Ren'Py - Lessons in Love [v0.45.0] [Selebus]

Version 0.30.0

Amazing game! Not perfect though. This is a game that requires the player to actually play/read through the game, if you are honestly just looking to rub a quick one out then this game isn't for you.

Pros:

Story - The plot is great for an H-game at first it's a little confusing with the "supernatural/horror" aspect of the game but as you progress you start get a feel for it and pickup on context clues and piece the story together. Making the appreciation for the characters and the world all the better.

Scenes - Hilarious/Heart-warming/Fucked-up/Horny/Emotional/Disgusted/Awkward/Scared - You can feel all these emotions if you actually wrap yourself around the story/content of what the game offers.

Hints Page/Character Sheets - Pretty easy to understand/read on who you need to progress in order to carry the story along in case the User is stuck on something.

Variety - A ton of characters and events to love in the game. Sure not all of them will be a player's cup of tea from their storyline to their personality, and will probably make you uncomfortable. Adding layer upon layer to keep the player more invested into the story.

Music/OSTs: Pretty fitting for most of the characters/scenes/events really adds to the immersion and world building giving it more value.

Cons:

Repetition - After progressing deep into the game's story you can notice a repetition... (Progress Relationships -> Main Events -> Progress Relationships Main Events and so on) This is with most VNs and honestly it did get convoluted at times in this game with certain requirements and I got annoyed, but with how deep I was already and appreciating the game and wanting to know what happens next it didn't really feel like a chore because it was that enjoyable.

A lot of characters - Double Edged Sword - With an objectively "complex" plot to follow you throw in a cast of characters with their own subplots that still tie their way into the story. While this does add to the game's content and giving the players wanting "more" content it does also strike that some of them feel they are foolproof plot devices just for the hell of it. Still adding to the story but not leaving a major impact.

Neutral:

Dialogue/Monologue - there are scenes/dialogue/monologue of the game that will make the player feel uncomfortable, depressed/sad, and cringe to where it would turn people off from the game. I wouldn't call it "Edgy" per se. If you do not like that then skip/skim through it. This game is not for the faint of heart.

Conclusion: TLDR -

This is a game you will have to play through if you extremely desire to get to the H-scenes. Just play through the game and you'll appreciate everything about the game more and enjoy it. The plot is good, most of the characters are good, and the H-scenes are good.

Game has way too much grinding and is unplayable without the hint mod. Even with the hint mod installed there are times like "broken world" where you have to hit random stuff to get out.
This game could've been good, but between the dozens of hours you'll spend grinding, the terrible writing, and the ridiculous file size, I'd suggest you find something else worthy of your time.

Played back in 2018, gave it another go recently, but was painfully disappointed.

- The early chapters were nice, got really invested in some of the characters, it felt like the author really gave a damn about giving them depth. But the more I play, the worse the experience. As of now, there are simply too many damn characters, and I only care about a select few. The problem is, I have to progress through every other character's plot to get back to the plot lines I care about. If I have to hold down the ctrl button 90% of the time I'm playing, that really isn't a fun experience.
- The writing turns very pretentious and infuriating very quickly. Oh god. Stop shoving that big pile of edgy ramble down my throat please, it hurts so much, it really does. I can't stand it anymore after the 50th time the game tells me what the author thinks about nihilism.
- The structure. With this many characters, the love/lust grind just kills my patience for the game. The "gameplay" devolves quickly from a ordinary visual novel into a "spam click all the different locations until something happens". Can't tell you enough how much I've grown to hate that crap. Just please get rid of that and turn everything into a linear, ACTUAL visual novel can ya? I really don't need this sandbox shit when everything is linear and I have to talk to every single character anyways.

I get it, the author probably has a lot of emotional investment into this project so that's why the writing is the way it is. I really wish I was able to get through those cons and find out what the fuck is up with Maya because I was really invested, but damn, I know I won't because I ain't gonna come back to this game again, sadly. Was mildly fun while it lasted, I guess.

Review for 0.30
Probably the best story on this site and I'm willing to give the game a 5 star just for what the story tries to do, despite its flaws in every other aspect. It's a VN that's unnecessary long and hard to get into. I'd strongly recommend people to stay away from this game at its current state. If you do have time to waste though, you should try reading to the end of the first beach event to get the idea of what this game is.
Pros:
- Very engaging characters, which is something I think very few adult games can achieve. They all have more to their stories then what they show on the outside.
Neutral:
- The story is linear, there are only some important choices that affects how characters behave towards you. Some people hate this, I don't really care.
- While Chapter 1 is decent, the story gets better from the second half of Chapter 2.
- Not a porn game. Very few sex scenes and not a lot of work put in. Shouldn't matter if you're into the story.
- This game is 60% slice of life 20% (very) depressing 20% mystery. If you only like the mystery then this game is not for you.
- Lots of awful things happens to the girls that may make you feel uncomfortable. I personally like this aspect of the story.
- The horror is not scary and I'm easily scared. They only add a bit of lore into MC's story.
- MC is a massive dick. I personally think this is necessary for the type of story this game tries to tell.
Cons:
- Interleaving 33 character stories into one. This means if you are only interested in a few characters you'll have to go through 4-5 hours of dialogue with others before you get to continue their story. It's also why characters feel one note even after 50 hours into the game, they are still in their introduction events and only a few of them get development very far into the story. This is something I don't think can be fixed.
- The game is unplayable without guide mod. Triggers to events are hard to find because there's just too many ways to trigger them.
- The "puzzles" in this game are not puzzles, they force you to remember the most obscure parts of the story. Use the puzzle guide.
- This game, like every bad sandbox game, forces you to repeat events to increase affection to unlock new events. Use saveeditonline.com and set every character's points to 100 for a better experience.
- Dialogues involving the MC is unnecessary long and only have 50% of real content.
+ MC VERY often go into monologues that are not required to understand the story. I'd recommend skipping all of them.
+ MC also makes sex jokes and stupid banter every three lines. Try skimming through them.

What an infuriating, meandering, self-indulgent game.

Its saving grace is the proficient writing (that urgently needs an editor) but everything else is complete crap.

The sandbox is created in a way to frustrate the player as much as possible. The "gameplay" consists of blindly clicking on a number of destinations until by pure luck you match the EXACT time and location necessary to get an event. GOD FORBID there'd be a hint on where to go? That'd invalidate all the cool gameplay.

Please note that this is basicallly a VN. There are hardly any choices at all. At this time it probably has more text than the Lord of the Rings and 95% of it is the regurgitation of the same, singular 'thing' each girl represents. All the girls are completely one dimensional and for most of the "game" never move past that. Did you know that Ami loves her uncle? And is jealous of everyone else? No? Are you sure? Here's another 20 events to make sure, you are REALLY aware of that.

There's also 5% of plot advancment and a tiny bit of character advancement and the game can be good at those points, but it's like pulling teeth to get there.

Don't get me started on the arbitrary, convoluted, stupid riddles that only seem to exist for the dev to check if you read and made notes throughout his quest to write the next War and Peace. Given how much of a d... he is outside the game to just about everyone, it's not unlikely that he just enjoys pissing off his fanbase.

I'll get the cliff notes version once they build a library to house all the text of the completed version in 2035. Thanks.
I am sure Ami will still obsess over her uncle and there'll be 287 new events to make sure I know.

Simply the best Ren'py VN ever made.

Diverse and charming characters. The author has an impeccable ability to write engaging dialogue and story arcs.

It's a long long grrind. However I say grind in the most kind sense, as I've played through the entire story 3 times.

If you're after a quick Hentai "get your rocks off" type experience, this game is not for you. However if you want something real, something with endless depth that makes you look inward, something that makes you feel and connect to the characters, you will find it here without any doubts.

100/100. I compare any other VN to this as the gold standard.
The Maya/MC arc is one of the most interesting interpersonal stories ever told.

I love this game. It's probably the first one that got me hooked so much. And the plot and mysteries in the game intrigued me as hell. I even replayed the game, read the game's wiki, joined the discord community, although the result was only more questions. The character interactions are also well written and the humor is really good. I read it back in 2021 and still look forward to the next updates with trepidation. In general, I highly recommend.

Well, this game is a journey.

Author definitely has a vision. Not the sort of vision you would like to get in your everyday life, but he certainly has it.

Characters in the game are deep. So deep that at some point you'll get tired of digging and start wondering, what are you doing there.

Then there are some psychodelic and horror-ish scenes. IMO - they're pointless and could be safely removed without any damage to the rest of the story. But, as i've already said, author has a vision for this game and he's following it.

All in all - not my cup of tea.
But the game is good. models are nice, facial expressions are fine-tuned, story keeps progressing. It's definitely worth checking out.

It maybe or maybe not has a questionable content but as long as its just the game, there is no problem at all. After all there is nothing as bad as killing and we do this in literaly every famous game.
Masterpiece story and great characters. shitty dev but we can deal with him

Really good game with good, poetic writing. The plot and lore are deep and interesting. Game rates 5 stars just for that.

That being said— the developer clearly has some mental health problems, like a lot of really good writers do. He is kinda dripping with self-loathing and at some point in his formative years someone must have told him masturbation was a great sin because man is he mad about it. If you like the game, I strongly advise you to stay away from the discord.

Also, if you can find an older version of the game, play the first chapter from it instead of the current builds. The developer originally made the first chapter fun and interesting, but after the game got popular he rewrote it in a tone more like the later chapters, but the problem is it makes you feel like you’re starting the game in the middle. You don’t have any real time to build into the world, you’re just beaten over the head with unsubtle messages, and most people would prefer to nope the fuck out rather than get into it the hard way. Unless you’re the kind of emo kid who shaved off his eyebrows in high school, you’ll like the original chapter 1 better.

Great game, as of now lot of contents has two long chapters and just started chapter 3 will take a while to catch up
Top main girls for me are rin, Sana, io, and touka has climbed up there but all girls are best girl

I gave this two stars because some of the ideas are decent, but they don't outweigh the four following drawbacks.

1) The writing. The author subscribes to the "lots of words is better" school of thought. Every single moment is dragged out as long as it possibly can be. This is especially egregious in "comedy" sections, where jokes are drawn out long past their point of humor. I don't understand how people are praising the writing in this game. Perhaps they spend too much time reading poorly translated visual novels. For those that spend any amount of time reading actual books, you will find the writing here infuriating.
2) The gameplay. Grind affection/lust and try to guess which choices lead to scenes. Much like reading the text, this takes a LONG time. Sometimes this is interrupted by poorly designed puzzle sections. The author has stated that he deliberately designed these sections to be frustrating/confusing. He succeeded.
3) Sex scenes. There are some odd choices here. For example, while this game has a gallery, it is a gallery of all of the events, not just the sex scenes. This would be fine, except there are several sex scenes missing from the gallery. Namely all of the scenes with animation. The ones in the gallery are still images with the authors trademark "ridiculous amount of text" filling the gaps. Most of the animated scenes are repeatable in game, but that would require you to understand every character's schedule. Good luck with that.
4) Obviously underage girls. Your mileage may vary on this one, so I didn't actually take this into account when rating the game. Still, you should know that the girls in this game look YOUNG. I would say that the majority of the students the protagonist molests look somewhere in the range of 10-13 years old. The oldest looks to be about 16. There are adults you can sleep with, but know that you are going to miss out on the majority of the game if you stick with that.

If you want a very long VN with a lot of depth you will enjoy Lessons in Love. If you're like me who wants something to jerk off to, this probably isn't the best game for you. A lot of the sex scenes scenes are spread out, sometimes taking 10-15 minutes or more of going through quests to get to the next piece of sexual content. Lessons in Love also suffers from the same problem a lot of dating sims on this site do, which is that there's way too many love interests. This results in not a lot of sexual content for a lot of the girls which is amplified by the fact that the creator of the game wants to put a lot backstory into every character. This is a fine ideal to strive for but since there are so many characters to develop there ends up being not much sexual content for them, at least compared to how much reading the creator of the game expects of you. Also since there are so many characters, the ones you may like often end up not having any good content or they rarely get new content as the creator tries to add more for other girls.

Lessons in Love is also terrible to play without the guide mod. The first time I played was a ton of clicking around because I didn't know if I don't have someone's affection high enough or if I wasn't checking the correct area at the right time. When you play with the guide mod and see how specific each trigger is you realize the game is terrible without it.

I also find the writing to be very tiresome. Lessons in Love has a lot of fourth wall breaking, mainly in the form of the "happy events". I find myself trying to get through these events as quickly as possible as I find them to be very disconnected to a porn game. I think when you're trying to make a game for people to jerk off to, events like these are just a turn off. This goes for a lot of the events in the game as there are many that deal with serious topics which isn't what I boot up a porn game for. They're way too serious. I want a character to feel like an individual and to feel connected to them but this game often makes me care less about characters because I get sick of hearing about all their problems and insecurities. It constantly tries to make you feel guilty for having sex with characters which isn't a turn-on for me.

In the end the writing is good, although it can be a bit pretentious at times. It just isn't what I want when I want to jerk off. It's often way too serious and kills my boner. The sex scenes are well-made and I'm sure if you play there will be characters you'll be into as there are a lot and most are well-written.

Overall I would only recommend this game to people who are patient and want more of a visual novel rather than an erotic game. Definitely play with the guide mod, it will save you a lot of time. I'm personally done with this game for the foreseeable future. I might play it one more time when it's finished and I have a lot of time on my hands but currently it's just too much of a drag to play and jerk off to. I hope after this game, the creator makes a game that is more light hearted as they do have talent for writing a story and making a decent plot, it just needs to be focused more on lewd themes rather than the uncomfortable themes that are prevalent throughout this game.

TLDR: Writing good, not really good if you're horny. A lot of reading, a lot of characters, and an okay amount of sex scenes (not all characters have them) that are pretty decent as they're well written.

Playing LiL since the beginnin. Honestly, the best game I played.
The mistery, the characters, the fantasy, the uncertainty of what is happening. The way that de dev writes is really immersive. Maybe im too fan tbh, but still, i really like this game.

A genuinely fantastic story with legit interesting lore, this game will make your skin crawl and your dick hard, 10/10

*as a side note, Keep notes or a journal and try to decode the lore, it's super rewarding and will leave you feeling a whole lot of emotions. (a hexadecimal converter is useful)

One of the best VNs on here. Varied fetishes, plenty of room to grow and the dev cares enough to go back and improve older content in the story.
I don't really have any complaints for this one.
I'm excited to see where the story will lead.

One of the most interesting protagonists among all vn. Great dialogue, well written characters. Whatever the problem with the grind or puzzles, the game remains 10 out of 10 thanks to the characters and the story.

Firstly, while it's my favorite game on the site, there are cons worth mentioning. As I'm sure other reviews talked about, this VN is very...very long. Almost exhaustingly so. It doesn't make it bad but if you're a completionist just be sure to take plenty of breaks. Don't make the mistake I made and try to beat it in a week. You won't. Aside from that there are a lot of very jarring scenes, which are put in intentionally to be offputting. I personally don't mind them, but some might. And finally, there are impassible blocks in the game designed specifically to force you to look up resolutions and come back to the thread. I think it's an interesting way to spark community engagement, but I wish the puzzles were at least solvable.
Positives: If you're willing to read all the text (this game is literally longer than the bible) There are some really great characters who each have important elements that reoccur and sometimes resolve in satisfying ways. It pulls at the heartstrings which is not something I expect from eroge. Would recommend.

This review should be almost entirely spoiler free.
TL;DR great story and characters but the porn sucks.

Pros:
This game is loooong.
The characters are good and somewhat diverse. While almost every (dateable) character fits some kind of stereotype they are still nice and varied.
The characters are all pretty likeable in their own way (at least for me). Except the MC. More on that later.
The story is pretty interesting.

Neutral:
The writing feels kinda pretentious sometimes if that makes sense. I didn't mind though.
Seriously, the game is super freaking long. Like about three times as long as LotR last time I checked. Might be too much for some people.
The story might not be everyone´s cup of tea. Check the tags.
It takes hours to get to the action. I didn't mind, but don't play this for the porn probably (it sucks anyway, see cons).
In general everything takes very long to get going. The story and character development could have probably been edited down by 50% and still be very coherent. I enjoyed the slow pace though. YMMV.
This game is hyped a lot on this site. So if you play it with very high expectations you might be disappointed. Not saying the game is bad, but it also probably isn't a perfect 5/7 GOTY for most folks. Just temper your expectations

Cons:
The MC is a massive fucking prick. It's probably supposed to be that way and without spoiling anything it fits the game pretty well I think. But it's still annoying to me. Might not be a problem for most people.
The porn is meh. It's standard honey select fare or whatever devs use to get this anime look. It looks very mediocre honestly. Also every sex scene is tinged with desperation (on the girls side) and feels super creepy. Which is probably the correct way to write a sex scene in a game in which almost every dateable character is of, at best, questionable age. But it still put me off personally. Which honestly might be the point. You never know with this game.


I thought about giving this 4 stars but honestly it IS a standout game on this site.

This is legitimately one of my favorite games ever. Yes it's a VN but man, I got so involved in the story I think I actually god a bit addicted to it in an unhealthy way lol.
Thanks Selebus for this game.