Review for Into the Nyx v0.29R1:
Overall: 4/5 - This is one of the better games on F95, but it took a while to get to this point. It's still a bit light on content, but it's worth downloading and playing.
Story: 3.5/5 - The MC is on a spaceship full of women and he is possibly the last fertile human male in the universe. It seems like a perfect setup for a harem porn game, and it is, but I've already played 2 games with very similar stories, so it's not very original.
Writing: 4/5 - The writing is generally very good. It even has style which is rare for games here. However, there are some really dumb errors. There are homophonic errors like writing "their" instead of "they're", "soar" instead of "sore", etc. Of course, there are obvious typos, too. The author is trying to write in a more colloquial style, which isn't easy to do correctly, and he's obviously not very experienced at it, but it's still pretty good.
Renders: 4/5 - The render quality is excellent. The female models are excellent, and I really like the details of the female facial features. However, I think the MC's face is ugly and his hairstyle is retarded. He looks like a sleazy white used car salesman crossed with a Korean game show host. Thankfully, the MC isn't pictured in most renders. v0.29 ended with the MC getting a haircut, but the MC wasn't shown afterward, so maybe that part will improve. The backgrounds tend to have unnatural glossy reflections and sometimes they are blurred inconsistently.
Animations: 5/5 - There aren't many animations, yet, but the few that exist are smooth and natural-looking.
Sound: 4/5 - The background music is decent if you turn it down to below half volume. The sound effects are OK, too, but there's not a lot of them outside of the UI.
Gameplay: 3/5 - I'm generally not a fan of sandbox games because so few of them end up being implemented and executed well. This game doesn't look like it will be an exception. The UI has a nice look to it and the controls are easy to use. However, the controls have duplicate functions (hints in upper left corner and hints along the right side) that can be simplified, and some things are destined to never be used, such as the "database". Clicking the octagons that then expand to circles outside of the UI area seems like an afterthought. There's not much going on anywhere in the sandbox, which is boring. On top of that, all but 1 or 2 tasks/quests are always blocked, meaning that the actual story so far is linear, which makes the sandbox pointless. The tractor beam minigames were too simplistic, to the point they're not really even games and I'm not sure why they exist. The UI icons for the rooms aren't very distinguishable. E.g., it's hard to tell the difference between the Medbay and the computer room. The game displays the name of the room when you hover over the icon with the mouse, but it displays on the opposite side of the screen instead of right next to the icon.
Amount of content: 2/5 - For a game with an initial release 15 months ago with development likely starting a few months before that, the quantity of content is really low. The last update doubled the number of renders in the game, but it took 6 months and there still wasn't much content. The quantity of content is so low that, conservatively, it'll take 10 years to complete the game at the current pace. I keep hoping the pace will increase, but the 0.29 update took almost 3 months and there are just two new scenes that took less than 5 minutes to play.
Quality of lewd content: 3/5 - As of now, there are 5 lewd scenes. Three scenes are handjob/blowjob disguised as being medically necessary to extract semen from the MC, and that's a fun concept, but not really all that hot. There's 1 thighjob that is kind of weak, with little build-up. There's one vaginal sex scene from the 0.25 update that's pretty good, but not outstanding.
Bugs: 3/5 - I hit a couple in the 0.25 version that I didn't experience before. When you use the tablet to study, if you select a subject where you've already reached some temporary cap, the game might tell you that it'll be available in a later update, or it might just go back to the previous screen. Also, the UI buttons behind the tablet are still active and they will highlight and show text even though you can't see them. I somehow got into a mode where the screen to load save games was bugged. Selecting the page number for saves would load a game instead of changing the page, and also when loading a game it would show one or two renders that were from a different save or something.
Some WTFs:
All of the girls' clothes are slutty-looking and don't make sense as attire for their duties on the spaceship.
In the very first lewd scene where the MC gets a handjob from Silver (the doctor), her clothes change color between renders.
The first time the MC meets Sara, she says "Who are you?" even though she knows the MC is the only man on the ship and she said she talked to the doctor about the MC the night before.
The game UI doesn't show where some crew members are sometimes, but the MC has a device that is supposed to tell him.
Sometimes, you can go to a place that would trigger an event if the crew member was there, and the event triggers, even though the crew member is not there. This might be a UI bug related to the previous WTF.
There are scenes where the crew didn't know exactly what happened to the Urania, then they even had limited communication with it, and one point it was referred to as "destroyed", but nobody actually knew that until several days later.
The captain and MC theorize that a rodent is taking food simply because food is missing, but there's no evidence like feces or things that are chewed.
