Ren'Py - Jen's Dilemma [Ch. 3 v8.0 Public] [SerialNumberComics]

What a mess. I figured I'd give it a shot despite the bad rating it had and oh boy was that a bad idea. Everything everyone has ever said about this game is true, the stars don't lie!

It's not just that it's a grind, if that was the only issue that would be fine. The points don't matter at all, they only serve to fuck you the player. Stats degrade over time and having too many points or too few locks you out of various scenes.

I can't in good faith recommend this to anyone unless it gets a serious overhaul or a benevolent walkthrough mod maker decides to unravel whatever this is.

I don't like hitting a dead cat, and there's not much to talk about either, practically every flaw in the game and the developer has been said over and over again.
I see some 5 star ratings and wonder if they were bought as it totally goes against most of the ratings and comments on the thread.
Anyway:
History: Same thing as other games, that is, it does not exist. Just one hell of a grind, just so it can be called a game.
Graphics: A total mess, some good, some terrible (those are more and more present).
Gameplay: Think of bad gameplay, and now multiply it by 10 (to be generous).
Fun: Doesn't exist, just frustration.
It's not even worth dwelling on too much, the game sucks in every way.

wonder why the dev keeps doing extreme sandbox games which cannot be played without a walkthrough which is too hard, this game corruption is good if they didn't make it too long to get the scenes this makes the game not worth playing.

I can only wonder about the low ratings given to this gem of a game...

Maybe people don`t enjoy this kind of "puzzle" game, where you actually have to think a bit before progressing and "try and error" to progress further.

Speaking for myself this kind of game is a very rare gem in my eyes. I love slow progress, with lots of corruption steps and a huge buildup.

This game is not fast food, no for me it ages well over time, and I always find myself coming back to the wonderful art and style of it.

Exceptional.

Absolutely horrible grindfest. Stay away, unless you have nothing else to do for a week or two. Makes me wonder what kind of person dev is to make a game this grindy. Only reason I tried it was because I liked the theme and renders looked decent.
Not recommended at all.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Dev just keeps making the same exact game over and over lmao. This dude must live in his own world. If this guy would just listen to some feedback and make his games enjoyable he would probably have 2k patrons. Multiple games with millions of views and 200 patrons. Something's not adding up here pal.

Game is atrocious, it's literally foot of the mountain repackaged. Absolute dogshit game lmao.

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.

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 average rating of just 1.5. That's one of the lowest ratings on F95, and it'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. You've probably heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. So basically, you have to be insane to play this 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 it looks like there are bugs, too]
• If save games ever get break, players will have to grind for dozens of hours to recover, and this is a real possibility since some content has been soft-locked in past updates.

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 there's a market for them, and I guess the dev's 200 or so patrons are proof of it, but just look at the review ratings and comments. That's proves very few players actually like this type of gameplay. I know that I want entertainment, but 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.