Ren'Py - Lessons in Love [v0.53.0] [Selebus]

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.

I played this game a year or two ago and never came back to it, but I stumbled upon it a few days ago and forgot why I left this game in the dust. Well, after starting a new game, I'm beginning to remember exactly what irked me.

As everyone's said, the writing and general "plotlines" are pretty good. But I'm finding it extremely difficult to relate to the MC and his choices. I don't know if the dev wrote him to have Asperger's in mind or what, but there are countless situations where I'm thinking "Why the fuck would you ever say that?" or "Who actually talks like this?"

Additionally, a majority of the general dialogue for all of the characters, not just the MC, feels like a stream of consciousness with no substance to it. It just feels like things are being said just because they can be said.

I hope I'm not the only one thinking this because it seems pedantic, but it's something I picked up on immediately and I can't get over.

Otherwise, the game is certainly better than most in it's category. However, it does fall into the trap many sandbox-y porn VNs fall victim to as well, which is grinding repeated interactions for arbitrary points.

I found out what the horror tag was for.
Despicable sandbox, no choice on MC behavior, etc. I don't like loli at all, but I saw the notes, as well as the horror tag. So I gave it a chance.
The beginning is nice, there's a "horror" vibe that quickly disappears (I haven't finished the game, maybe there's more horror afterwards).
You get the occasional flash of image, but that's about it.

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I'm modify my message to add that from the start everything is unhealthy. The mc is a p*do who bizarrely compliments minors (you can find their ages in the Care packages) and clearly wants to have relations with them. In short, it's just unhealthy and doesn't make you want to continue the game.

In the end, I'd say that's the horror of the game, playing a p*do.

This game is a hamster wheel of emo cynicism, and yet it's hard to look away.

If that sentence feels polarizing, good, so is the game. Whether or not that's on purpose is arguable. I usually try and judge a game more on how well it fulfills the developer's implied intentions rather than how well it satisfies my personal preferences. Thus, I would overall call this a good game, but only because there are enough green flags littered throughout to be worth racing through all the red ones.

+ tons of content
+ skilled writing
+ good designs and details
+ lots of unique and deep characters

- everything else

Gameplay: 1 / 5

It's the worst kind of visual novel, the one with clickity sandbox grinding. You will be repeating a lot of nothing to get anything new. Repeating the average/good sexual content between filler yields no benefit but to keep you sane as you circle this bizzare toilet of an experience. The skip key isn't just a friend with benefits anymore, here it is your bestgirl waifu.

You'd think by playing for a while that it's a sandbox with choices. But it's a fake sandbox where to get any content you have to do all the content. Nothing is actually optional except how long you're willing to put up with the grind to access new scenes.

Is it bad on purpose? Maybe. But that doesn't make it any more fun, and in fact makes it worse than a normal bad game, but we'll get to that in the story section.

Sex: 3.5 / 5

The dev definitely has writing skill. And while they squander most of that skill on stretched out, repetitive, existential dread, it does occasionally bleed into some sexy dialogue and well written sex scenes that are also nicely rendered and have a lot of nice details.

But like the rest of the game, it comes with a catch. The dev clearly understands how these games work as the whole thing is a dark parody of a hentai visual novel, and this absolutely shows in the sex scenes as well. You can't write and execute this kind of stuff without having played a bunch of it yourself. Yet the goal here seems to be to make you feel guilty and shitty about liking this style of game at all. Rather than celebrating the degeneracy, Lessons in Love would rather scold you for it. It only lets you get away with enough getting off to keep you playing.

I would unironically tag this as humiliation fetish porn, but not because the characters in the game sexually humiliate the protagonist (though this does happen as well a bit). It's actually because the dev sexually humiliates the player. Am I into that? No. But somehow there's enough enjoyable stuff around in the 3/4 of current content I've gotten through that the rest didn't feel like a total waste of time as a porn game, but it does slip off the edge it tries to ride often.

Story: ? / ?

What a beautiful mess. It's like slowly and painfully excavating a buried dinosaur and hoping all the bones are there and that they fit.

The theme of the game is guilt. Prepare for a lot of assumptions and a bit of projecting, but the more I think about it and the more I play the more convinced I become. Just know that my major beef with Lessons in Love is not that it failed, because I'm pretty sure all of what I'm reading into is intentional, but that I philosophically hate what that intention is. It is a compliment to say that the effect it had on me was definitely personal and emotional, just not in the way I think it was supposed to be. There's depth, but that depth stems from a shallow premise that I fundamentally disagree with.

Lessons in Love had a chance to be that top tier horror, silly dimension hopping, deep thought experiment game, but it refuses to stay in its lane and prods the 4th wall until it bleeds by being judgmental, not about the actions the insufferable MC takes, but about you in the driver's seat despite having no actual choices in that dark path. The plot's refusal to bend, while artistically consistent, is just so off-putting and unrelatable that I can't say it got beyond interesting to something great, though it comes close on many occasions.

It succeeds in that it wants you to feel shitty and powerless and frustrated. It fails in that it has nothing else to say about those things except that you should feel them. We all become Maya by the end, hopeless that our experience was worth it, and bored by the clichés the game criticizes yet does nothing to fix or adapt.

It just wants to wade in the mud; complaining about all the AVNs while intentionally just being another one.

And maybe all the pointlessness is the point. But that point being made does not make for a worthwhile experience in a porn game. This kind of story just isn't what I imagine anyone being on this site for. I've got enough deep shitty feelings IRL.

If you're into it, all power to you. I see all the pieces that would be worth loving, but the game tells me not to love it, so I don't.

The plot is so incomprehensible,

The "rewrite" event specifically disgusted me from the game.
Having to select "Shrine" x time to exit the "broken world loop" is stupid and unnecessarily frustrating.

Plus. the in-game walkthrough is poorly designed

I regret speding so much time on this game


However, i commend the incredible writing work; there is lot of content

This is one of the best examples of where a concept is simply stretched as far as humanly possible. I think in the first 2 years of development, this AVN was worthy of praise for being unique: it was one of the few that was actually a pastiche of a genre, this project with clear talent and effort that took the tropes of the "teacher corrupting students" AVN and gave us a far darker tone, a level of depth and nuance.

But now, in 2024, this game serves as a lesson to prospective developers that can be summed up simply as: the devil's in the details. From the outset, there's a level of polish presented that many other AVNs fail to have. There's an air of mystery, there's conversations that flow naturally, visually this is some of the best for the style. But the longer you go, the more you realise there isn't really any more beyond it. 6 hours in you will have the same air of mystery. The same flow in conversations. This AVN is like walking on a treadmill. Sure you're moving, but you're functionally in the same spot.

It's this strange example of a game that DOES have a good amount of sexual content, but also wants to focus on a slow burn. The slow burn is depressing and bleak to such an intense degree, yet you're meant to want to get your rocks off a couple scenes after. Do most people pop a boner soon after someone cries about missing their likely dead husband?

I don't blame or criticise anyone who likes this game. For all the slow burn, there's plenty of content to get into after the first couple hours. However, the promise of something more, something greater, ultimately feels unfulfilled. It's as if it started as a dark joke about the genre, and then became a dark joke about itself, the Ouroboros of AVNs. There's only so many clock motifs, mental breakdowns, "man I'm such a piece of shit" comments and depressing backstories you can read before you just get tired of the repetition.

Ultimately, this is one of the most tiring AVNs I've tried to read, with philosophy that never goes beyond the juvenile edge lord who read a couple quotes from Nietzsche and watched Clockwork Orange once. There are more enjoyable uses of your time.

I'm torn between a 4 and a 5 star for this game. The reason being, I very much enjoyed playing and there is plenty of content for it only being 0.36...like holy shit it just keeps going. I love getting lost in games. That being said, there are some parts that are just waaay out in left field and it kinda took me out of it and I found myself skimming once or twice. I'm making it a 5 star review because I DO recommend trying it out and I can tell a lot of effort was put into the game, and I will continue to play future updates, but it is very much not going to be everybody's cup of tea.

As for the game itself, this is not a quick fap kind of game. There is plenty of build up, there are a LOT of characters, and each of them feels unique in a way that is very impressive. No other game seems to have so many love interests that actually have content. Not to mention content that is well written.

Because yes, the story is well written. That being said, the actual "story" can be hard to follow at times if you're not paying close attention. BUT, even if you aren't necessarily following the overarching plot, each of the characters has their own story that is rather engaging.

The thing about those stories though, is that this game is exceedingly dark, despite plenty of humorous moments (including a LOT of 4th wall breaks). There is some taboo content, considering that the MC is a teacher at an all girl's high school. Yeah I know that trope is used a lot but in this one it's very much unlike the others. Most of the girls are of...questionable age, but those ages are never explicitly stated. There are also many different potential triggers, including, but not limited to: Sexual assault, physical assault, self harm, suicide, PTSD, eating disorders, grooming, child abuse, death and substance abuse.

The MC is also very much a narcissistic sociopath, but is at least self aware of the fact that he's fucked up for trying to fuck a bunch of high school girls. You can see his development over time, however, and how he slowly starts to care about the girls. That being said, he doesn't ever really stop being a narcissist while still showing sociopathic tendencies. (He cares about the girls, but at the end of the day, he still wants to sleep with them and will do pretty much whatever is necessary to do so.)

I found myself appreciating the fact that the MC stayed true to his character, but also occasionally wishing he wasn't quite as fucked up as he is. But that's just part of the game. It's an extreme roller coaster of emotions that I often found to effect me even outside of the game. It's very heavy and not for the faint of heart. If you struggle with certain mental or physical disorders or have any triggers that I listed above, you might want to consider a different game. But it's a journey unlike any other I've found on this site so far.

TDLR: It's a very good game. It's very long and engaging. But it's not a quick fap, nor is it easy or lighthearted. It still has plenty of humor (including a lot of 4th wall breaks) but lots of dark content and triggers. Proceed at your own risk. But if you do, you're in for a hell of a ride.

Okay so i’ve been playing this game for about three years or so every update and I actually quite enjoyed it. The characters are very good. The dialogue is nice etc. but as more and more events pop out it feels like it’s getting lazier and lazier like the writer doesn’t know what he’s doing or what his plan is with this game, which is okay I didn’t mind it at first the game being very long and such.

I subscribed to Selebus subscribestar and the bonus content you get a brief description about a few characters and it turns out one of them is 15 years old and she has a lot of sex scenes in the game. this really freaked me out because I thought they were all 18+ since they were in dorms and such and it said they were all 18 in the subscribe star. Fiction or not this is basically a pedophilia game it turns out all the students in the game are 14-16 average being 15, Rin talked about being moved up a grade which would make her 14 aswell as chika saying she was held back which would make her 16 aswell as selebus stated in the bonus content of her.

I don’t see the problem in making them all of age, since they are in dorms and don't have parental figures. also the lead character you play as is 31 so basically this game is about grooming your freshmen students. Other then that this novel was written really well and the characters are all amazing, its just disappointing

I have spent over 100 hours playing this game. It's addicting. Amazing writing - Can go from funny, to super sad, to super hot, to just disturbing. All the feels. It is currently the longest VN ever written and is still updated monthly-ish. Highly recommended. Although may want to avoid if you are just looking for porn.

I'll keep this review pretty short.

This is the only thing I have ever actually paid for on patreon, subscribestar etc. The game is very well written and has very endearing characters who are all unique and interesting and the main mystery/supernatural plot is addicting.

Do not go into this expecting a quick fap! There are a lot of H-scenes now but they can take a while to get to.

Install the guide mod! as trying to figure out what events will help progress the main events or other character events can be frustrating if you lose track. Its much better than alt-tabbing back and forth to the wiki to find the Daisy chain of events you need to do first.