Ren'Py - Lessons in Love [v0.48.0] [Selebus]

I have two reviews for this game: one is a 5 star and one is a 0 star.

This game is 5 stars if you:

• are willing to invest 100+ hours into a story and willing to waste dozens of hours on pointless grinding
• are not playing to bust a nut (you simply won't be satisfied if that's what you're after)
• are willing to tolerate the things listed below in the 0 star review

This game is better described as a work of literature than as a porn game. It's quite pretentious at times but the good parts more than make up for that. If you want more details, read any other 5* review

Below is the 0 star review, I originally wrote it as a joke but honestly all of the "criticisms" are legit:

I wish I could give this game a negative rating because it genuinely fails in every possible way at making my pp hard!!!! it's honestly kinda impressive... the author has conceived of completely novel techniques to make my pp soft in the context of h games... a true pioneer in the field of anti-erotic erotica

• the gameplay is so mind-numbingly boring and designed to waste your time... it kills my boner every time
• the ntr is so disgusting... it kills my boner every time
• the weird fixation on maggots and termites and birds vomiting into each others' mouths and one's teeth melting into one's own mouth until one suffocates to death, yadayadayada... is utterly off-putting... it kills my boner every time
• the part where the girls have real life feelings???!?!?! sir, respectfully, what the f** is this *****? im here for the pussy not for the moral dillemma?? it kills my boner every god-damn time!!!! :mad
• the mc is a total depresso espresso!! like seriously, how hard is it to fuck the pussy without wanting to commit sudoku?? kills my boner ***every*** time!!!!

in conclusion, lessons in love is a game.

Ok, this is my first review ever on this site, so here we go, I'll try to be spoiler free... I just finished all the content avialable. Also, English is not my main language, so, apologies if there is any issue on my writing

1) This game is incredible, but I clearly understand that not everyone would be involved on the topics it touch. There are some scenes that are really crude, or they make you feel like shitties person ever...

2) this is not the classical eroge or sex-game, yes, there are a lot of sex scenes, but it is much more than that, I would play the story even without the whole Harem theme

3) Talking about the story, the story it is awesome, it makes you question practically life itself sometime, Selebus has a way of writing some things that I do not really share, but I can count the with the fingers of one hand.

4) The puzzles are the only thing I do not really like on the game, I used the guide mode and the Puzzle guide on the extras section that provide the solution for the most complicated puzzles... and boy you going to need it, the answers sometimes are really vague or arbitrary...

5) IMPORTANT: Watch out epileptics! there are TOO MANY flashing scenes (not pun intended, literally flashes on the screen)

6) Selebus writes TOO much, sometimes there are a lot of text, if you like to read, great, if not, well guides are your best friend.

7) The wiki is pretty good also, I do not encourage anyone to skip content, but sometimes it is possible that the character is not relevant to you, then you just can read the summary of the scene on the wiki.

8) The characters feels really alive, they have interests, persoanlities and hopes, I've played a LOT of games from this site, and I feel like there is not game where the characters makes me fall in love with them like on this one.

9) The constant updates and the lenght of the game, this is the only game that it is not completed that I'm currently playing, if you are like me and you are waiting for the game to be completed, please do not, Selebus releases content every month and it is a lot of content each time, it is worthy to play it even not finished

I could keep writing but it would take me forever, this game is awesome, it broke for me almost every other game, I've never enjoyed any other game from the site like Lessons in Love.

Thank you Selebus.

Warning: this game needs an NTR tag

I'm talking straight classic NTR scenes in the past couple updates. As in love interests getting raped by other characters, but halfway through end up enjoying themselves, cummings their brains out, and talking about how much better the rapist is than the MC.

These scenes come out of the blue, like 100 hours into the game, after you have already grown attached to the characters and didn't think anything like this would ever happen.

For context, this game has 4 chapters, and for the first 3, nothing like this has ever happened. There are 35 girls in the game, and a handful of them were introduced as bisexual and interested in/dating another girl. But all of the characters who were in love with the MC were routinely, clearly, only interested in him. Several of them would tell him repeatedly that they will only ever be interested in him don't want to be with anyone else. Then chapter 4 happens and most of the love interests start sleeping with other people. Girls who were super loyal to the MC one chapter ago are suddenly going to orgies or having sex with their friends. This culminates in two classic NTR scenes in the two last updates.

Other than that obvious deal breaker, the pros and cons of this game have been pretty well laid out by the other reviews here. Great character writing. Shit everything else.

Rating this game is hard as hell: on one hand we have the good things: the game is huge, with tons of different characters and shockingly this is actually... Very well written ? I often find myself quite entertained by the back and forth between the characters, sometimes because they are hilarious and sometimes because they are traumatic. And on the other hand we have the bad things: this game has some of the worst game design choices i have ever seen. First, you basically NEED to play the game with a mod that gives you the hints for the events, sometimes you need to choose to do a specific thing on a specific day with a specific characters, there are dozens of options creating hundreds of variables, and sometimes only one of those will result in an event. "Ok, so i've downloaded the hint mode, now it's all good, right ?" Nope. The so called "happy events". Ok, listen, they were fine at first, they really were, they made the plot interesting and made you wonder what the hell was going on, but after a while, they get annoying, they are always the same gibberish and sometimes they force you to complete unreasonable stuff, or else you are stuck there: sometimes you have to input a code that was shown once an hour ago and if you didn't write it down for some reason you need to go check f95 for the answer, sometimes you need to answer a dozen of specific, open ended questions, and i have no idea how anyone would ever be able to figure it out on their own. The final thing is that sometimes your choices don't matter at all, sometimes you are forced to choose between the game making you feel miserable for what you chose or missing who knows how many porn scenes in a porn game, like "oh, so you chose this girl as the winner because you will get an H scene ? Let me show you the other girl crying in the bathroom because she worked so hard for a contest that she deserved to win, but you cheated to get the H scene". It's just... Annoying

I wanted to like this game, but the narration seems to want to shoot itself in the head by being so obnoxiously pretentious the whole way through.

Despite how annoyingly judgmental the narration insists on being, you really don't get to actually make many meaningful or fun choices on your own. It's borderline railroading, and I see that despite that some people enjoy the story for what it is, but I think the game should have just been a novel instead of making a lewd game. Because, as a lewd game, this game kind of sucks.

To me, it just feels like the game was influenced by watching a few too many episodes of monogatari.

Some of the characters are cute, almost in spite of the writing itself, but it gets ruined by the overall intent of the game being misaligned from what you would want from a game like this. The MC is also a total twat, and the narration itself insisting on trying to be "deep" instead of letting you have fun and make choices in your interactions with the characters. This is way more of a VN than it is a "sandbox".

To put it another way, a lot of these characters would be really enjoyable if they were in a different game, that wasn't trying to spite the player the entire time. I don't want to give examples because that would dip into spoiler territory.

There's a point in the game where it's heavily implied that you're now free to make your own choices and play the game, but then you're further rail-roaded for a good while longer before you're actually able to make "choices" because the game just can't help itself but be pretentious and controlling.

The character designs are decent, the writing itself could have been good (for a porn game) if the writer could get over himself, but the final product is kind of a stinker because it fails to accomplish anything it sets out to be. I'm not spooked, I'm not horny, I'm not blown away by a "deep and complex" narrative about any of these characters. I'm just kind of annoyed, disappointed, like my time has been wasted by someone who thinks more nonsensical bullshit = better.

There's also sort of an accessibility issue. The game says that audio is necessary for progression, but this game is almost entirely text-based with pictures of anime girls. It feels like the audio thing is only there to, again, be kind of pretentious. It's an issue for anyone who either cannot use audio for the game or cannot hear the audio due to a disability or something. The suggested solution for this by the dev was just to look up spoilers, which I don't think is a solution at all.


Story - 2.5/5: It tries too hard and comes off as pretentious and honestly entirely misplaced.

Character Renders - 3.5/5: They're made with Koikatsu (which I like), but there's not enough busty characters (which I dislike). The MC looks pretty bad though, which is a shame.

Playability - 2/5: It tries to be a sandbox dating sim, but it's too rail roading and you're just selection locations from a list and that's just not an enjoyable way to play a game. It almost should have just been a VN. Would have been a little higher, but there's a purposefully added accessibility issue just for pretentiousness.

Grammar - 4.5: The content of the writing is pretentious and annoying, but the quality of the writing isn't bad. Maybe the dev should try and write an original story on a site like FictionPress or RoyalRoad, as that might be a better place for it than a pornographic video game.

Amount of Content - 3: There's a lot of word salad in this game, but not a lot of meat in terms of what people are actually playing these games for. I'd rate it lower, but the sheer amount of words is kind of impressive for something that claims to not be a VN.

One of the most exciting and interesting h-games I've ever played. The game is not very strong technically, but in other aspects it is incredible:

1. Complex multi-layered plot and very rich lore
2. Amazing world-building - laws of the world, contradictions and paradoxes
3. Very memorable characters with lively personalities
4. Complex psychological and moral topics
5. Black humour and fun jokes.
6. Custom and unusual H-scenes

I supported this one for about a couple years back in the Patreon days. It was good then and going at a decent pace. Then it seemed to just stop going anywhere. The story got stale, the characters got stale, and the whole thing got boring. I played an update before, must've been about a year back, that I thought would get things back on track (involving an important character's obsession), but it ended up being resolved really cleanly. I was expecting (and hoping) for it to descend to a climax from there but it didn't- it was business as usual.

If there's a good game here, it stopped being that around two million words ago. I'm consistently shocked by the amount of people who have competing readings and theories about this text- it certainly lends itself to that, but how has this kept anyone's rapt attention this long? The writing is essentially a stream-of-consciousness rant at this point. It's cool that people are still enjoying it- it's just completely lost all of its magic for me, which is a shame because this was one of my favorites in the early days.

Story 2/5
Couldent get into the story its just a mess and boring, could be related to hating MC and hes crinigy and weird thinking and talking, hes just not for me, some story aspects just dident make sense to me either, like MC almost rapes a girl on the roof top and goes "sorry thats was not supposed to happen" "it was an accident"...girls should have called the cops on hes ass just like she talked about but nah nothing happens ofc, since MC can do no worngs.

But what really kills it for me is that its just another kinetic novel hidden behind a sandbox tag, which arent even a sandbox but just a clicking sim, the only reason i can see for this being made like this instend of a normal VN is due to not wanting to put the kinetic tag on, all you do in the "sandbox" is click a textbox like "bar" "dorms" "dojo" and on to go there and thats it, cant really call that a sandbox can ya....

Other then that you just follow a linear questline for each girl where you gain a point with them which is pointless since there is no relationship system, you cant lose points, you cant skip girls, you cant progress with one girl since questlines are tied together, its pretty much the definition of kineitc/linear gameplay and theres no freedom other then what order you do some things in but still forced do do everything so thats really not much freedom.

Theres a shitload of text which is does warn you about, but when you then finaly get to a sex scene it might just be a single image showing MCs dick in pusssy next image MC cums in pussy and sex scene done....in others that are animations you dont see anything no dick no pussy no penetration and as for virgin scenes theres no deflowering no blood no pain....theres just nothing thats done right in this game.

Girls 2/5
Just to many childlike girls with flat chests for my taste, i love lolis but to a limit and this goes a bit past that line, other then that they look ok face wise.

Animations 1/5
They are rare, bad cam views, alot of scenes arent animated, feels like softcore porn most times.

Sandbox and choices 0/5
Its just kinetic/linear and not the type i like and sandbox is not a sandbox just clicking sim.

Let me say that I really can't bring myself to sit through all of the story - I just don't have the patience. I appreciate the depth of the story and the effort the dev has put in, but getting deep into a porn game's lore and writing down hexadecimals just isn't for me. That being said - if you're paying attention at all, you'll know it has a gripping plot whether or not you actually pay full attention. The characters are memorable and lovable, and you really do start to care about them over time which I can't really say about most games.

It could really do with an official walkthrough mod because of how easy it is to miss just about all the stuff you need to progress during the "resets", and that's most of the reason I think it deserves 4 and not 5 stars. Still, quality-wise it's a cut above just about everything else.

It started strong, mysterious, creepy... it makes you want to know what's going on while questioning several topics from VNs in general and real life.

In my opinion, if the game was only 10% long of what it is, it would be a safe recommendation, but it's horribly long and has a lot of filler, incessant ranting that leads to absolutely nothing and doesn't mean anything most of the time, the progress is minimal and by the point the game is at (0.43) the tension and mystery have long since been lost.

Also the game mechanics are terrible, at first it might have seemed like it was on purpose to make fun of the genre, but after 300 hours of play it seems more like a punishment, what before seemed like criticism now seems like just ineptitude on the part of the developer.
The music does have some incredibly good moments, but it's mostly generic garbage.

Making an honest review of the game, it is mediocre at best in most aspects, I think I give it a 3/5 more because of the affection I have for it after investing so many hours than because it really deserves it.

this game is pretty good so far im sure it will likely get better but i cant give it a higher rating than 4 mainly because of the general weirdness of the story i get its a horror and phycological title but at the same point why mix that directly in to the hentai sense it is not very fun but this a side the animations are amazingly well done and the story intriguing and compelling i just don't think it fits with being a hentai game i could see it being a standalone game but mixing the hentai aspect with the horror aspect just does not work for me but if the dev made the story a separate game with a more story driven plot and the hentai parts of it a spin off with out the horror i would for sure check it out over all a great title just a little weird like if doki doki literature club was a hentai game

it is a game. and it is long. like, really long. there's some good writing. and sometimes you have to wade through pages of turgid nonsense. and bullshit absurdist reset gate events that would force me to stop playing if i couldn't look up steps online. it reminds me of a great fantasyish book i read, i then admired the author and went on to read more later books of his. but these later books weren't great in the same way, it felt like after spending years on one great book the author just sat down and got stoned every day and churned out enough pages for a new book every six months that had a couple good ideas and a lot of stoned psychobabble. so it goes.

its like katawa shoujo but for mental instability and ptsd. every characters has beautiful personalities even with all the issues and all of the fuckups they did. good comedy and great storyline, capable making you laugh and feels bad for the character. all the characters is crazy but all bangable (including sensei) totally worth the hot/crazy scale.

I was making a review while playing the game that was almost at 5k words raw, but in the end it doesn't even matter, — linkin park.

I can summarize easily with one phrase. "Convoluted writing doesn't equal to good writing"


Yeah, some use of it can make a big impact, but forcing it everywhere, and badly at that, ends up just being boring. And speaking of boring, repetitive ass gameplay loop of farming random points repeating the same text 10 times till you unlock the next scene, skip simulator.

If you want to lose some time, it is good tho. 2.5

Only playing the first 60 minutes of the game, my blunt personal impressions:

- an unrelateable MC who is very creepy and unlikeable from the start. a p*do r*pist. how to write any constructive review abt this?
- all the girls are 15-16yo minors (confirmed explicitly in the 'Care Packages'),
- the first few nsfw scenes just feel wrong. skincrawling uncomfortable, unhealthy dynamics. the antimatter of arousal
- edgy, shallow "deep" writing that is hard to tolerate because of how overly verbose and self indulgent it is. it's presented in a text box that is too small, using a light sans serif font which is hard to read. its not a comfortable reading experience for the eyes.

Conclusion: a big NO from me. not ever. no thanks. this isnt "weird"

I have played much games, but not as one being as attractive as this one, it has good animations and an amazing story, mixing goos comedy with a good horror, that makes you forget you are playing a porn game, its story is quite long on a good way, catching you and making you search on the wiki what to do next, it has good animations and good repitable scenes, this game is not for the people who are looking for a game with lots of porn scenes, as you have to proceed on the story to gain this scenes, this game is for people who appreciates a good narrative with some spice on it.

[I wouldn't call anything here a "spoiler" because I'm not going to talk about the story, because the story is very much secondary to the style in which it is told, but I am going to talk a little about the fluctuations in quality and my experience with the game, and if you want to really experience this for yourself, which you should, you probably shouldn't read this or anything else and just know that I think it's really, really good. Just be aware that much of the content therein can be really disturbing, so maybe read around a LITTLE for trigger warnings if there are certain themes that you aren't comfortable with]

LiL is really hard to talk about, especially if you're trying to describe it to someone scrolling through reviews deciding whether or not to play it. I was introduced to Lessons in Love a few years ago while I was scrolling through new indy VNs, just looking for something weird or creative. LiL caught my eye in particular because in the comments of the download section, someone had commented a request for an animation of "X character in Y position wearing Z outfit", as one often sees on these types of things. Selebus himself responded to the comment with a simple "not that kind of game". That stuck with me for some reason and piqued my interest for a VN which seemed to really aspire to more than just a neverending conveyor belt of pornography serving as the front for an eternal Patreon account (no shame in that, for the record ; this world takes all kinds).

Going into LiL with zero expectations is what made it possible for me to push through it, because, if you read reviews, you'll see a lot of people saying things like "best VN of all time" and "most beautiful writing I've ever seen from this medium" and, honestly, while I agree with BOTH of those sentiments, the first chapter (which is VERY long, basically the length of a normal VN all on its own) doesn't completely reflect that. The first chapter is good, don't get me wrong! I'd even say it's QUITE good, better than your average EVN, certainly. But the reality is, is that when people praise this game and give it 5/5, they're (at least in my case) talking about everything after about the halfway point of chapter 2 (i.e., a daunting 75 or so hours in), once basically all the exposition is done and the game can really start moving its pieces around in ways it can't take back.

The style changes gradually until it's almost unrecognizable. What begins as a very interesting slice of life with some very nice writing and very well written characters and very welcome poetic interludes becomes a virtuosic philosophico-poetic manifesto told through quasi-mythological, Lynchian dream sequences and delusions. Even if you HATE this game, you have to admit (assuming you get up to about chapter 3) it is without a doubt one of the most ambitious VNs of all time. Whether it lives up to that ambition, in my opinon, depends on how much you like reading through LOTS of poetry. Personally, I love poetry, and I think the poetry (especially after chapter 2) is genuinely exceptional. Your mileage may vary.

It's one of the best things I've ever read. Should you read it? Well, besides the poetry thing, that depends on your stomach for some rather dark themes and very disturbing, often violent imagery. Normally, I'm not one for a story that gets this dark, it's not usually my thing, but honestly LiL is so well told that I can't pull myself away from it even though almost every time I sit down to read it I either cry my eyes out or have a fit of anxiety and have to close the game.

It's good. Great even. What do you say about something that very clearly aspires to be literature, poetry? "Oh, Delillio's White Noise? 8/10, good story, good ideas, weird pacing". It's a VN that, at least once it hits its stride mid-chapter 2, takes itself very seriously as a real work of art and very much deserves the title.

I mean, this game is good, the psychological random flashes really adds to the game. Really worth your time if your looking for something out of only-sex cliché.
Only bad thing is you skip too much you will be likely be soft locked until you find your way out, but there is so many guides and mods you won't loose your head like the protagonist...
Ayane is def 1000/10 and i need more Yumi, too little Yumi tbh.

It has good moments but also sooo much bad ones. It feels like the author has scribbled down every single line of thoughts they had while making this. It also is trying to be edgy like a 14yold or Jaden smith, thinking that writing weird stuff is deep.
I gave it a proper chance but every bad sentence takes away from the game as much as every good one adds to it and this one has walls of bad ones. Writing stuff is not hard, knowing what to cut from that is and this author don't even try to cut anything.

During my time playing this game, I've felt like dropping this multiple times and I've definitely skipped at least 50% of the text in this game. So, why am I rating this game so high you ask? It's because that some of the scenes that do go hard, are so amazing at times. The ending of Chapter 3 and the contents of Chapter 4 are some of the best writing I've ever experienced.

Some of my complains with the game would be:

1. There really are too many characters in this game and that you can't really ignore them. You need to see the events for multiple characters in order to continue with the main story. (This is where majority of my skipping happened). Even though I'm skipping a bunch of text, I can tell that a lot of these characters feel so alive.

2. Using the third party hints tool is pretty much mandatory to progress in this game.

3. The jump scares and philosophy stuff occurs too much. This is definitely a case of "Less is More" imo. That being said, some of the good horror scenes are really anxiety and thriller inducing.

If there was a version of this game but with mostly important story events and less character development events, I think this game would be so much better.