Ren'Py - Lessons in Love [v0.47.0] [Selebus]

[Reviewed as of update 0.16.0]
This game is an easy 5 stars, but I don't think I will ever play it again or see it through to the end. I feel like that review deserves an explanation.

This game is rough. Not in the sense that it's poorly made, but in the sense that it's hard to get through the story because of how emotionally taxing it is. I don't care about the horror bits. Games and movies don't scare me and the TV static and weird faces never bother me even a little bit in this game. The horror elements of this game are really tame. But around the end of Part 1, the game starts to take a really drastic emotional dive.

You have characters
It's genuinely a little disturbing, and not in the way these games usually are. Normally, "disturbing" in adult games just means a little blood or creepy monsters, but the last few updates left me feeling genuinely upset at times, and I don't consider myself someone faint-of-heart.

I could go on and on about this but I'll leave it there.

TLDR; The game has great characters, solid art (if you like this style), and surprisingly good and engaging writing. For that, I can easily give this 5 stars. But it can also be incredibly emotionally taxing. I recommend giving it a try for sure, but don't feel bad if you decide to drop it for a game that you can fap to that doesn't make you feel like shit when you get near to the end of Part 1 of the story.

I'm honestly not sure what to say about this game. Normally the horror tag would have me running the other way, but I got pretty far before I noticed that, and now I'm too invested in the characters to stop, no matter where the story goes (even if I'm not sure I want to know where it's going).

Gameplay is leisurely, allowing you to focus on narrative over decision-making (although there are a few gotchas to beware of). Renders are solid, though the lewds are relatively few. This is a slow burn game, but very steady.

Easily one of my favorites on the site.

One of those that is more the VN side and less ‘Game’.
It’s also not pron-on-tap: Yes; there’s gratuitous and exaggerated smut, but it’s contained within a novel, not akin to list of linlks on an ‘adult website’..

Ultimately; it’s (currently) a linear storyline, with minimal deviation possible from this planned path. But then; the author’s stength is in this writing; both dialogue and events / arc.
That’s not to say it’s just clicking the <next> button for each scene, as there is control afforded to the order, through prerequisites of other scenes, stats, locations, days, times.
The point to keep in mind is that it is a single interconnected story with multiple characters, rather than having mostly separate characters / routes.

On my first playthrough; I made the mistake of simply focussing on the characters who most appealed to me (Sana/Run/Yumi plus a couple of others), which quickly results in roadblocks from the ‘ignored’ ones.
The simple way to play this game is to not grind, but just prioritise each unique event as and when they appear on each day. And pay attention to the actual story / plot.

I’m being a bit miserly with 4/5 as it’s still being fleshed-out, and can feel like some parts (eg. ‘Happy Scenes’) and characters have been used and then neglected.
But it’s substantial, interesting, promising, and keeps growing.

This is why I lurk this site, for gems like this. Porn games with a heavy emphasis on the story are few in numbers but definitely provides incredible experiences. I've only finished the first chapter of the game but I'm already sold. The game is pretty jam-packed with content and there's always something to look out for while trying to get all the events. The game offers both comedy and psychological horror that really got me engaged in the story. The girls are pretty much all likable and include many different flavors of personality (though only some of them can engage in ero while a good portion of the cast can't). I'm not really a fan of VNs, pretty much prefer scrounging up shitty nip RPGmaker eroges, but for anyone reading this, this is definitely a must try.

Honestly my real main issue here is the MC, who acts like a dick and thinks with it as well but its reminiscent to harem protags who actually dicks his girls instead of being a dense shounen harem protag (only issue here being the age difference but who cares anyway, Nothing is Real). Nevertheless, the MC is still likable enough for me to push through the events and story segments.

Cheers to Selebus!

So, this is actually a pretty good game. Sort of. There's a reason I've rated it three stars. Part of me feels that's way too generous, and part of me feels it's pretty unfair. So I suppose that means it's probably about right.

Basically, this is unplayable without the progress mod. Currently, it's not even listed as a mod on the main post for some reason. This might end up out of date, but - go to the Guide link and then check the attachments for the mod. Get it. Don't play this game without it.

The game is needlessly complicated. I mean it's a renpy game, it's not actually complicated. But there's all sorts of weird triggers hidden in all sorts of ways. For example, a main story event that will substantially block all progress is triggered by going to a location and then bailing without actually doing anything there. I wish I was joking.

So. Yeah. Play with the progress mod, or just don't even bother. It's not worth your time without it. Even with it, it's a fairly substantial time sink. The mod will only point you in the right direction, unfortunately. And it's UI is slightly better than the built-in trackers, but it's still entirely hidden by default and requires you to go looking for what to do next.

I won't blame anybody for not wanting to waste their time with this game even with the progress mod. The content itself is pretty good, but it's not quick or easy to get to.

And this isn't just restricted to this. The same mindset that lead to the above insanity pervades the whole game. It's pretty happy to waste your time - and that's true even with the progress mod and if you actually enjoy the whatever insanity that pops up from time to time. If you don't enjoy it, there will be large sections you may as well enable Skip Unseen Text for. It's an odd one.

Edit: Holy mother of crap. It's even worse than I thought. You can get on sub-optimal paths WAY before you ever get notified via event tracker (even progress mod too). The only solution is to restart.

This game gives zero shits about your time. It's very good, otherwise. But. Even the excessive multi-click "..." transitions between every scene are hardcoded. You can't even easily mod them out. And if you went to that trouble, you'd need to update the mod with every game update.

So, I mean, it's kind of a question of how much time you're willing to burn here. I don't think I'm alone in being interested in more games than I can actually play. I'd strongly suggest just going and playing the other games you're interested in instead, or finding a way to just view the events directly - such as a complete save and using the esc menu tracker to replay them.

And I'm the guy sitting there shaking my head when people complain there's not enough action in a game. The point of a game instead of trekking off to one of the many, many, many porn sites is that you can get a nice story and all that. So, yeah.

Lessons in love is an absolute gem, a completely outstanding experience that only very few VN's in the industry could achieve.


The developer manages to repeatedly deliver some of the best writing I've ever seen in the industry. For example, the writing is structured in such a way, that it successfully achieves to touch me emotionally on a completely another level. This game has moved me countless times, and i could not be more satisfied with the writing in this game. To be quite honest, I originally came for the lewd content, but the story and writing completely changed my expectations. The lewd content in this game is good, but it is not what I stayed for.

The plot and characters are extremely well developed, every character is presented with each of their problems and personalities and the MC is thrown into the lives of said characters, being forced to take certain choices, which will inevitably have a massive impact on the story in the future. The complexity of each character and story, got me really passionate and interested in these topics. I have never ever, been so invested in the story of a visual novel, but the developer just manages to deal with this extremely well.

Attention to detail and complexity is extremely apparent in the game, due to this, there is a lot of replay value, in almost every event you will notice something interesting and new, that you did not see the first time. Lessons in Love has a massive lore, small hints are hidden in many of the events, but as of version 0.16.0, you will not receive any concrete answers on some of the games lore and story, therefore you are left to form your own theories and ideas, which is a massive quality in my opinion. People gather on the discord community, to share their ideas and theories.

Another huge quality of the game is its originality, no other VN's I've played and know of, manages to handle such touching and sometimes dark topics, the game is such a breath of fresh air.


The only critique I have is the slightly lackluster UI, and that the game can get a bit grindy sometimes, when required to advance affection and lust stats in order to progress the story. Thankfully, the upsides completely outweigh the downsides of this game.

In conclusion, Lessons in Love is without a doubt worth it to check out. I could not thank you enough Selebus, for providing this awesome experience for us all to enjoy!

10/10.

This is a great game.

Forget for a moment how fast the dev churns out content, how much of that content is released for free every 2 weeks, etc. The characters are all fascinating, the game within a game concept going has me intrigued, and frankly I have every reason to believe this will be finished one day even with the massive scope of the project (and that the payoff will be worth it).

This is a project I plan to stay with for a long time.

So, like everyone has said - its super long, it has a bunch of distinct characters, it's really grindy until you get how the events are triggered, if you like the art style then its the best of the genre, the UI/interactivity is low, the writing is exceptional, its occasionally laugh out loud funny, etc.
BUT.
I used to really really like this game (and i still support it on pateon), but the more I get into it the less I find I enjoy it.

The fundamental problem is that roleplaying as a child-grooming sexual predator is tolerable in games like this - until the writing gets good enough that you actually think about what you're doing. I don't really want to play a game where I'm engaged in the story while also despising the person im playing as.
I get that the unlikeability of the MC is a deliberate choice, but it's a deliberate choice that I'm not really down with and honestly selebus hasn't done anything interesting with the MC beyond "look at me im such a bad person but everyone loves me anyway".

selebus has the emo turned up to 10 and he should seriously consider dialing it back to a 7 or 8.

The Game had the potential to be one of the best vn because of it somewhat interesting premise but man the grind and ui of this game is terrible which makes playing it feels like a chore watching same boring scenes again and again just to increase 1 point or so in some girl stats and repeat and there are like many girls so you have to do it for all of them the game keeps telling me to be “happy” something which i find hard to achieve while playing this grind fest of a vn yes there are some good story events in it but the grind and terrible ui kills all the fun.

Can I copy-paste the review below mine? Because that is exactly my experience.

It's grindy and repetitive as fuck. I got some girls to like 30 points but nothing is happening. I give up. I don't have the patience for this kind of "gameplay". I'm just cycling through the same scenes again and again and I can't get any progress.

The UI is absolute garbage. I get the choice between "going somewhere", "calling someone", and "Invite someone over", but the last 2 options don't do anything! Yes I can call Ami and get a repeating meaningless scene, but none of the other girls ever pick up the phone! How about you show me who I actually can call instead of filling the menu with dead ends? How about any indication of where there is new content and which actions just repeat some recycled scene.

Also I've seen the going-to-bed-then-waking up scene so many times it makes me wonder if it really needs to be there. Just cutting to black would be an improvement.

This dev has less than zero respect for the player's time. If the Dev is reading this, try playing through your game and 1. Time how long it takes, and 2. Ask yourself "is this fun?" while repeating the same scene a million times to get +1 affection. Hint: It's not fun.

There's some nice bits in there, but it's so thinly spread out throughout the boring grind I don't feel like it's worth my time at all.

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).