Ren'Py - Living Together! [v0.47] [Advent Games]

Giant wall of grind, from the start you pick stats that debilitate you
Very little progression, thanks to the start you not only start further back but have to make up for it
Lots of Ren'Py options and features locked or blocked

Very much a "you have to play my game my way" type of game :/

Its basically another one of those cohabitation games ala sis-con. Ive played so many of these that merely looking at the UI alone tells me what to expect, and how the game flows. So on with the review.

Premise is simple enough. You play as a particularly hairy guy with or without income, forced into living alone with your younger, nubile sister who immediately gives out a big hug to her obviously not-creepy older brother. Yes, its obviously a fantasy. Through a few events, you then make the stunning decision that your life goal is now to fuck your sis, because what else is an honest, hard working onii-chan supposed to be doing with his imouto?

Gameplay is like all other cohabitation games. Its mostly point n' click, with a thin veneer of sandbox but not really. Your main task is basically to raise your sis's trust and attraction through a variety of actions that dont make any sense in real life. You balance out your work schedule with chores and interactions with your sis, reach certain milestones and unlock new actions.

The immediate issue you'll face is thus: everything seem so overwhelming and tedious. Even the mere act of talking branches out into multiple choices that dont give a single inkling of what to choose. Open up your phone and you're faced with a wall of apps that dont tell you what you're looking at, let alone its significance. To make matters worse, the dev seem to think that people play H games to do economic planning and stockbroking. I mean, in what hell do I have to give a shit about passive income when my main goal, surely, is to virtually fuck my sis. Worrying about money is something most people do in real life, and life be damned if they have to start doing the same in H games of all places.

H gameplay is also mostly point n' click, except the game is in fact gated via events, not stats. You cannot for example bathe together until after the restaurant date event. So why is it even an option from the start? As for the scenes, theyre good enough I guess, pretty much what youd expect from games featuring 3d models. There is slight animations but no VA.


Concluding...

Well, if you made it this far perhaps you're wondering why my score remains good, and thats because whether or not you like the ride, the pacing is excellent. Youre not immediately going from groping to sex in the space of a few days, it'll realistically take weeks before you even go so far as a handjob let alone full on penetration, therefore making the act satisfying when you finally get it. And it has to be said, that the corruption, for lack of a better word, feels natural enough to be believable without being too creepy.

If youre wondering why this game receives such scathing reviews, its because some of the gameplay design choices, ranging from the bizarre to pure tedium, does itself absolutely no favours, making for many frustrating moments for new players. Allow me to list down some quick bugbears;

- Putting an option to peek during bath sessions but then made it absurdly difficult, if not impossible, to succeed in the early game is just a dick move. Same for nighttime acts. If the gameplay is designed so its overwhelmingly unfavourable for the player to do certain things, especially lewd actions in a H game, then the option shouldnt even be there at all. And especially since the punishment of getting caught is basically a gameover, or might as well be one.
- There's just too many things in here thats just tedious shit. Doing groceries to restock on shampoo and sanitary pads are just redundant at best. Also, the papers please minigame, good jesus. Its a H game for fuck sake. At least its not mandatory, and Id be shocked if anyone gave a shit for it.
- Stat decay should absolutely have no business existing in a game like this. There's no reason why my sis's trust in me declines naturally without any input or event.
- I know its intentionally designed to make the save/load UI look better than it is. But seriously, just let me save by clicking the esc button. Doing it via an app on the virtual phone is just tedious buggery.
- Just take off the period calendar for fuck sake. Whats the point of making this a mechanic other than to piss people off doing mental calculations on whens not a good time to fuck a girl. Her facial expressions should give that away immediately anyway.


All in all, a decent game should you choose to invest some time in it. Takes about 2 hours before you get to do anything remotely lewd in this game but because the payoff is good, well paced, and somewhat well written enough, I have to give it a thumbs up, albeit with some criticisms. Perhaps its not as well made as its infinitely more famous japanese counterpart, but it has certain charms of its own to stand on its two feet.

Just one last suggestion. Let us choose to remove the excess fur from the models. Hair follicles look dumb enough in 3d models, thats why its usually not present.

In this game, you play as a gorilla with a little sister. The gameplay relies heavily on grinding, and progression is extremely slow. That’s my first reason for giving it a low rating. I don’t mind sandbox games, as long as there’s a good story. But even if this one had Shakespeare level storytelling, you'd forget it over time because of how tedious the grind is.

My second reason is the game’s size and lack of content. It’s nearly 7 gigabytes, but there’s not much to see except more hair on the protagonists arm with each update. Considering how much effort it takes to unlock anything, it just doesn’t feel worth it.

Way to much repetition to grind trust and attraction points.

There is no enjoyment in clicking sleep, do chores, go to work, talk about interest, and talk about lewd, repeat, and finally unlock a scene or action.

I like sandboxes so im ok with grind and really hoping for this game to become 5 star with some updates, but right now this is some bs.

Constant INTENTIONAL crashes. Theyliterally intentionally crashes the game for piracy.

The bodies of both characters are nastily and unnaturally hairy, it's really quite gross. The hair on him is so distracting it ruins any of the weekend scenes. It looks like she is being raped by an animal. Otherwise the characters would be pretty decent in terms of design and natural proportions, though the lighting in some scenes like pool is bad.

Oh the mc also constantly talks about pubes, he is obsessed as well as about sniffing panties. There are a LOT of fullscreen closeups of his abnormally hairy dick - not vagina too, just dick closeups, eh? You literally never get to look at her butt

Pretty much no feedback after all actions and very unresponsive UI that takes between 1 and 2 seconds to show up, meaning you click accidentally on actions. The popup speech bubbles are also huge and disruptive.

Autosaves and rollback have been disabled and there is literally no reasoning for some decisions. You can bath together every day but then one day she randomly goes back to being scared of it.

It does have an interesting setup which made it seem polished until you see all of the above.

The only real intimate scene so far has been fingering her in bed - unfortunately they decided we dont get to choose pace and continue as we want. It's in fact just a long timer. I have a real girlfriend if I want to actually have to wait for her to cum

story v0.43c - sister moved in and MC take care of her you very much become MAIDS + provider + clown keep sister happy FEED! so much GRIND!! i pay play Grind game. no sex just petting/hand job.

model- is hairy! (typical JAP model) not eastern model.. exploring tropical jungle... with crab.

my opinion- need pay subs give mc an option $ i REALLY wanna play it but too much SIMP turn me off thats just ME.

As others have said the system of building trust and affection has no rhyme or reason. I made a spreadsheet thinking I could do trial and error, but no it makes no difference whatsoever. That and rollback is disabled and you can't skip repetitive stuff. The dev must be some kind of sadist who likes torturing perverts. I'm going to unren to see if there's any content worth unlocking and to enable rollback for the asinine and random choices.

Edit: I unrened the game and had a look at images. Don't waste your time. Bugger all for sexual content. How this is 6GB is beyond me. And this is why I browse games on f95. So many jokers trying to get easy money.

I enjoyed the game so far. It is very grindy and plays somewhat similarly to some of these onii-chan, imotuo games. But the action economy is all over the place and so is the money. I get the budget system but I just didn't use it. And I can't really fault the game for not having much going on but it would be nice to see improvement a bit faster. I swear it took almost a whole month before I was even able to do anything physical to her and I mean anything like petting her without her getting mad. I'll play it again when it's at 1.0. But please make the actions do a bit more than just +1 to something. I do like that she has interests that give a bigger boost when you find them, but even that is a roll of the dice.

very good graphics, could be expanded more, for example, always the same room, I wanted it to be watching TV, eating, socializing with more action. For example, cleaning the rooms should have at least some image that it is being cleaned, etc. Because now it is always just a task, talking, watching nutflex, but players want more liveliness. Another thing is that the questions that were good before the task are no longer suitable for them the next day. All assessments could be seen normally, not just on the clock.

I really want to like this. I think it could be good, very good maybe. However, the grind makes it impossible.
There is no rhyme or reason for the effects of talking to the girl and even the "mutual interest" you supposedly start with can result in just about any resulting trust change.
Please change this and make a guide that actually helps play the game.

The renders are very good and I disagree with the posters complaining about the pubic hairs. Without the renders, I would have given it only 1 star.

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.