Ren'Py - Lessons in Love [v0.44.0] [Selebus]

Easily my favourite game on here, I eagerly look forward to each update, each of which has a very generous amount of content for how quickly they come out.

The characters are interesting and varied, as are your relationships with them and the twists and turns they take. Some characters open up to you right away (if not sooner) while others are still not interested, which I personally think is great, rather than everyone throwing themselves at you as in most games like this.

One of the most important things to me is that the writing is GOOD, not just passable, not littered with mistakes and text that doesn't make sense, it's prose that wouldn't feel out of place in a good book. The writing supports a story that is certainly confusing, but also very interesting.

There's a real range of emotions here, some parts feel like a punch in the gut, some are disturbing, others are happy, sweet or funny, I don't feel like many games get such a good range and do it well, so that alone is worthy of praise.

Lessons in Love is well worth your time and support, and I'm very glad for Selebus's constant efforts and hard work in creating it and giving us high effort content.

Praise Be, Maya is a nerd.

Good: Great graphics, a lot of different girls. Dialog sounds natural and not like the author has never spoken to the opposite sex before as sometimes games on this site can sound like. Protag sounds like the smarmy rapist that he is.

Bad: Unrelatable setting and protagonist. The setting doesn't seem to work with any real-world rules, just an excuse to set up the fetish scenario. The women in the cast feel very samey in personality. I don't get the sense of different personalities, just the same girl in different situations. Terrible gameplay with tons of repetitive clicking that loves to waste your time. Game design has absolutely no respect for the player. The dev seems as low empathy as the protagonist, never considers how fun something is or how players would feel about it, just shoves stuff in to troll.

I don't like this game. Personal score is like... 3/5

I just know it's quality stuff, and deserves 5/5 for what it is.

Personally, I feel like to best experience this game, you probably want to engage in some of the harem/porn elements, and that's something I REALLY don't want to do in this game.

It doesn't feel right to me, and I can't shake it.

But that's just how I feel.

The characters the well written tropes that evolve overtime, the horror elements are awesome, the comedy is hilarious at times, and I can thoroughly recommend this game if you're into the initial concept of it and have an open mind about how the plots of these things should go.

It is... anything but ordinary.

I have very mixed opinions about this game. When I first picked it up roughly a year ago, I was hooked. The story ticks the right boxes for me, the writing is better than most. I didn't even care about the porn (which let's be honest, is mediocre at best). I liked it so much that this was actually the first game I became a patron for.

But after getting past that initial rush and playing the game on a release-to-release basis, the flaws start showing up. Biggest one by far is the cast is just too damn large. Results in the story progressing at an agonizingly slow pace, and some of the characters are just frankly more boring than others.

There's also a lot of QoL issues. The format of just clicking on rooms over and over again to maybe find an event is agonizing. The UX is amongst the worst I've seen on any game here and hasn't appreciably changed since I've started playing nearly a year ago.

Beyond that, the author makes some rather... interesting choices for the game, and has a very "my way or the highway" attitude to the whole thing. The puzzles that show up in the more recent reset events just plain suck for example. They're not fun, they're not engaging, and the game is very unforgiving about being able to discover the answers if you missed it your first time around. If you dare criticize this or seek a way around the puzzles, both he and his legion of followers harass you about how you're playing the game wrong. In fact, with the latest reset event, if you cheat in the wrong way, then you get locked out from progressing, just because you're not doing it the "right way".

And sometimes those puzzles involve looking in unprecedented places without any hint to guide you. For example, in the "There is Nothing" event, you need to be able to hear a voice in the background to get the answer to the port number (which is 1024 for anyone bothering to read this far). The game never required anything like that beforehand. It doesn't give you any sort of warning or hint that something in the audio is important. If you play on mute? Go fuck yourself. Have trouble hearing? Well disabled people don't deserve to play games anyway.

All in all - the biggest draw to the the game is that it has an engaging story, especially if you binge it in nearly one shot. But it's not going anywhere any time soon, especially with the size of the cast. I don't think it's an exaggeration that the game still might not be done a decade from today (if it hasn't been abandoned by then). The porn is mediocre at best (and it'd be better if it just wasn't there at all honestly). The UX is awful. And the gameplay can be very unforgiving.

I'm giving it 2 stars because that story really is engaging and will probably still have me coming back every now and then. But it's not really worth playing on a release basis, and it's not really worth being a patron continuously.

My review of Lessons in Love

The game starts pretty good for a sandbox with regular story events and plenty of cute characters.

The huge problem is it can't really be played without a guide unless you plan to grind your relationship with every single girl.
I focused on the 3-4 girls I'm interested in, grinding the others only a little.

Eventually I no longer kept getting any story events, nor any new events for the girls I cared about.
After mindlessly grinding the other girls for 1-2 hours and still not getting any progress I gave up.

A game that is unplayable without an external 3rd party guide doesn't deserve more than 3 stars.

So this game is something else, it starts off where some folks will probably be confused or maybe even lost with the story but then the deeper you dig the more it all comes together. It is one filled with theory-crafting left and right and it leaves you with eerie renders and things that drive the player to ironically want to see more. Like I'm at 19.0 right now and hyped af for the next. I say give this game a chance if you haven't played it yet, especially if you're into psychological horror and deep stories.

Where to begin...

"Came for the porn, stayed for the plot" is an oft-used expression, and it is incredibly apt here.

I think that Selebus has, quite frankly, a gift. I'm not going to sit here and claim that they are the new Tolkien or Sir Terry Pratchett, but their characters are...alive. Plenty of porn-y tropes, but a lot of it is used exactly to juxtapose it with how an actual person would think or behave, without making it some meta "haha tropes are weird" joke.

Quite frankly, the way the characters interact with the story, the way the story interacts with the player, the way Selebus interacts with us and the game...it is an experience. They have managed to make me smile with little character in-jokes, made me think based on certain comments or events, made me tear up due to character interactions or merely by expanding upon character arcs.

This is by no means a happy game, there are a lot of darker moods and plenty to think about, but neither it is a sad or purely a game with horror for laughs...in many ways this game is a bit of all parts of life. With happiness and sadness, hope and despair, with jokes and tears, and I feel richer for having experienced the story so far.

[Review written as of 19p1, patron]
Lessons in Love is possibly the best adult visual novel I've played period, and it achieves that almost entirely through having phenomenal and evocative writing that elevate it above any other. Even the earliest "hook" scene, with some admittedly more edgy writing in general, still hits remarkably hard with the imagery delivered. The visuals for the game itself have also been steadily improving, going from sprites(that will likely be removed entirely in the future) to detailed in-engine renders with creative shots or chilling closeups, mixing surreal and grounded visuals to create a singularly impressive work. Past minute to minute writing or visuals, though, is an expansive and complicated web of relationships between the girls, the world, and Sensei, which we can currently only speculate on the true complexity of. The only situation in which I would not wholeheartedly recommend Lessons in Love is if you are intending to use it more explicitly as an erotic piece, as that is neither the intent or a particularly usable element of it. Either way, please do read it and experience all the joys Lessons in Love has to offer.

The writing is simply brilliant!

It's a mirracle, how Selebus manages to fill these girls with so much personality, that I really care deeply about all of them.

I came in search of a nice incest-loli-wank and found so much more. I often don't even care about the sexual content anymore (LIE!), at least this isn't the reason I'm still playing this game. I'm supporting on on patreon and have payed more than I have for any other game in my life. And I will continue to do so.

This game has touched me so many times, I even cried a few times. No other creator has managed to achieve similar effects on me.

PRAISE BE!

This is a really amazing game. The plot is very interesting and very engaging. The rhetorics, ironies and cynical mindsets of the game ai find very amusing, especially when they break the 4th wall. Though this is an eroge, I can confidently say that I am in more for the plot rather than the sex. The scenes have good animations and the fact that it us available for Android is amazing. I can't wait for the completion of the game and I hope for it to prosper and garner more attention. It's just that good. I hope the developer doesn't abandon this and continue to develop this amazing game.

[After playing 0.18.0 Part 2]

This is one of my favourite Ren'Py games. I had my doubts at first, but once you get into the story I have to say that storywise this one is gold. The characters are almost all of them great, the art is good even when it's bad (because it looks bad on purpose and it works). The variety of girls and acts is quite big and probably will be huge once it's done for what it looks considering the story. The sex scenes are also great, though maybe this is not a game you will enjoy just for that, so if you're not interested in story elements and come just for the porn, it won't get to you. Personally I play it more for the story than the (still enjoyable) porn.

I don't usually like manga, anime or anything Japanese-styled or influenced in general, but there's something about this game that dragged me to play it to the very end of the most recent update.

I'm not really any good at judging game design or any type of programming either, so I can't go into depth with that either.

What I will say though, is that its title is meant to be taken quite literal. In a both intellectual, spiritual and.. sometimes disturbing way, it will take you on an emotional rollercoaster. It will both be serious, and completely non-serious at the same time. A limbo between reality and fiction. Laughs and sadness.. and sometimes those two at the same time as well.

There are obviously a few times where I feel myself distanced from the protagonist, which I'm sure many will experience as well, but the creator really takes you through the story with almost no filter or regard for being accessible, which I find to be endearing and a breath of fresh air.

I don't usually get dragged into being emotionally invested into anything other than a few AAA games or very particular movies or TV series.. but this game manages to do just that so I'll give this my highest rating.

[Reviewed as of version 18p2]
I mainly want to talk about the writing style of this game which I like a lot.

One thing that stands out to me about this game is the dialogue. The game really does a good job at keeping the flow of dialogue natural by avoiding introducing a new topic of talk suddenly. If a character tries to make a tangent, it would always relate to any previous mention in the dialogue. A character event may start with the most mundane topic and manage to stretch out linearly to a 30mins worth of writing.

As for the monologue, though, there is a shit ton of it in this game and it may be off putting at first when we barely know the purpose. However, it will become apparent that they contain a huge amount of symbolism relevant to the plot as you progress the game, making them quite exciting to reread. Even if they don't contain any significant plot hints, they are still good read nonetheless.

The comedic lines are usually written in very few words and are seemingly low effort to make, but they're actually very funny. I especially like the MC's quick rebuttal to what the girls say; this kind of comedy really vibes with me.

Psychological horror stuff is a big part of the game but I think it's still too early for me to evaluate them. They were pretty unsettling when I first encountered them so I didn't quite focus on the writing, and I figured many others would too. Just keep going and you'll find that the horror writing also contains a huge amount of symbolism that relates to the symbolisms in the "normal world", and this may serve as a hint to understand what the fuck is going on. For now all I can say is that using symbolisms to explain the game's world is a unique approach as they say a lot about the world without giving us any definitive answers, keeping things mysterious.

Other stuffs:
Story (Character Events) : 10/10
-> The game really showcases well how people deal with different types of issues, and how people NOT deal with them and choose to ignore them. I relate a lot to some of the girls and can say that the writing involving them does a lot of justice in addressing my issues and how I feel about them.

Music : 8.5/10
-> While the musics themselves are amazing, I feel like some of them aren't quite suited to be BGM of a VN. A few of the musics have tones that go between weak and strong. Reading important lines while the music is at the wrong tone might ruin the experience a bit.

Art : 9/10
-> Character arts and expressions? top tier
-> Lighting? Posing? Angling? top tier, at least starting around the end of Ch.1 and it continues getting better
-> UI? looks fine, nothing special
-> MC? pretty sure he looked bad to me the first time, but after seeing the not-successes of many other male KK characters, this one actually looks very good comparatively

Legitimately the best written game I have ever seen and it's not close. There are lists of games I've praised for their writing and this just blows them all out of the water.

I was just trying too see all the content at first but I was a bad homie and that scene broke my heart to the point I deleted my save and started again.

Then I got to the same scene being a good homie and I cried. That's right, a porn game made me cry. Big up to the writer for being so fantastic. I'll be reading anything they write forever.

So, firts things first, this game is indeed pretty good, great writting, great humor, pretty and cute girls and interesting characters.

But to be honest, it just isn't my cup of coffee, i tried to play this game many times, but you being "reincarnated" in a body that you don't know, and that you are lost on what you have to do, it's a turn down for me, i find it boring and extremelly irritating.

Another problem is the "sandbox", i mean, i do prefer visual novels over sandbox games, but there are plenty of sandbox games that i played and really liked, but this one no, the days passes randomsly, you don't have any sort of hint to how to progress with the girls, no visual indications on where the girls are at the time, nothing, i think that this is the biggest flaw in this game, you are lost on what you have to do.

The third thing is....it has too many characters, something that i noticed in good sandbox games is that they don't have many characters, because you have to grind affection and lust points or whatever and this takes time and is pretty boring, now imagine having to do this with more than 10 characters on a game that doesn't have anything to easy your playthrough...yeah, it isn't for me, maybe some more "hardcore" players don't mind, but i certainly do.

As someone who loves horror and someone who loves porn games this was perfect. There are few "horror" nsfw games out there, and I think this one might be the scariest, there are a few scenes in here that genuinely creeped me out. Along with that though are great h-scenes (with haruka being my favourite), and in between those are a lot of events with good writing and funny moments, especially as an irish weeb i love the character of molly. Looking forward to where this game goes.

My only major critique of the game as it is would be that the progress mod is needed to get through some parts and even with it i had to look up an external guide to progress the main story due to one important event having a requirement that I would never naturally go through. So hopefully a more concise progress tracker or context clues will be added to the game.

THIS is a harem game done right! A few stereotypes from anime but it's clearly out of an appreciation for the genre. Where it differs from all the other games is the writing. Sure there's game that got a chuckle out of me, but several times almost laughing out loud in the first chapters? That takes talent. So yeah, if you're looking for a well written meta harem anime game THIS ONE is the benchmark for all others to strive toward. Keep up the amazing work!

This is game's story was probably one of the best things that came out not only in 2020, but in the last decade that preceded it.
With already 21 main characters (counting MC) + more side characters, every single one is not only clearly distinguishable, but compelling at the same time. They all have their flaws, some more obvious and downright (morally) unjustifiable, but even then, you can find something relatable in them to some degree.
I keep wanting to know the girls better not just because I have to in order to continue the main story, or because they are so well written, but because they can make your day a happier one. Simply put, they are cute as fuck, and them being happy is joyful, until missery unexpectedly rears its beautiful ugly head.
This game requires you to advance the girls' events in order to continue the main ones, but I think you should do it even if it wasn't the case. Never skip on girl's event or dialogue. Even if you didn't want to do her story for whatever reason, and only wanted to do the ones you liked, you never know when a hint or piece of the puzzle that is the main story will drop. Its never just the characters geting development or going on with their lives, but they are essential to even know what is going on below behind the scenes.
Without giving out spoilers, thats my review for the story part. For the gameplay part:
It works as a standard VN to a degree. After your first events, you get freedom to go where you want from the options. Of course, all these options involve calling them to hang out, inviting them home, or visiting a girl in either their shared dorm room or their "usual spot" (work/club/streets where they just... walk).
The more common is the last 2 forms of visit, since calling them or calling them to invite them home isn't available until you get the girl's phone number. You only get that in either the girl's event in question, or unexpectedly in an almost unrelated event.
Either way, the most predominant way to unlock the girls' event is getting 5 affection points each time by visiting them.
One important part is that there is not hint system. And since some events are locked not just by points, but by interacting with the girl in question in a specific way at a specific time.
For example, visiting a girl on Monday in her dorm room. or calling them on Saturday afternoon.
Thankfully (MC would disagree) those times periods are reduced to only the evenings from Monday to Friday, with only the weekends having Morning-Afternoon-Night time periods.
The problems to find these events is reduced by the fact that there are 20 main girls + the side ones, so you will end up circling around unlocking events for the other girls until you coincidentally hit ther giht combination.
If you just do as said, and progress with all the girls, you will rarely find an issue.

As of v0.17.0, the girls, our relationship with them and the world itself has changed. Some changes are more subtle than others, but they are there once you compare them to the first releases. And these subtle changes will keep on piling up for the next years as we get more updates.

Even if VNs, or adult content in general isn't something you particularly enjoy, you should absolutely try this game.

I've been following this project since its inception, and I have to say, I really do keep thinking about it even after I stop playing.

I think I did talk to Selebus about the way he wrote, and the way the music set the mood.
I've not seen a visual novel with this level of quality, rivaling japan's main export product.
We better keep him safe from the inevitable ninjas.

You might already know, or the other reviews might have already warned you, the porn is a trap. The character dynamics, cleverly written dialogue that isn't afraid to be serious or silly, the surreal bits that hint towards clocks something larger, these are the true meat and potatoes of this project.

I've been on this website for long enough to see pretty much all my favourite projects abandoned. I pray that the same does not befall this one.

Sel, I'm still waiting for the jukebox menu!

This game, this dev, and the community around both, take this game way too seriously. This game has flaws in the way it delivers content, it is a click fest and ultimately nothing but a kinect novel with very little in the way of decision making. The content is often cringy and reads like something straight out of a depressed teenager's tumblr, it would all be fine if it had a lighter approach to it but no, it tries to be dead serious.

As I have ran out of salt, this game is still a very good looking loli harem with a psychological horror twist to it, so to each their own.