" over and over and over again jumping from girl to girl between fishing or mining. If you send them out adventuring to get money they aren't available to romance. It's not horrible, and just about the time you're getting frustrated something will happen with one of them, but it does get repetitive at times if you are not a super-gamer (which I am not) If I could I would give it 4-1/2 stars instead of 5 because of this, but wouldn't knock off a whole star.

MC is an idiot, but a good hearted, brave, loveable idiot. He's not stupid, he's only an idiot because he lead a sheltered life before, not because he's a limp wristed soy-boy like so many others. Even though he is scared, he will do whatever it takes to protect the ones he loves, and his town.

Jimmy........Jimmy get's his own write up. Most side characters never get mentioned in reviews. Jimmy has very little "screen time" but Jimmy steals the show. Jimmy rocks. HHG wouldn't be the same without Jimmy. Watching Jimmy eat ice cream wearing a helmet made my day. By the end of the game Jimmy deserves a cute girlfriend (probably in armor wearing a helmet)........and a puppy.

HHG is easily in my top 25% fav games, and it's still got more coming in the future.

Nov 15, 2020:

Just finished this game and it is amazing
The story is very interesting
And the models are perfect!
Can't wait for Ari scenes too
Definately gonna get the patreon next update
I realized how good all the girls look when I try to choose who has the best tits but couldn't even pick a top 5
One of the best games I've played and I've played the best of 'em!

A 5/5 Keep going ♥


July 20, 2024:
This game lost its way, the dev doesn't care anymore and since my previous review 4 years ago almost 0 updates and content.
If you read my previous review I said it was great but it has fallen so far from that its not even funny.

0/5

DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME OR WASTE YOUR MONEY ON IT!

This masterpiece has transcended what a game is and has turned into an experience. the art, writing, mechanics, man even something as simple as the audio. its all 10/10. The only gripe I do have is the lack of post-relationship interactions with the girls. There needs to be just a little bit of growth in the background interactions

Way more polished than I was expecting, as well as surprisingly good humor in my opinion, more Sunny please , the one thing I'd really like to see in the future is a bit more spotanious events in the game while going to objective and event playing out is fine, more scenes of the girls interacting with each other or the MC would I think reduce the monotony of doing the same thing everyday for x or y reward!

review based on "0.1.2 Pre-Release Fixed" version.
PRO:
- great UI(no, i mean GREAT)
- no w/t needed, cuz hints presents ingame(some wrong a bit, but icons on map show right info)
- good code, i found only 1 noncritical bug
- huge amount cg
- good game mechanics
NEUTRAL:
- very early stage development. looks like only 15-20% game done
CONS:
- good code, but scripts r heavy and thats cause some lags (posibly realtime workers do that)
- some clothing / bodyparts clipping
- some grinding presents, but no overdose here

CONCLUSION: aded to my watchlist, one of top games in this genre.

Come for the porn, stay for the hilarious characters. It helps that Komisari (the dev) tends to be an all-out swell person in the thread as well. 5 Stars, would recommend; should be among the featured games rotated at the top of the site.

This is an above-average game held back by a multitude of small tech, writing, and design issues. It's enjoyable, but nearly every piece of praise I have for it comes with a qualifier. Let's break it down:

Visuals: Basically the one area I don't have any complaints. Is it completely professional? No. But everything is functional and consistent enough. The bulk of it is Koikatsu renders, but it's done competently allows for a bunch of content to be had so I'm fine with it.

Storytelling: This is a mixed bag. I can understand what the writers are going for and it's interesting enough, but I have to mentally fill in a lot of gaps in the execution. Characters in particular make odd jumps in how they act towards the main character and have conflicts that may make sense in concept but immediately boil over instead of developing naturally. The editing is also pretty spotty with more than occasional bad grammar, odd turns of phrase, and non-sequiturs. It's not outright painful to read like plenty of other games on this site, but it does distract. If you look past the issues, you get a generally competent story with characters that are fairly simple, but manage to be charming and more than completely one note, some funny jokes, and some world-building that's interesting by virtue of characters just accepting it as the way of the world instead of feeding it to you in exposition dumps.

Gameplay: It's a go around and talk to all the girls with minor puzzles/grind type of game. Not amazing, but effective at giving context and putting you into the role of the main character... when it works. However, this game takes a while to get going. There's a prologue for the prologue, and then you hit a big grind wall where you have to fish for an inordinate amount of time to get to the point where you have enough money earning ability/skills to progress at a reasonable rate. And most of the "skills" are basic features that you should just be given from the start/for free as appropriate like fast travel to your room, or seeing where the girls are on the map, or being able to pick apples. Once you get through that grind wall, the gameplay heads into the territory of generally decent, but I have to wonder why it was there in the first place.

Tech: This is where I whine. The game isn't buggy so much as horribly SLOW, both in menus and in scenes. There are just constant stutters everywhere I don't get with any other Renpy game, including ones with large amounts of high-res rendered assets like this. The skip function works generally smoothly though, so does every scene just have dozens of manual hard stops? Whatever it is, it's a constant annoyance that really drags the experience down.

Well, that was an impressive waste of 9GB of space.

So after reading all the posts about how this game is amaizing and seeing whooping 9k on patreon i probably overhypped myself for something amaizing. Little did i knew that this game is decently made. And this is the best praise i can give to it in summary.

I'll start from saying that as i said above it is very well made for EroGame on the patreon. For what it worth it has a lot of content, and it's content works well. There no moment while i were playing this game my game broke, or felt like its majorly missing something. It feels like an amature game, but well made amature game. UI designed nicely. Cool effect like paralax scrolling on character profile, is rare to see in games like this. The idea of the game feels like there is a lot of potential there. And its already has a lot of content in the game...

I'll give the creator that he did created a nice models in the character creator. It does have a lot of good written moments. Jimmy is just adorable goof. And some scenes are geniunely charming. The main girl, and mute girl is just soo much charm it is amaizing. The initial expression about the lady(sorry bad with names) was such a good starting point, but ended too quickly. Kinda robbing the point of being more of an achivement. You can jump from just stepping on the main character, to swimming with him in Jacuzzi in like 4 hours. Minigames lacks any kind of depth so they feels like a busy work, and exist to just waste your time. And progression system exist just to annoy you for the first 2 hours, to than be forgotten, because you unlocked everything. So without any kind of fun in the minigame, it just a busy work to acquire enough money to progress the game.

Of course usual excuse can be said that it just a version 0.1.2 or wtv. I agree, problems like boring minigames, lack of depth of the currently present content can be fixed by patches.

i would give it more than 5 star if i could.

it would be nice if the cheats option doesn't give you straight 100 gold coin, i like the grinding part but taking away most minigame mechanic just for using cheats once isn't ideal.