Ren'Py - Lessons in Love [v0.52.0] [Selebus]

This visual novel has a horrible identity crisis. As a standalone game, it's got a lot going for it. The writer obviously has a natural talent with words, the overall idea behind the plot of the game (isekai where you've taken over a high school teacher's body in a world where the school year keeps looping and getting progressively weirder) is really intriguing, and most of the horror elements are legitimately creepy and unsettling.

However, the process of advancing through the game is a chore unlike any other I've had to do in any game I've ever played. GOOD FUCKING LUCK getting through chapters in Lessons in Love without an external guide. Everything needed to get through the story feels completely arbitrary, and I haven't even referenced the time loop segments that require you to solve absurdly obtuse puzzles to advance.

Which leads me to my main issue. This would be fairly interesting as a plain ol' indie game. A bit pretentious, with some spotty writing, but the effort and vision are clearly there. But what is any of this doing in a porn game? It makes fun of the genre while being a part of the genre. It constantly ridicules the player for what it itself is. "Time to do sex on your niece" it playfully slaps into a choice for you to select, when it is the game that is pandering to the niece-fucking demographic in the first place.

There's a lot to this game; I'll give it that. But maaaaaybe half of it is good, and even that's a stretch. For every heartfelt conversation the game has, it has another scene where no one involved comes out of it even remotely likeable. For every joke that lands, there's a horribly-timed, tasteless joke about rape. For every well-written character dealing with real, relatable problems (Rin, Futaba), there's a character that I just can't even imagine what happened writing their scenes (most of the second floor). I feel like I would be more willing to let most of this slide if the non-sexy stuff was profound or thought-provoking, but they're not. It's just a bunch of protentious fluff that constantly degrades you for attempting to enjoy it.

A lot of work obviously went into making this game, and I can recognize it for being of objectively higher quality than 98% of the stuff on this website, but that doesn't automatically make this a good game.

Erased my previous lengthy review to bring it down concisely.

This is like if a Westerner made a shitty isekai and was too obsessed with DDLC but didn't understand why that game was popular.

This game is all shock value. There is content, but it's buried under layers of pretentious narration, terrible grinding mechanics, and lackluster horror elements.

(Not to Mention Unvoidable ((without warning)) noncon and NTR)

2.5 Good Art

Lessons in love is a pretty good horror visual novel. It has a pretty interesting story and has some well-written characters that stand on their own, but it's also marketed to pornsick gooners. I dislike how long it drags sometimes but its there more so as set up like in Higurashi or something.

It's worth a play imo. I would recommend downloading the walkthrough mod just so you don't have to click around looking for scenes.

You should also avoid the discord. It's a bit of a cesspool.

There isn't any NTR. People saying so are literally delusional.

I've been holding off rating games. I have been following this game since day one, with it's ups and very very lows. The latest update is a return to the original plan. H-scenes and TONS of weird and degenerate dialogue.

And when I have to say "thats a sentence I would never think myself", I can't help but rate it 5/5

Pretentious word salad with poor art, hard to relate personalities on the LIs, weird AF MC, infinitely repetitive "where do I go next?" clicking... overall just a terrible experience.

A frustrating waste of time. Hard pass.

This a top tier VN disguised as a porn game, if you came here for a quick fap this is not the game for you, however I can guarantee that this will be an amazing experience for you, the writing and the characters are top notch.

It should be said before anything else that this game hits differently if you suffer from depression, and even more so if psychosis is one of your symptoms. I am not sure someone with those issues should play this unless they have figured out how to deal with it, at least as far as it can be dealt with. I am not a psychologist, Iam saying this because I have these issues myself and I can't imagine how much this game would have fucked me up 20 years ago. That said, I can't even begin to describe how much I enjoy this game. There are like... a BUNCH of warnings one should have before playing, though. First the age of most of the girls, and the inability to avoid h content with most of those girls. Second this is a LONG game, I can't imagine playing this as if it's porn. Third is the darker content, the game can be depressing at times.
All of that said, I kinda feel like it NEEDS to be set in a highschool, I just wish the main character were around their age. That said, even if you aren't into that, as long as it's something you are willing to tolerate you might love the game. It's honestly better in a lot of ways than the non-h slice of life games that I play. Not having any restrictions on sexual content makes it kind of interesting in that you can experience a lot of different "coming of age" type of content. It's not a thing that I ever knew would be interesting, but it turns out to be just as interesting as other slice of life type stuff. The game has mystery, friendship, drama, and plenty of H. The development of many of the relationships has a surprising amount of build up that allows room for teasing as well as progression and will-they-won't moments. The writing is shockingly good and the humor in my opinion is also fantastic. The graphics are perfectly fine as long as you are used to anime-style stuff. This review is less objective than I usually try for because the content of this game is rather quirky and I think that has more to do with whether or not you'll like the game than the graphics. The writing is I think objectively fantastic, though, whether or not you enjoy the topics and characters.

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.