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

I'm not getting the appeal of this game.

Its tedious to navigate. There's no map or anything, just a dozen menus. Effectively 2 rotating lists of places you can go and... go... and go... and go.... and go... and after visiting the same place 150 times you may randomly trigger an event not even based around visiting it that lets you move forward with the girl in there. Or not. Maybe she doesn't even have content. Who knows? I don't. Enjoy visiting the bar 30 times in a row, getting absolutely no progress at all, thinking there's none to be made, only for there randomly be progress. Was it a result of the absurd grind? Random event? Both? I don't know. One day she just stopped showing me the same event as the last 30 times.
And there are a lot of girls in this. Lot of areas. Too many. Far too many for this grind. This terrible progression. Even skipping past the over the top spam of identical scenes, it takes ages. To get anywhere. To do anything.
And then when you DO finally get somewhere, you get like 1 'talk to them option', 1-3 repeated, short, koitatsu sex scenes and maybe a seemingly pointless option to headpat them.
Also sometimes it'll waste your day having some random glitchy shit, OH SO SPOOOKY 12 year old looking girl covered in shadows walking at you, etc. Shit son this is soooo random and spooooky and I'm sooooo invested in this story bro. Sooooo invested in 'you visited x, nothing fucking happened x 50, oh shit a ghost!???'.

Its got some of the worst progression seen on this site. And that is fucking impressive. Its grindy. You can't tell if you are making progress. You have an event list; it lists events. How do I do them? Doesn't say. Are events happening on X day guaranteed, rng, do I need to visit a girl, phone her, phone her at a certain time, visit her but somewhere else, visit ANOTHER girl while she's there? I don't fucking know. I'm not tabbing out to a wiki every half a second because every single girl, of like fucking 30, doesn't do anything at all, ever. beyond refuse to see me or repeat one scene.

Its not worth it. Its just yet another koikatsu made game with an ugly mc, generic girls, meh writing and bad sex. But hey at least they call you daddy a lot in this.
Also the game starts off with some 'I'm so high IQ bros' rant from the dev about reality being boring yada yada, the game will be so weird , yada yada, but its, boring fucking waste of a day glitch scenes aside, just a boring harem. Maybe it gets better later? After 1000 + days?

This review is for v 0.15.0 Part 2

Let me see... when this game first came out, I was all interested and excited about it. By v. 0.5.0, I was only ST starting to be discouraged in the game. By the time v 0.15.0 Part 2 came out, I had lost all interest in the game. What happened you ask?

Renders: 5 out of 5 - The renders were the ONLY thing good (at this point) about the entire game.

Story Line: 1 out of 5 - The story line followed no logical progression, possibly because of the Sandbox aspect of the game. There were no hints, assistance or real logic to what part of the story line you followed at each point in the Game Time-line. Instead it was a "hit or miss" if you actually found all of the necessary events within the game or the necessary points (love or lust) to allow you to advance with ANY of the girls in a reasonable manner. This game SERIOUSLY needs a REAL walkthrough, not some incomprehensible "guide" that does nothing to guide you in any way.

Also, the hints NEED to be clickable with hints to move it along. Sadly those are lacking as well.

3) Writing (both style and grammar/form): 1 out of 5 - Sorry, but after all this time, the developer's writing style/grammar SHOULD have improved significantly. As they are, they still are bad to the point of ruining the story/game overal

4) Grind: 0 out of 5 - This is the absolute worst part of the game! Too much grind for little to no reward. And I am not talking about grind in only select parts; I mean too much over the entire course of the game, with no idea of what or where to grind, the potential rewards of said grind, nor any hints of same.

Other detraction from the game: TOO MANY of the female characters within the game, the basic sameness of those characters, no growth of the MC in his personal progress, the stupid and ridiculous "horror" elements within the game.

As such, I could not recommend this game to anyone, unless they ENJOY random activities with no purpose except as filler to drag out the story for as long as it can be. As for me, unless and until this game is immeasurably improved, it will remain a deleted game on my hard-drive.

I kind of like the art and the harem type of game. Everything else just isn't very good. The gameplay is grindy and pointless since you need a walkthrough anyway or you'll miss things you never knew where there. You need to raise affection points and maybe lust points but you have no idea about the order of magnitude you need for events. Then there are time of day and day of week requirements for unlocking events without even the slightest hint. The backstory feels pointless and off-putting.

There are too many games out there that if I have to grind for any length of time I've moved on to something else. With the console log 'fix' I thankfully could bypass 98% of the grinding in this game and enjoy the story, the relationships, and the lewd content.

I just passed day 145 and find the dialogue and story make me laugh out loud more often (not that I didn't laugh at some of the great humor earlier in the story). This is a fun harem story that sort of breaks the 4th Wall sometimes as it refers to itself as a lewd game or the characters being characters in a game.

The artwork works great.
The UI options with an event tracker, character event tracker, replay scenes, etc. are all top-notch features.

I'm not one to usually write reviews but damn this game definitely hits different. The game features a diverse cast of characters that all have their own unique goals and struggles. As the protagonist you build relationship and lust points up with each of the main girls. I would like to warn those who are looking for a quick fap to look elsewhere as this game spends most of its time building up the story and relationship between the characters. While there is plenty of lust scenes to enjoy, they definitely feel overshadowed by the mystery surrounding the story and development of the relationships between the characters.
Overall I love Lessons in Love and can definitely say without a doubt it is one of the best story driven visual novels out there!

Lessons in Love is another of those kinetic visual novels that uses a basic map navigation screen in the place of a fade to black scene transition screen. Like all of those it has almost no player agency and it has no respect for the players time by having meaningless filler grinding which likely doubles or triples the play time. It is all too obvious that the creator either added the map and grinding for people who want to pretend that adding a pointless map as a scene transition screen and, grinding makes this Grand Theft Auto or Breath of The Wild, or is one of them themselves.

The game centers on a reincarnated soul who gets to steal a teachers body and have sex with his students. Lessons in Love creator likes to 'hear' the sound of their own voice. Which is a good thing and a bad thing. On the good side Lessons in Love has better than average writing, for a kinetic porn novel. On the bad side the writing is bad by anything but porn standards. If you have never read a book or seen a decent movie then the less than one-dimensional characters in this kinetic novel might impress you. You have loving horny love niece, you have self-harming lesbian who pines for popular girl, overweight low confidence girl and other too familiar trope characters. There isn’t a a great deal of sex scenes so most of the time is spent in far below franchise fiction level lifeless prose in a generic porn anime. There are fourth wall breaking moments in the story where you are noted to be a player of a kinetic novel that are supposed to evoke curiosity maybe even reflect on what you are doing in the ‘real world’ but, these scenes are as lacking in creativity/life as every other scene . Everything is simply horny teacher in a terrible anime with characters that it would be too generous to call one note, doing everyday things. It tries to tug on your heart or make you laugh but, it fails at every step.

This would be a lot better without the map and without the grinding and have automatic scene playing as the player has no input anyway.

I guess I'm not the target audience for this game. The writing would be good, but the dev is obsessed with sequences where everything goes cuh-razy and they get to "write" by rolling their face across the keyboard. This could be engaging or interesting if there were ever any sort of substance to them or coherent hints of some larger story but it's got the Lost syndrome of just building a bunch of mystery and never paying it off past restating the foreshadowing from the opening scene. Maybe they do have a plan for it, but all I can see is a writer clumsily fumbling to make things seem bigger than they are and hoping they never have to pay off the debt. It also doesn't help that the player character comes across as an absolute chode.

Gameplay-wise, it the usual text-based scene hunting. Nothing special, but it works if the writing is good. However, in the later stages finding the scene triggers becomes a massive chore and I just gave up instead of looking for a walkthrough.

I guess the real measuring stick for if you'll like this this is if you were impressed by Doki Doki Literature Club and would like to see that a dozen times in a row and with porn.

Goddamn dude, this is one for the ages

Every two weeks (he updates every two weeks) I know that I'll have a day that I just feel bad where it feels like I'm just an empty shell and it's solely because of this game. it's not sexy, and during most sex scenes you're just uncomfortable

10/10 literally cannot recommend enough

Are you looking for a Visual Novel that's a quick fap? Then this is very very very definitely not the game you're looking for.

But if you're actually looking to a Visual Novel to spend time with, getting immersed in a group of well-written characters with a frankly startlingly
well-written story? STOP READING THIS REVIEW RIGHT NOW AND DOWNLOAD THE GAME.

It's not a game for the faint of heart. There are horror elements, but the part that will stick with you is the pain of seeing the girls of Kumon-Mi and the emotional problems their character and the callous world has brought upon them. Oftentimes, in spite of the fact that nothing is real, the game will be terrifyingly real.

I haven't found a game yet that scares me like this. And yet, in spite of how horrifying and tragic this game can be, I have not played a more beautiful game in my life. Play Lessons in Love, please.

Lessons In Love does not belong on this site. This game is special, and it should be talked about is hushed tones and respected as one of the best told stories to every grace the halls of pornographic video games, not lumped in as another thumbnail alongside an assortment of hundreds of trashy model-swapped jerkfests.

There are 30+ girls in the game currently, all of them are absurdly cute and very well written, such that even with such a massive cast every single one of them feels unique and none of them can be easily summed up with a simplistic archetype. Some of them are wildly fun to be around, some of them are awkward and tough to get through to, some of them have shockingly dark backstories and some of them are so painfully relatable that I wind up questioning if this is an H-game or some sort of experimental therapy. Most importantly, every girl has a level of depth that may not be apparent from the beginning but becomes more apparent whenever you spend time with them and see them deal with new situations and interact with other characters. Even if a girl doesn't seem up your alley initially, I can almost guarantee that they will win you over once you get to know them.

Visually, the game is phenomenal - yes, it is using Koikatsu models but the things the developer does with lighting and camera tricks makes the production value absolutely dwarf any other game of the type. This isn't necessarily super apparent early on, but as the game progresses it is genuinely pretty mindblowing what can be done with such a well trodden posing tool.

Audio wise, the game is absolutely loaded with fantastic music. Yes, you absolutely should have your volume up while playing this porn game. If you live with others, get some headphones. You won't regret it.

Finally, there's the story, and by God is it a story. At risk of spoiling someone's first experience with the game, I won't give any specifics about the plot itself. All I'll say is that the writing in LiL is unbelievably good; the game can go from ridiculous and wacky teenage hijinks to seriously heartfelt to surprisingly disturbing and at no point does it feel tonally out-of-place. The entire story is a balancing act of keeping this massive cast of characters interesting and relevant while also progressing each and every one of their personal stories and driving the main plot forward. It's a herculean task and I would say it's impossible for such a plot to work but after a year of development and over 600,000 words the game has only gotten better. Playing Lessons In Love is absolutely a commitment and it shouldn't be for the faint of heart, but if you allow yourself to get caught up in it there is an completely absurd amount worth jumping diving into here.

If I were to make one criticism of the game currently, it's that the introduction and tutorial period is a little slow. It is not bad by any means and it does a decent job of introducing the initial cast of characters and the world itself, but it does take a few weeks of in-game time for things to really open up and for you to begin to properly get to know the characters beyond the basics. If you decide to play the game but don't initially see what all the fuss is about, I'd strongly recommend that you stick with it at least Day 25 or 30 at the minimum. It's absolutely worth the effort, and once you get past the initial hump the quality of the game continues upwards, getting exponentially better with every new update.

If you're potentially interested, then stop reading reviews right now and go download the game. I promise it's worth your time.

Still don't get it? Don't want to wait for a 4GB download just for another stinkin' Renpy porn VN? Continue at your own risk (mild spoilers ahead, although no specifics).

Honestly, Selebus couldn't have made a more beautiful game. It's a game full of raw emotion, and that's the real horrifying part of this game. The game is well wrote, the characters are to die for and literally some of the most lovable characters out of any game I've ever played. The real horror lies in just how real some of the situations these characters are really going through. The world going to shit is just an added bonus. The writing is hands down 10/10, surpassing even titles like "The Letter", "Doki Doki Literature Club" among other triple A horror visual novel titles. Not to mention the amazing community he has on discord where you can spend hours and hours discussing the intricacies of the game.

Selebus, if you are reading this, thank you. This game has made my boring life a lot more fun. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
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This game... I don't even know where to start. The porn is the least interesting thing in this game, and I love the porn in this game.

Just... there is no other game like this and there will never be. I truly think this is one of my favorite games I have played in a long while, not just porn game but a real game. The last time I was this addicted to a story was God of War. I love the story, the horror elements, how the characters feel almost too real, it's almost creepy how alive they feel when you speak to them.

You start the game for the ass, but after an hour all you want to do is learn more about the characters, their problems, and the world. 11/10

This games has some incredible upside:

• The story is really interesting, some characters have some pretty emotional story that blends well with this harem theme
• The humor is incredible, the fusion between memes and 4th wall break make this game one of a kind
• There is also a really good amount of H content with almost every characters.

It's always tragic when I've got to change my review. Especially when it was a 5*, and it transforms into a 1*

I guess one of the worst parts about this game, are the 'puzzles'. They are not clever, they are purposefully as dumb as possible to make the player annoyed with the game. And Selebus admits that. I'm not going to watch a 'happy scene', which is a cringefest, for mystical clues about what could be the answer to something on a sex game. This is a sex game. And yet it wants you to consider your own life, write down pages of useless notes, and be a sad emo kid. This game is for people that hate themselves and can't accept it. It would be fine if the puzzles tested your intelligence, speed, or anything else. It tests how bored you are

The gameplay is basically a repeating loop of you watching the same boring scenes over and over again. Unless you play update to update, you will get lost for 90% of the time that you play. Luckily I was never that far behind, but to any new player without a guide, you're pretty fucked. Not to mention that it's currently 100 hours and you can do nothing with over 75% of the characters. All you can do is watch the fun filller events and bore yourself to death. If you want to do anything with your favourite character, you've only got 10 updates and a tsunami of snooze fest storylines to go

I think the inner monologues are a meme of this game. People don't like them, because this is a sex game. And the main character switches between a goth and a sex offender every five minutes. Pretty much every event will mention the fact that he wants to fuck the girl he's talking to, her mother, or her friends, and yet a minute later he's reflecting on how bad life is. How worthless it is, and other sad emo kid thoughts. It's strange. Nearly as strange as the cult that follows the game so closely

I found the following of summertime saga to be cult-like, but this if off the charts. His patrons are beta's that worship him. It's all very cringe. Again, this is a sex game. You aren't going to find the purpose of your life playing this game. I think some people didn't get the memo. He has said that he has made this game as long as possible, so that he can maximise his profits. Which would be a normal thing to do. Except he's making you waste 100 hours of your life (It'll be over 500)to get anywhere with it. The best part about this game, the length of it, is only there for greed. Not for passion. It says it all

But I digress. The game itself is boring. It started off well, and turned into a depressed emo child's diary. One that is a future sex offender when he grows up. I can't look at this game anymore without cringing

I never put any reviews for any games in this sites

Even I already download and played more than 50+ games

First time I use search function for School settings dating sim game, it recommend me Lessons in love, and all the tags interest me. But after playing the game I don't give a single shit about the ecchi content and instead engaged by the story

I far more interested in learning each of my students background story, and try to fix their problem instead of fuck their brains out.

The feel, the sass in the writing, the 4th wall breaker, and the dark side of the story also pull me to keep playing it

Hoping for continuous update from the game in the future!!

This game really surprised me. Mostly because it's genuinely well written - definitely one of the best-written games I've yet seen on F95. The characters are exceptional - all of them are believable, have distinct and interesting personalities/issues, and are easy to care about.

The game also strikes an excellent balance between humour (YMMV, but I enjoyed it and more than a few times actually laughed out loud), sex scenes, psychological horror & intrigue, reflections on the main character and his impact on the people around him, and an occasional winking meta-humour, which again YMMV on but I quite enjoy.

It also addresses some unusually serious issues in some of the character arcs for this type of game, such as and does so in a grounded and sympathetic way. Putting themes like that in a porn game is risky - it would be very easy to mishandle them in dozens of ways and make the whole game worse for having them in, but LiL manages to avoid that through strong writing and a good understanding of how those themes should be paced throughout the game.

Really, the only issues I've had with LiL is occasionally not knowing how to progress, either in a specific route or to the next main event, because of a lack of in-game signposting or hint system as to what the next requirement actually is.
Even that gripe is rendered somewhat trivial though, as the game does provide a link in the menu to its wiki, and a tracker of which events you haven't yet unlocked, so I was always able to look up the next requirement once I gave up on figuring it out in-game.

Overall, an excellent game, and surprising in the best ways. Brilliant work Selebus , and I very much look forward to future updates!

This game has superb writing. It has drawn me in to the point where I've become legitimately attached to certain characters. I actually care about their emotional states and I'm hooked into waiting for the next patch.

But wait! This is a porn website, so is the hentai good at least? Yea, it damn well is. It's animated well, and at good framerate. The characters have different physiques, and limits to how far they'll go with you.

It's a great example of what hentai games should be, and I hope you all support the developer for putting forth this effort. The only negative that I would have, is that the developer seems to prioritize character development over mindless sex and porn scenes. That's fine by me, as I enjoy reading about the characters. However, some people might be turned off by this, and skip through the story. I implore you to give it a chance and really read the story. It's well worth it.

A year... a year of greatness in one of the shitiest years ever.
A year of development of one of the best written and designed games in the VN universe. It's hard to believe that Selebus is alone behind the machine that Lessons In Love has become. The consistency and quality of each update is enough to make just about any game company jealous. Congratulations Selebus, I may not be your biggest backer on Patreon, but I am proud to support your project since your first update.
Happy!

Lessons in Love is a game that makes you feel things. Not always good things, but the experience is richer for the variety.

The pillar of this game is its writing. The writing is sharp and clever and ruthless towards both its characters and its audience in the best way possible.

This is not a game that coddles its players with banal fantasies. It is a game that picks away at the edges of such fantasies and digs into them to find the existential horror underneath. If you have ever been playing or reading an adult game and felt a vague unease because you realized that you liked a character too much to want to jerk off to them (probably right after having jerked off to them), this game will rip off that scab and dig its fingers into the wound. It will hold up a mirror and show you things about yourself you are deeply uncomfortable with and make you think about things you would rather forget.

There are characters and story arcs and even just individual lines that will take up space in your head rent free.

Lessons in Love is a story about fucking high school girls what it means to be happy.

I get it, you may have reservations. You may not like the art style. You might find the gameplay a little repetitive. This game isn't perfect. But it is brilliant and engrossing and there is nothing else like it.

(Review as of v0.13.0 Part2)

I actually dropped this game a long time ago because I was still new to the adult VN scene and didn't find a quick fap here. However, as time passed, I wanted something with more depth, so I decided to give it another shot.

I could sit here and type out an extensively detailed review about how spectacular this VN is, but I truly believe that would spoil the journey you go through that really makes this game stand out.

So I'll say if you are looking for:

• Naturally built character development for an extensive amount of characters, including the MC
• Well written dialogue that, coupled with the first point, allow each character to feel like they have their own unique personality
• A story that builds slowly but surely, where it's not all sunshine and smiles

then give this one a chance.

UPDATE (December 5, 2021): After reading some of the less positive reviews, I will admit there were some cons that I bypassed early on:
- Yes, it was difficult to tell how/when certain events are triggered. I actually don't know if this has been addressed in the vanilla game, but I use the mod that tells you when and how a certain event is ready to be triggered.
- Yes, there was a grind with affection and days. I used a save editor to update those to values that aren't blockers for me for story progression.