Ren'Py - Jen's Dilemma [Ch. 3 v6.0 Public] [SerialNumberComics]

Grinds are ok if there is a path - not so here. You have no idea what to do to progress - the help is useless. Really wanted to like this, nice grahics, stats and open play / sandbox which I like. However, as it is the game is just too awful and frustrating. If there was some good basic in game hints I would come back to it, but as it is please do not waste your time.

Don't normally leave reviews, but this is....shockingly bad...normally like Ren'Py games like this (mc gets all the girls) and also like sandbox games but this one is just a grind fest.
The mc is a loser, the renders are not very good, there is too much unnecessary grind, and nothing seems to differentiate from the last game, last time I was a supporter for FOTM but this seems like he rehashed the models, gameplay mechanics and most of the (poorly written) story to keep getting paid for minimal work.

GRINDTASTIC! You spend most of your time grinding for something that gives little return. Expect to spend DAYS in game grinding for one night of "fun" (if you can call it that). At last look, the walkthrough was lacking in any real detail, just a follow me grind. About the only thing you can do without much grind is spying (peeking).

My first Review,

Gameversion is the newest 0.19V.


After creating more than 4 Games, the Dev didnt learn anything new about Gameplay and Renders. You can see he is just reusing the Models, and the "Story" is mostly not there.

Normally i really like Grindy Games, but this Game has the Chance to softlock you with certain Characters if you progress too fast and lose the Option to get Relationpoints with the Landlady/Mom. E.g (Footrub)
Sadly at some Point you are just holding the Skip Button because you need a certain Day or Time to progress in a certain Point which with bad luck is blocked because the Points decrease over Time, in my opinion, unfair Ratio.

So its really annoying that you have to Mod the Files or Edit the Savegame just to get the Chance, to see the next "Step" from the Scene.

Good thing about this Game, are the above average Renders/Animations.
But thats it.

The game has a great potential, but just like previous games made by the developer, the way you're supposed to progress the story is horrible.
You need to grind stats to unlock new scenes and the hints are so hard to reach and ambiguous in their explanations.

If the grind was removed and a competent hint/walkthrough menu was created, my rating would instantly jump to 4 stars.

I decided to Quit on it.
Try it with cheat with mod with some comments here and no1 seems to provide any guide or walkthrough.

Game is pain in the ass .

U need billion relation points to trigger just one shitty scene meanwhile to earn those u grind over and over like moron , same fucking time same scenes same routine or places - a simple '' DEFINITION OF INSANITY '' !!

NONE DEVELOPER and I will repeat NONE DEV EVER SHOULD USE THIS WAY FOR GAME PLAY, inside of their games , because this is fucking porn game not an grinding FEST to nowhere. Me personally I dont have time to waste on grind some of us have job to do too. I dont like too much fast pace games but this is bullshit too slow too much grind too many repetitive scenes THAT U MUST DO TO PROGRESS FURTHER !! It just isnt worth it.

I really liked models and graphic but it is useless because models and story are easily 4 or even 5 stars but gameplay killed overall rating to fucking ZERO.

2 STARS is best Ive got or I can but, naaah... Ignore 4Life

Update for Jen's Dilemma Ch3 v6.0 Public:

I keep waiting for somebody to create walkthrough or walkthrough mod, or a cheat mod or a gallery mod. The fact that still none exists tells me that it's just not worthwhile, either because of the game's content quality/quantity or game's design.

Review for Jen's Dilemma v18:

Summary: At this time, the game has an overall rating of 1.8. That's generous. You've seen all of those teaser preview images in the OP? Well, you're not going to see them for a long time and when (or if) you finally do, you're going to be too pissed off to enjoy them. Save yourself a lot of time and frustration and avoid this garbage game.

Story: 2/5 - Kind of a below-average incest story.

Originality: 2/5 - Not really anything new here, except maybe one of the lamest premises to a story you've ever seen.

Renders: 4/5 - The renders are good and the models are good.

Gameplay: 0/5 - This is one of the worst sandboxes I've ever played. It's tedious, non-intuitive and buggy. Examples:

• Using the phone to access the quest log. You have to go to the "internet" and then when you're done, you can only click "return" and it closes the phone, so if you want to check on other quests, you open the phone, the internet, and the quest... again.
• The UI shows which characters are in which rooms, but frequently, when you go to those rooms, they're empty.
• The phone is frequently not available.
• Using the phone from anywhere always takes the MC back to his room. WTF?
• The game doesn't always tell you when you gain or lose relationship points, and sometimes, you gain or lose them for no apparent reason. [Edit: it appears as though relationship points decay with time, which of course, adds more grind, but I think there's more to it.]

On top of being tedious and buggy, the gameplay is a frustrating whack-a-mole experience. It's grindy as hell and mostly without any feedback to the player. You grind for a week or two of in-game time and then get one render or one line of dialogue that's different, then it's back to grinding with the same old renders and dialogue for another week or two. It's not fun. It's a boring snooze-fest. There are enough games like this out there that developers seem to feel that players like them, and I guess the dev's 200 or so patrons prove it, but just look at the review ratings and comments. There's real evidence that very few players actually like this type of gameplay. I want entertainment and this game is just a mindless time-waster. I have to applaud the dev for his conviction, though. He's obviously not doing it for the money.

The in game walkthrough is outright wrong most of the time, or so vague that it is completely unhelpful. On other games, that might not be a problem. But on this one, you have to grind for hours doing the same things over and over until finally something changes. It isn't ever clear what part of the routine caused the change though, so you can't skip any part of the routine. And god help you if you accidentally left out or did something wrong in that grind, because you could go for hours accomplishing NOTHING and not even realize it.

An example of an entry in the in game WT that is completely unhelpful is this one that says "Visit the hall @ 18:00, have the talk with Elaine about renting your room." First off, there is no hall. The only rooms are the living room, Jenny's room, Nadia's room, the MC's room, and the bathroom. I have tried all of them at 18:00, and nothing happens. I have even tried going to the world map at 18:00 and still nothing. So maybe I have to go to one of these on a certain day of the week? I have no clue. I don't even know if I have met the prerequisites to trigger this event. Maybe I have to do it in a certain room on a certain day 5 times (this game will do shit like that.) And even then, maybe some stat is not high enough to have started the chain needed to trigger the event, so I'll need to get one of the stats (which one is a mystery, so it is more likely all of them) higher and then do all of that over again.

I have never seen a game as poorly explained as this one. My advice is to just not play it. If you are about to play it for the first time, just keep in mind that you will probably get a few hours in, get super lost, and come here for answers. You will not find the answers that you are looking for. All you will find is that you have wasted hours of your time.

Here's another game by this Dev, unfortunately the creator doesn't learn from his mistakes but he keeps repeating them. I suspect that his new game will contain the same bugs as this game and the previous ones. The worst part is that his supporters convince him on this forum that this game is great. Same as his patron supports.

Graphics 8/10
The characters look nice especially the character of Melinda

The plot of 4+/10 - nothing I haven't seen in other games.

There are characters from the previous game but they don't remember much of the person from the previous game

Characters 9/10

There are characters from the previous game

Election 7/10
There is a lot , But I don't know if something can be avoided or if something is forced by the game, because I just haven't gotten there yet.

Sex scenes 7/10
They're hot

Now let's get to the negative stuff

Sandbox 2/10
the worst sandbox I've ever played, not counting other games by this dev

no quest log 1/10

You don't know what to do, you play by trial and error



Endless grind 1/10

To move on, you need to have the right relationship points with the characters, otherwise you won't get new scenes, and when you do, they are cut off and then again a boring grind to get another scene and so on. In addition, the creator came up with a great idea that you will lose relationship points with characters every day, seriously?

game mechanics 2/10

Here are hidden statistics and activities in the game, e.g. exercises. But the game will never tell you that, you have to guess it yourself.

The game seems good at first, but the further you go in the game, the worse it gets. You don't know what to do, endlessly boring grind to get a cut scene will kill you, and then you skip dialogues hoping to discover something new in the game. And so on indefinitely. If you want, you can try. But I do not recommend it, because so far I have not gathered strength to return to another game by this developer.

This game sucks.

Listen up, porn games come with a certain conceit- that is to say, they should have a certain level of ease of accessibility built into them. When a smutty game ends up being incredibly obtuse to play on a basic level, where the critical path to progress the game is obfuscated and hidden, that is evidence of either incompetence or delusions of grandeur. If it's the former, learn some basics. If it's the latter, you gotta humble yourself. You're making wank-material, not The Sistine Chapel.

Here, we have some basic plot premise, where a dad is a jerk and his wife takes their kids and hides out for a bit. It's a contrivance, and fine. Who cares? Anyway, the problem comes with the triggers for events to occur not being linked to things a player can really piece together. Why? Nobody knows. You'll end up repeating scenes literally dozens of times because the author hasn't heard of a gallery feature where once a scene plays, you shunt it off the critical path and into the accessible archive, so it doesn't clutter the player's attention.

Don't play this game. Any tittilation or immersion is ruined by over-exposure to the same damn scenes. You'll be holding down the SKIP button, trying to brute force your way to stumble upon forward progress. The author should just make a Visual Novel that doesn't have choices, because basic sandbox gameplay is way above their capacity or interest.

Let's start from the positives - the content itself is good.
The female character models look nice and the story, (if you find a way to follow it) although not groundbreaking in any way, is beliveable/engaging enough (more than the collection of random sex encounters having no impact on the characters).

As for the nitpicks: renders are not of the highest quality, as some of the games on this site might have accustomed us to. For me at least, that is not the issue at least if the story and especially the relationship dynamic between the main characters is engaging.

And now for the issues... The game is basically unplayable beyound some initial content. I see other people in the reviews ascribing it to the game being "grindy", and yes, it is, but that is not what makes it so. The problem is that ther is no way to tell what conditions are required to trigger the new content or even what content there is. You could be doing the same events for hours getting the relationship status points up way higher than they need to be, but you have no way to tell if they are high enough, or do you need to be in a specific place on a specific day on a specific hour and choose a specific hour. So what you end up doing is going from room to room and skipping what appears to be the same dialog you've seen dozen of times not even noticing that somehow you stumbled into the specific trigger that changed last line of dialog in a sequence you've seen hundred of times already. And to add insult to injury, some of the options have negative effect on the stats making the "trying all the options until something clicks" strategy not work.

Why do I give it 3 stars if I say it's unplayable? It's because I found a way to play, not the game, but the content by decompiling the scripts and comparing them with git to the previous version, to see what is the new content and how to trigger it.

I like the rendering and design of the character, and the plot is quite interesting. but it's super grindy, you have to repeat 10-20 same scenes to get another. also to find the scene is quite hard forcing you to use a walkthrough. My suggestion, if you want to play it just play with cheats, it makes the game so much more bearable.

V. 16
One of the grindiest ever games!

The models are really gorgeous and despite the fugly MC I was motivated to get some lewd scenes. Yet that was a mistake. I had to repeat same scenes at least 20 times to increase corruption than 20 more times to increase submission and then all I've got was kiss on the cheek.

The stupidest grind I've ever seen!

Please change the grind to 3-5 else this game is utter garbage - complete waste of time.

When I saw the artwork, I really thought this was going to be a great game. Well .... the artwork is very good throughout all the hours I played, but the grind is probably the worst I've ever experienced in a game. It seems to be set up to force you to try every option, since the outcomes change for each option as you try them again.

BTW, I would have given this one star if the CG work wasn't so good.

If you hate grind, don't even try this game. You will hate it.

review based on v16 version
remember, this review writen by sanbox and grind fan
PRO:
- cg
CONS:
- "great" sandbox in 5 locations... mby better name game "under house arest" or "grounded"?
- ui... ui takes 30-40% of display- its ridiculous , cuz game have only 5 locations, also ui(phone, mc room menu etc) style acceptable for games from 2017-2018
- dev, check Hour == 21 state- u can only visit living room othervise u ll go to sleep... also visiting some location cause only Hour+=1 w/o any action...
- grind... sry, i mean OVERGRIND! im actualy like grinding, but this part of game mechanic is insane- as example: basic iteraction give +1/+2 relationship (mrel/srel), and EVERY 2 days each of this stats ll be decreased by 5... dev, r ,u ok?! ohhh, i almost forgot- for some iteraction u must have 200/300/400/450 stats... *** that
- grind/content ratio. worst ratio I've ever seen

if u like hours grind w/o any noticable progression in 5 location- it ur game. game blacklisted for me.

After 5 hours of play, almost zero content and a bunch of bugs. And in the end, the bug killed the whole game. If you are a lucky person and are willing to spend a lot of time looking for the logic of action in this game, then you can play. And so the game is highly discouraged, it is not worth the time spent.

Impressive Perfect Amazing

3 Words To Summarize It All

* Them Girls Is Thicc
* No instant sluts ( Look at your dick and just go crazy type )
* Amazing how older game chracters like mom from Tangled Up is Here She is something i really love.
* Good Quality Renders and scenes that are more realistic
* Player is Guided in every scene what to do no need for walkthrough

Version: v15

Review:
It could be a good game but it seems that this dev never learns. All your games were like this, with a extreme grind which always makes the gameplay annoying to play. I really can't like sandbox anymore because most games are exactly like that, little content and a lot of grind. Disappointing, it could have been a decent game but it turned out to be boring just like all its previous games.

History:
There is no fixed plot that makes for a constructive narrative. The game is linked to other of your previous games but it's all poorly explained. For example, the MC's name by default is Ivan but Melinda a FOTM character calls the MC for Daniel. Anyway, the game has a poor story it doesn't make you feel like you are corrupting, everything revolves around a boring grind.

Gameplay:
I've played a lot of worse sandbox games and this one ranks among the worst. Everything is very disorganized and events are not followed up. The progression is boring and bad that makes you keep repeating the same scene over and over as if you were in an infinite loop. Tasks are arduous and again disorganized. You need to grind all the time to increase the stats and there are other stats that not even the dev had the prowess to tell the player what that is for (study, exercise) so basically you play it to try to understand and end up spending more than your time going nowhere. There task info but it doesn't seem to work, because even trying to follow exactly what the game offered you things don't seem to work. You need to grind, grind a lot until you get to the point where you get an X number from some stat (domain, corruption, relationship). Being sincere the sandbox mechanics of this game are bad, terrible and poor (interactions, UI).

Graphics & Sexual Content:
It's maybe the only decent thing about this game are the renders, female character models, some sex scenes and animations. It is notable to notice that not all scenes have good qualities, some renders lack sharpness, saturation, low quality; anyway, there must be an image program that gives an improvement maybe the dev could try to learn. As for the sex scenes, some are good and animations too.

Why I did gave 1 star?
I've played many sandbox games and this game is among the worst because of its gameplay. A game with almost 3gb and that doesn't have much to offer you is disappointing. I've played games with little size and with decent quality and animations and that turned out to be good, however in Jen's Dilemma everything is the opposite. The gameplay is torture and the worst thing is that this gameplay has been applied to all the dev games. I don't mean to belittle the dev, but it's also weird and it doesn't make sense to apply the same method that EVERYONE finds horrible. Sincerely, this game did everything to go wrong and it did, because the lack of organization, info, events aligned made things go wrong. The game's story doesn't help, it's an incest game, you don't feel that mood, it's not something you feel is happening, but something like a flash. Confused wouldn't be the word for me to describe it, but unwilling, impetus from the dev. Anyway, new renders of scenes are being added but the focus that was to improve the gameplay is getting further and further away. You gets stuck in the gameplay without having any information not even a walkthrough, so total waste of time.
Here is a list of cheats in case you are going to try it, I don't recommend this game.

How to get 200 characters? - as it's not worth more than that.

The renders are kind of decent, but that's all.
I always think it can't be worse than some games before, but there's always a game which is on top.
The grind over here is hillarous and not even rewarding at all.
You don't know where you are at your stats as all are hidden. I dived into the code...
... and no - really no ..... i don't do THAT grind for nothing

I thought the dev might have learnt something after people told him his last abomination of a game was too grindy but this, this is worse.

Only 2 words came to mind while I was "playing" this and those are fucking boring. A game full of sex scenes with some quite decent looking character models and I was bored.

Here's why.

Story is practically none existant. You spend most of your time grinding either relationship, corruption or whatever point for that monotonous grind to be broken up by a couple of minutes of scene then grind it out again.

You do the same shit over and over and over again waiting for something to happen with characters that aren't even likeable in any way.

It's just so fucking boring.