Ren'Py - Living Together! [v0.41b] [Advent Games]

I have never ever planned to write a review for a game and to write a poor review for a product but here we are. Why? The game is frustrating on a whole new level. You can't even imagine the grind you have to go through.

Don't get me wrong I like myself a grind and a slowburn but the grind is NOT fun when the grind is solely based on RNG results of a conversation you put with the second character. And it can vary from the girl completely hating you to giving you a +1 point. You can talk about the same interests again and again and the results vary. Why? Just why?

No rollback feature? Don't get me wrong there are hundreds and thousands of skillfully written VN's and Simulators with realism in mind out there but they don't have their rollback feature removed. I can understand the developers point of view but not every player has to suit the same way of gameplay.

What angers me more is that this game is such a wasted potential (Hence the reason for me giving a 2/5)
Remove or fix the RNG so it feels more rewarding to play the game itself and include the rollback and the game instantly would be a 5/5.
The game is unplayable at this state (Version 0.39)

I started the game in the best friend route, as a trader, which supposedly is a really powerful combo, but still took way too long to start being trusted. Most games of this genre usually throw in a bone to keep you hooked, and yet, I still haven't seen anything worth the wait.

Man, I hate to be critical of a free product, but this thing is not a game, it's not a visual novel and it's not a simulator.

-The controls feel designed to constrain player freedom. There's no "back" button in any menu, no way to rollback a decision or click, no way to fast-forward repetitive screens, no way to end the peeking 'cutscenes', no way to skip ahead to the weekend, no way to end the weekend when there's literally nothing to do, no way to quickly save and load games.

-Every game mechanic lacks clarity. There's no way to tell what she'll be interested in at any given moment, it's not clear if there's even an underlying logic or sheer randomness, the different money-making options are outrageously obtuse, there's no estimation of how likely any given action is to succeed or fail, no indication of whether chances can be improved, no indication whatsoever of how when and where to see any new scenes, it's very hard to tell how much energy any action costs, how much is replenished by drinking each drink, how much is replenished by sleeping or if it makes a difference how early you go to bed...

-The grind is unbearable. It takes hundreds if not thousands of clicks to get the "attraction" meter up to 0. The UI needs a massive rework, and I don't see it happening unless you decide to burn it all one day and begin from scratch.

-There's no narrative. The sister character exists as a series of menus and parameters, with very few lines of dialogue. If the gameplay itself was fun and the rewards... existed, then this would be very forgivable. But since it's not really the case, I feel like this is all very pointless. I might be willing to spend a bunch of time and effort to slowly court and romance a real woman, but not a blow-doll, you know what I mean?

-The cryptobro aesthetic is... cringe. My dude, that community is already strongly suspected by outsiders to be riddled with full-blown PDF files awaiting their chance. I doubt they'll appreciate the association, specially after the whole "mental maturity should be enough" debacle. It seems like a critical lack of self-awareness. If a developer proudly signalled their catholic faith in their game about a priest that r***s children in an Irish boarding school, it would look just as bad.

-The branding. The fact that you describe your game as "will never contain r***" like the least ambitious moral grandstanding in history, but you can assault the girl in her sleep and cum on her within the first week, it makes me wonder how much you understand or care how consent works or why it matters. There's some really fucked up games on this site, but this is the first time that I find the developer creepy.

All in all, it seems like a first project for learning how to make games. That's great! Well, the only useful advice I can give you is that your coding skills are not the main issue here. Understanding player feedback and reacting accordingly (specially when everybody has the same complaints) is gonna make your games much better than slightly optimizing the code. NFT games are notorious for being extremely boring to play, despite everybody involved being relatively tech-savvy. You have a chance to be the first cryptobro to make a game that someone might play for fun, but for that you need to be open-minded and learn from criticisms. Good luck!

This is a "hopeful for the future" review and not really a review for the current game (.39). Biggest problems are all fixable with a few number tweaks and I really love the model so, I believe the game can do well in the future! The following is stuff I would recommend changing / looking at for the dev.


Making it so you can see the RNG on choices would be a big help. I don't hate the conversation topics idea but there are a whole lot of them and with how high the trust breakpoints are and how few "good" topics she can have, they do not feel worth trying to figure out. Just spamming Watch Something feels much better.

It isn't just the grind that is high that is a problem, but getting points with the current RNG is both a grind and feels unfair / unfun. Putting the breakpoints at 50/100/150 etc and making it more obvious that you have hit a break point with some kind of event would be a big help.

I feel like attraction is easier to get if you drink a beer / sake first, but I have no idea if that is true or just chance. The only surefire way to get attraction is 1 a day from headpats, but if you take the -1 attraction per day start then your grind will be SO much worse.


I either don't understand the stock mechanic or it is not working properly, no idea which but money just seems to vanish no matter what I do with it. Better explaining how you get / lose the money would be good.

A big part of these kind of games are the grind and slow burn yes, I don't recommend that the dev abandoned the slow burn or anything like that, but making breakpoints easier to get and making progress more obvious on how to move forward would both go a long way.

The game has repetitive dialogue. Nothing changes with increased trust or attraction.
The game is very much a copy of Living with sister but with far less content so far.
With my limited PC specs and renpy knowledge I reckon I can get where this dev got within a week. Maybe less.
The content at the moment is absurd. A ton of grind for 2 animations head pat and kiss. There's nothing in bed yet and you cannot "upgrade"/educate the MC, alcohol has no effect, so a lot of unfinished ideas.

The game takes a lot of clear inluences from the Monochrome series. The gameplay should be familiar to anyone who has played Living With Sister. It's grindy with a lot of RNG results.

Living Together is a visual upgrade with very little in terms of gameplay changes. The inability to quicksave and quickload or fastforward through dialogue hurts the experience some, especially when you're looking at the same results over and again or comparing it to other Ren'Py titles.

If you enjoyed Monochrome Fantasy and like the screenshots this games is for you. The young woman you're cohabitating with is lovely and the gameplay does its best to simulate intimate interactions and bonding experiences. It's very sweet, though getting to these scenes takes a lot of patience.

Grind simulator, literally non-existent content for hours of gameplay. A poor copy of Imouto Monochrome game, It's a Renpy game, but roll back is limited, unable to load, and unable to press right click for menu.

The idea of the game is not bad. However, its implementation is surprisingly ill-conceived, incomprehensible and uninteresting. There are too many actions that are repeated without understanding the consequences, and you do not know exactly what the steps led to - were they effective or should they not be repeated, except for the obvious ones, after which the end of the game comes. At the same time, the usual, useful and understandable save/load mechanism is distorted in such a way that it is inconvenient to use, and at first it is not even clear how.
If at the same time there were decent graphics, drawing of models or animations... And yes - there is none of that either. That is why the rating is the lowest. So far, this is a flaw that is not even worth paying attention to.

v0.39

Too much unneccesery conversation topics, like it was made just to burn players time, nothing more, noting less.

Save/load system... Well it doesn't works as it should, first of all LOAD is a "myth" it's something made up by some lunatics, we don't know what it is.
We can load game only by restarting it and save progress in the phone... It's annoying, uninteresting and not userfiriendly, cuz YES we have pages in the save window, but NUMBERS of the pages have the same color as backgorund.

Rollback function... It's a myth too. ( doesn't exist)
Same goes for the text skip function.

We have a "choice" in the start of the game where gameplay can be divided in more casual VN style or a Sandbox... but it seems it's just a placeholder cuz we can't set any of the options, game just continue and we face a brutal and stupid grind system.

Grind. Too much grind for nothing. I thought that 100 of trust would be - "Woooah! I trust you with my life, bro!"
But the dev tought otherwise. He thougth that useing default % system is boring, so we points isn't limitedby 100. a hundred trust points is just aone lil tier, which indicates you that the girl only STARTS to trust you...

Renders... Honestly, there is so "much" of them, that i don't have enough fingers to count them all! Especially, when i really don't have any...

So... yep, overall it's a trsh. I don't belive in any bright future of this project at all.
Too much grind. Not user-friendly interface in some places. Small amount of content during grind activities, so we basically just pressing buttons to press another buttons... We don't have any renders of "gym" which we are visiting for... what reason? (there is no any strength variable in the stats... we don't actually have any stats, except of the girl ones.)... Broken default renpy functions for no reason...

So yep, that's it. Do not spend your time on it. Just skip it or wait for the... v0.5-1.0... maybe tehre would be smth of interest, but i don't belive in it.

Dev brags about there being nearly infinite variations in the gameplay so you have to "learn" about her, I guess he forgot this is a porn site not an AI dating site. Have tried game multiple times on updates, still hasn't failed to bore me to death before a single thing happens, even with the sub version making it "easier" when realistically the sub version lowers some of the management but doesn't help with the most time consuming part of it.

review based on 0.39:

absolutetly NOT recommended!

I was intrigued by the description and the provided renders - but that's all.
First it looked as there is no way to save your game, but then i recognized an icon on your phone where you can save your progress. However, there is NO way to load saved games except on reset/restart the game, and even then i encountered several crashes and some of my savegames don't work at all. Also there is no "rollback" option.
Aside not being able to save and load propperly and in a convenient way, the grind is HORRIBLE. The whole gameplay is all but intuitive and you don't have ANY clue what to do. Even if you figured some basics out after some time and most likely after some "Game overs", the grind is absolutely boring, horrible and non-rewarding.
Before i deinstalled the game and put it on blacklist, i decompiled the files and had a look into the renders about what to expect if i could force myself through all that miserable gameplay and horrible grind => there is NOTHING rewarding at this point.

I really wanted to give at least ONE more star for the really cute and nearly perfect asset for the girl, but honestly everything else is so "not worthy" to get even the one default star, so i decided not to honor the only positive about this "game" at all.

You really shouldn't waste any time or bandwidth to download this (in my opinion) crap.

I assume all reviews above 2 stars are either made by people who never even played the game at all, by massochists (who like to torture themself), or made by fanboys/friends of the dev ... or they simply played a different game - who knows?
Giving 4-5 stars to this is so absurd and a huge slap in the face of all developers who actually put really decent and fine games out there and getting 4 stars for them. Equal this game to other 4-5 star games is like claiming that some old broken worn up Roler Blades are on the same level as a brand new Rollce Royce

The grind is absolutely ridiculous.

There's no gameplay to speak of.
There's no rollback, no autosave, and seemingly no way to save.

Actions seems to randomly gives a pisspoor amount of points, or none.
I ended up extracting the game to see what was in there, and there seems to be no content either anyway...

Ignore this, you'll only be wasting your time.

2 hours in, theres no load option besides resetting the game, there are 0 h scenes i have encountered, the attraction bar is impossible to raise, the best conversation topics that i had spent so much time trying to find out only give 3 affection, where as watching tv does 4?? this game is just lowk weird and i have no idea what im supossed to do

grind grind grind grind grind. no pay off, no indication outside of paying to go on trips that you are making any real progress. just a giant time sink. spent a better part of 3 hours just trying to make any headway and it felt like I put in a miles worth of effort just to move an inch. developer, games are supposed to be fun. your game is sitting at a 2 and a half star. clearly players do not really find this gameplay loop fun or rewarding.

Fun game, albeit very early in the process. It's a little quirky but shows promise. I enjoyed my time with it and will re-visit after an update or two.

Character model is cute and I appreciate the dev's inclusion of natural, unshaved pubic hair. Too rare in this field and it's very nice to see. Toilet peeping is always always fun!

Even the idea is good, there is no way you can win in any aspect. Anything you do, lose points, lose money, you dont have any idea what to do. I think you could be trying to be "good MC" days and days to get nothing

I would not even call this a game, it's more like grind torture. The cute little girl next to the title, and the "Loli" tag, get gamers interested, which is the idea I guess -- but then unless one has much deeper internal gaming mechanics knowledge than I have, one becomes lost in the infuriating, byzantine grind of it. No Renpy save or back controls, one has to constantly start again... I read a few of the reviews that aren't 1-star, and they seem really reaching to find anything remotely satisfying, IMO. Really, one of the worst AVN experiences I've had in a long time. Unless you enjoy grind for the sake of grind, I advise you to stay away. If I were the dev, I would seriously consider making this game a lot more User Friendly.

The game is quite promising so far. It could use some easier in game help, but then, more important is good game mechnics. If you like some slow grind before you get rewards, this might be a game you wanna check out.

It's a game scam, like a cheap plastic toy in shape of quality product.
Instead of reproduce Monochrome gameplay this fake game give you non-existing mechanics, described, but clearly not working, repetetive click-clack gameplay instead of exiting one in original, well, a couple of renders for fancy cover.
If you want those 3D renders, go and try, and be dissapointed. In any other case just play original. It's better.

as a person who was not born in an English-speaking country --> he uses a translator --> he asked too many questions at the beginning and too much description is unrealistic for me and it is impossible to choose everything at random sometimes it just doesn't allow other times I choose more features but I don't know who...

but the worst thing is that someone makes a game with early access and wants people to pay him support, and the game is unplayable, and what's worse, there is no room for "beta testers" to try all the possibilities!!!! the most important thing is the back bond, and if it is dev. he ignores it, it is clear that he will never have a project that will see the light of day or even success, there are thousands of games where the dev made a similar mistake and I have not heard of any of them making money or even being completed!!!!