VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Kingdom of Velvet Сhains [v1.0] [Amarta Tales]

Initially, I was impressed by the sample renders and barely read through the premise. I like to go in somewhat blind. I read a few reviews, but decided against reading too many. What I gathered from what I read, the mini-games were a huge part of the negative experience. So I decided to turn them off for my playthrough. And...

Yes. The renders are absolutely gorgeous. Truly high quality. The voice work is a nice touch, but falls short imo. The majority of the girls are okay, except for the very obvious drop in quality of the recording for one girl. Their acting is passable. The voice work for the guys however... yikes. I'm guessing they did their best, and kudos. It might be a fault with the voice directing here, but it's so monotone and eerie. Not believable for even a second.

The structure with chapters is... a choice. What I'm having most issue with is the fact that the premise of the plot (in the developer's notes) is coherent and thought-out, in written text. But you don't get that from playing this. You sort-of get the gist of it, but it's more like glancing through a manuscript and not experiencing the adaption of the story.

I'm just... really disappointed I guess? I can see the potential for a good game, but it would require a complete rework and we all know that's not going to happen.

Okay, I hate to do this but I feel it is necessary to stop other developers from making the same mistake. Mini games are fine, if you can skip them and if they are pertinent to a reward or trial that facilitates a win of some kind. These mini games simple allowed the story to continue which is so distracting and really discouraged any immersion. Most of these mini games were skippable after a very long term of time (and many failed attempts at solving some of the more idiotic ones).

The main problem I have was that even when characters were in the middle of important conversations or even in the middle of an H scene, the mini games keep popping up foiling any sense of continuality. Imagine this, you are reading along a wonderfully created render with stunning models. She is dressed very scantily and you click to continue expecting her to disrobe but no, the screen freezes because you have to click a tiny lit box on her hand first. The build up of her glorious nudity is slowed because after you click her hand the first time, she takes a step and the screen freezes again. Now you have to click her other hand. It was so infuriating.

The visuals and the models are top notch, some of the most beautiful LIs I have ever seen but the H scenes and story are clogged with meaningless clicks, tracing mini games, bars that you have to click on and drag up otherwise the H scene will not continue. How the dev thought this would be entertaining is beyond me. Do yourself a favor, Dev. Please stay away from ANY mini games in your future endeavors.

The storyline which was disjointed and ruined by the clogged minigames in EVERY scene. I am not exaggerating and neither are the other reviewers. When I first read the reviews, I thought, "How bad could it really be?"

Answer: very bad, hellish, brutal, infuriating and your worst nightmare! Stay away if you value your sanity!

I didn't rate it a one star because, as I previously stated, the models and visuals were exceptional. Unfortunately, they were not enough to save this frustrating steaming pile of dog poo... I quit after about fifteen minutes of gameplay because I felt it became a chore to play this VN...

The graphics are nice, the interaction is only mini-games ... well ... you cannot have everything. It is in fact some sort of "place these objects at the places where they belong". Sometimes it's easy, sometimes you have to guess, because there might be different possibilities. Especially in chapter 2 right in the beginning. There do not seem to be any real choices, so it's only short stories here. I think I mainly rated the graphics.

Amazing renders.
So-so story(as for me) in the okay setting.

What spoils it all is the unavailability to move on with the story without stopping for annoying sliders and clicks every 5 freaking seconds.

If the devs or modders, could add some a turn off options in the setting, this game would only win. But for now, alas.

The renders genuinely are good, but the "gameplay" is so unrewarding, obnoxious, and frustrating that the game is essentially unplayable.

I'm not kidding; I've played a lot of really bad video games in my life, but this might be the worst. The entire design philosophy is misguided. If it were a simple VN it would be significantly better. I don't know if there are any choices in the game; I didn't get any and I played for 15-ish minutes.

The puzzles aren't even good. They have no rhyme nor reason, they offer zero satisfaction. You basically just randomly place items around the screen until you find the arbitrary configuration that satisfies the complete condition. Worse than that, it doesn't immediately lock in, you need to wait a brief moment for a fade out, during which you can still move an item. That means if you're clicking fast to try to get things to move on and you click in the wrong spot you can undo part of your progress.

It seems like the game was intentionally designed to be annoying. 0/10 I do not recommend this. Dev, if you just remove all the "puzzles" and arbitrary clicking and make it a basic VN you'd still not get 5 stars, but you'd at least have something playable. As it currently is I can't even recommend trying it as a free download, let alone something worth paying for.

The renders are good and the story is okay. I'd have given this game a higher score but honestly, I couldn't go past the 3rd chapter. Not that the 3rd chapter was particularly bad, it was just the point at which I lost my patience.

A lot of people are complaining about the puzzles, and yeah, they're accurate. But the puzzles can be turned off. What really grated my gears is the need to click on somewhere on the screen every fourth image or so. Do you know how in some VNs, when a character goes "Let me grab my keys" and then you have to click on the keys for the scene to progress? That's never good game design, it's not challenging enough to feel satisfying to accomplishing and ultimately it's just annoying busywork. But most games will have the decency to limit that to a scene or two here and there. Not this game. You are periodically prompted too click on random spots of the screen for no reason at all, which not only disrupts the flow of the game but also make it extremely annoying skip read text AND to play one handed, which honestly should be a consideration in this type of game.

I usually don't review games, but Holy SHit, I had to review this one because of the sheer amount of negativity in the reviews.

Visuals: This game was an absolute treat for the eyes, very, very amazing renders, beautiful characters, and very hot scenes. Everything about the characters was very detailed, from hair, clothing, accessories, the backgrounds, and the models from head to their feet were amazing. 10/10

Story: It's building up and seems like your generic story to facilitate porn, but it still had me hooked, and there is an FMC, so that random self-insert and disappearance of our own player-character was a mystery of its own, so yeah, waiting for that reveal in the next one as well. 10/10(for a porn game that made me interestred in the characters and the world)

Puzles: So lets come to the puzzles, damn does everyone cry about them, did they break the flow, sure sometimes, but usually in the start of the scene, and when it comes around the middle of the scene you just have to trace the characters themselves, and weirdly that had me even more invested in appreciating their bodies so 7/10, could be alot worse. Seriously, I don't get the crybabies who couldn't figure out puzzles that were so easy and didnt intrude on the experience.

Voice Acting: The voice acting was actually pretty good, there is only one character that really breaks the immersion for me and that the warrior elf, otherwise all of the voice acting were pretty good. 8/10

PLEASE TRY THE GAME DONT GO ON THE REVIEWS

would have gotten 4 stars but even though this says it is complete, it actually is not as the story just abruptly ends.

the mini games are simple enough. you can skip some of them and i think all if u hit the game controller at the start. bug in the 2nd mini game where you cant put the clothes in the right area even though it's the right area. annoying part where u have to click the mouse to make the circle grow larger but it is impossible to click fast enough. the solution is to press both enter keys on your keyboard together quickly

there is no animation but the high quality of the images makes up for it. Especially since depth of field is used.

horrible user experience, i don't like having to click a 10 by 10 pixel square every image. This is not a visual novel in that case, its a game. Art looks good however, that's a bit too bad you chosed this direction with your game but i guess some people will like it

This is bad.

On the surface, it looks like a game that could work quite well. It's aesthetics at first glance would have you think someone put a lot of effort into this game.

You're liberated from that impression quite quickly.
What starts as promising visual story telling with optional atmospheric scene interactions (you can click on objects and see an effect or an additional bit of text) soon reveals itself as a shallow, short, busywork mini-game story without any meat to it:

A destitute woman goes into a tavern, the tavern keeper uses her misfortune to get her to have sex with him for food.
Why should I find that sexy? I have no connection to the tavern keeper or the woman. There's no reason to be interested in what they're doing. Nor is there any story beyond that present. The game just throws two characters at you without any reason to be interested in these generic characters and then proceeds to a sex scene that's no where close to sexy.

Instead, you meet the second big problem: mini-games. There's the "arrange these objects on specific slots in the scene for the story to move forward", the "pull the mouse in a direction while holding the lmb pressed to mimic a sexual action" minigame. The idea of involving the player through mouse-actions in the sex scenes is not necessarily a bad one, but it's badly done.It's tedious. Sometimes it's not even clear what you're supposed to do, and you're clicking and dragging to figure out what to click and drag this time.
And none of it matters anyway, because I don't care about the sex.I don't care about either character, nor about their sexual misadventure. Nothing was built up to this, it's just a random semi-consensual sex scene of rando NPCs.

Which leads me to the third problem. The writing is chock-full of grammar and spelling errors. And I'm pretty sure the voice overs are AI. For a moment, I thought they might not be - because a sentence was spoken correctly instead of the incorrect text. But then all the completely nonsensical other lines were given verbatim by the voice over, even though any normal english speaker would be: "Hey, am I REALLY supposed to say this?"
Also, I somehow don't think someone that didn't bother hire a proofreader for the text would actually bother hiring a real voice actor.

This story is, in a way, the perfect showcase of why AI can be so bad in quality. It mimics the appearance of something good, but it has none of the substance.

The developer tries to create a captivating visual story...but does not know how to actually do so. So we end up with the shape of one, but no interesting character or story beats and bland and generic dialogue.

The developer tries to create a interactive sex system...but never wonders why people would even care that characters on screen have sex. He does not know you need to engage the audience and build up to it, make them care about the characters in a way that you're invested in it - or at least that you can put yourself in a character's shoes or follow their perspective. Instead, it's as if we're an uninvolved, uncaring third party, witnessing generic strangers interact.

And beyond the aesthetics of having the voices read, there's no understanding of why voice acting is compelling. No breath-pauses, no emotional investment in the voices. Because it's AI. It's the shape of voice acting with non of the emotional engagement or the skillful usage of inflection to invest a voice with something more than just a bland sound.

I was surprised when I saw the bad reviews when I checked in a minute or so after launching the game, and actually thought people might be overly critical. I very, very quickly was disabused of this notion.

This game is a shell of what someone who doesn't know how to make good games thinks good games look like, with none of the meat and insight that actually create compelling stories and exciting sex scenes.

For a 'completed' game, having spelling and grammar errors in the opening scene is pretty disappointing. While there might be a language barrier behind that, with all the spellchecking and grammar checking available these days, it's pretty unforgivable. The puzzles are terrible. No hints or instructions provided. Granted they are easy enough to figure out with some minimal effort, but the placement of the items on the screen is so bad, even knowing the correct answers to the puzzle, I was unable to get the clothing item to place on screen for the second puzzle (I had to look up online the answers to make sure it was the game and not me choosing the wrong answers) and was forced to disable the mini games from the menu just to continue the first scene of the game. The voice acting is terrible as well, might have been better to go without. The story might have been interesting, but all the other problems were so bad, so quickly into the experience, I deleted the game after 5-10 minutes so I will never know if the story was worthwhile.

I'd give the game one star, but the graphics are so good that I will award two stars to a game that really only deserves one.

The game is a fascinating example of a developer that has no clue as to why people play games, or else maybe is just a sadist. The "minigames" are just ridiculous means of punishing the player, having no basis in the story at all, being opaque in the extreme, and are only solvable via trial and error, with little logic involved. I played as far as the start of Chapter 3, where there was a twitch minigame that was so annoying that I preferred to stop playing than to being a dancing monkey for the dev's silly ideas of what is fun.

It is also possible that the game is deliberately bad and unfun because the dev thinks that torturing players is amusing. Nothing would need to be different if this is true.

So, this is a bad game by a bad or cruel developer and is not worth anyone's time.

Table Puzzle, what was that? So annoying. Should clothes be placed on chairs while the candle and food stay on the table. Why is there no guidance at all? How to skip that minigame? I like the render but the minigames are terrible, too much click point in a short time.

This is an amazing production, but OMG the mini-games. It's like every other screen you have to play some sort of mini game. I think the first h scene is pretty good, but I wouldn't know because I spent every screen playing some kind of unexplained game. It's hard to describe just how bad the mini games are but I have never been so frustrated before playing one of these.

I mean, the production is off the charts good, but it's not worth it to sit through all the mini-games.

Avoid this like plague, don't let nice screenshots bait you. Mini-games upon mini-games, puzzles with 0 explanation of what's expected, and worst of all, they are in the middle of sex scenes. I have never seen a bullshit of such caliber in any of the games.
I just quit in less than 10 minutes of "playing".

I thought the graphics will make me want to play this game, but the sheer amount of useless minigames killed any patience I had with this.

I don't care how beautiful the characters are or how interesting the stories are, but when I have to click random points on the screen or place objects from the sidebar, I get an insatiable urge to look for the ALT F4 buttons.

This is a puzzle game. Who puts puzzles in the middle of the sex scenes? It is just stupid in my opinion. Shame because the graphics are not bad. I would recommend the creator to remove the puzzles and replace them with choices like pretty much every other such game.

I picked this up on steam. It does have beautiful renders, even though some of the renders have noise issues in the water and in the face for example. There are no animations really, just still renders moving back and forth. The music is fitting, and the whole thing in voiced. There is no image gallery. The mini games are annoying. And even though it does not say ea, after the 5th scene, the story just stops and you go back to the main menu. I'm not sure if there's another season, or if it's a ea title. There is only a little over an hr's play here, and there are really only like 1-2 choices that effect anything.