Ren'Py - Hollow Memories [v0.10] [Huli]

Hollow Memories is the next iteration in what has become a formula for the developer, Huli. You're in a house with various locations, and you do something to accumulate points that you can spend to unlock more sex scenes.

The main downside of this game is the "something" that unlocks sex scenes is a spooky spot-the-difference game. There's two game modes, but they're basically the same. Maybe my brain is broken, but I was unable to reliably beat this on the first mode, the second was better but it's still tedious.

You have to beat the minigame a LOT to get enough points to unlock all the stuff. Like, maybe 50 times? 100? After the first two or three times it's just not fun, especially when you lose and get nothing but the feeling that you're wasting your time here on earth. You can cheese it with the save/load system, but why should you have to? You could of course just hack yourself a bunch of points, but then it makes the game feel even more like an animation gallery instead of a game.

The animation on the sex scenes is unique and fun, but due to the mechanical nature of the unlocking can feel repetitive. Since they're all variations on "fucking a ghost in some room of the house", there's no buildup, just bang bang bang.

Two incredibly fixable irritating things about the game:
* Every sex scene gives a pointless confirmation dialog when you click to exit. Why? Worse case, you didn't mean to click 'cancel' but you can just watch the scene again tomorrow. Average case, you have to click an extra time for no reason.
* I wish the rooms in the house were just presented as a menu instead of having to click from door to door, and that it was immediately obvious which rooms had people in it for a given hour.

Overall, the bad minigame makes this a three star experience, but I give an extra star to any game where I can fuck a ghost.

Good steady progress and something different for some of the most used tags in this site supernatural. Hopefully it can progress to the point that you can happily be with the ghoast and add more supernatural folk tale like a certain tall lady

solid art, i like the over exaggerated proportions on the two girls. but could have made them look a little more unique from eachother. scenes are alright. theyre kind of short but get a little longer the further you get.

this game just suffers from the same problem as the rest of the devs games. overly grindy but lacks the feeling of gradually progressing with the girls. they just feel like sluts that immediately want to do lewd stuff. theres reasoning for why theyre like that but it doesnt seem too well thought out or satisfying enough for me.

the grind is just annoying. i mostly spammed the anomaly mini game for points. it sucks at first until u memorize the anomaly spots but its just tedious and mind numbing. probably gets less tedious with upgrades but i dont want to grind enough to find out.

overall, the devs games are fun for the first like 30%-40% of the game then the lack of gradual progression, poor dialogue, no form of corruption end up making the game feel too stale and not enticing to complete.

i love a lot of the ideas this dev has and will still gladly try their games in the future. wanted to give it 3 stars but feel like a lot of my gripes are subjective

An early build review of this game. It has some promise but temper expectations for now.

Reviewing as of 0.06

Pros:

• Feet kink activated
• A skill tree to unlock for each girl, just like in previous games
• There's minigames to play
• The map is easy to navigate
• Around 1 hour to complete as of now

Cons:

• No sex yet, just foreplay
• No gallery but it isn't needed yet
• There's only one minigame worth playing
• The story is incredibly easy to unlock, it should be more expensive to unlock

Conclusion:

I'd download and try this one out. There's enough content in the game right now that should tell you if you'd like this game or not. The story is expanding and starting to get good now.

I've always enjoyed the art used for this creators games. The grind in this game though is going to be crazy and that really takes aways from the enjoyment.

Hopefully by the time it hits a few updates that gets worked out, but still really promising right now.

Not much content as it is, but the quality of the content is good.
Would give it 5 stars but I feel like the minigame gets repetitive quickly and it'll feel too grindy in the long run, so if you use a save editor you're dandy