HTML - Completed - Locked Down [Afterstory] [AnonDux]

Looking over the reviews, it seems they are way too harsh on this game.

I'll start with the bad and justified criticism:

• The writing is not great. English doesn't seem to be the dev's first language, and it really needs to be proofread. This is more an issue for the prologue than smaller bits of dialogue later in the game.
• The style is not great. The dev thinks he is a little funnier than he is. As people have pointed out, there is a strong weeb influence here that takes you out of the story a little bit (ex. when the younger housemate magically appears behind you, or when the two sisters "kill" their mom).
• The "travel" system is a kind of menu that you navigate by clicking key words in text. It is not always clear how to navigate back to an earlier menu, nor is it clear if an option leaves you past a point of no return. A better system would be like the one in Friendly Wife, OR to just keep the game a straight up VN (as it was in the prologue).

Those are my only complaints. Now for the good:

• The choice of models is great. There are many high quality images and videos almost from the very beginning.
• The plot, contrary to what others are saying, is not "overdone." It mixes the "confined" plot of various corruption games with an NTR plot. Sure the bad guy is cartoonishly bad, but that is true of just about every NTR game. I think this is what the dev had intended when he calls the game "hard NTR". If that's not your thing, fine, but to me it's refreshing to see an HTML game that jumps right in with the heavy stuff rather than announce that it will be a "slow burn" and then abandon the game after three updates.
• There is a lot of content so far! There's been only one update to the initial release and the game took a good long while, with a great picture or video to text ratio.

tl;dr Game is great, ignore the hate. There are some real problems (awkward navigation system, all videos playing at once) but they can be fixed in later updates.

Decent, if not very original premise, but unfortunately it doesn't take very long for the problems in this game to start showing themselves.

Pros:
-The relationship between the MC and his girlfriend is portrayed as sweet and loving, and the dialogue between them is actually pretty good. The fact that this shows the dev CAN write good dialogue is honestly what makes some of the other parts so frustrating thought.

Cons:
-The MC is, for lack of a better word, pathetic. I don't mind him being traumatized by Darren stealing his first crush away from him and hating his guts for it, but it's overdone so much that it stops being a point of sympathy for him and just starts to be annoying.
-"But you're friends, aren't you?" I fucking hate this shit. I hate it with a burning passion. I understand the dev wanted to amplify the feelings of being frustrated, not able to rely on your loved ones, and that Darren is a snake, but come on. All this does is just piss me off whenever they act like they can't see what's going on. Even though the MC hasn't told them what Darren did to him, it really isn't hard to see that he shuts down every time Darren is in the same room as him and is super uncomfortable with his presence. Maybe the older sister would be willfully oblivious since she's probably going to take Darren's side in this, but the mother and younger sister both act like morons in this regard.
-Aiko's family is... a bit too anime for my tastes. Aiko being cutesy, hyper, and energetic is fine, but her entire family acting like that is too much.
-The entire scene where Darren came in and just info dumped on the MC about how he's fucking all the women in his friend's lives was pretty bad. Might as well have given him his own Disney villain song at this point.

v0.2
I believe dev is a newbie to NTR genre, so he/she picked the worst plot of NTR story. Pretty much the basic plot that everyone first heard of NTR think off: where MC just cannot think of anything (even though there are 1000+ ways) and get "force" cuck (voluntarily basically).

A good NTR, is able to show love between characters or at least the individual who is about to get cuck. The cuck either clueless or trying hardest to prevent it from happening and this dynamic is what make NTR good.

I do hate bring up this example since it is abandoned but prime example for a good NTR is "big brother", where dev literally shove Eric NTR down player's throat and player really have to work for it to get out of NTR path. If you want more recent example then: "condemned town" (HTML), "mother NTR training" (Renpy), "horton bay stories" (Renpy).

An NTR story where the cuck cry and beg all the time while our antagonist/bully somehow takes ages to dominate is like . . . watching an NTR story where there are 2 cuck with no antagonist (this is what the current story of this game is). Hell, even a basic swinging story would be so much better than this

I feel like when writing reviews for the games of this genre, and in this general medium, it's important to consider the broader state of affairs.

On initial release, this game has good pacing and degenerate (and good) enough writing without coming off as a parody of itself or devolving into a grammatical mess.
The aforementioned good pacing is also doing a wonderful job from turning it into a chore of just clicking and hoping to get to the next interesting scene.
Really looking forward to updates as-is. It will be the updates and the scope of the content within them that will make or break this game. The author promises a pivot away from the kinetic novel structure of the 1st chapter, and I really hope the game doesn't become drastically worse because of it.


Some nitpicks:

1. Gf's family writing is a bit too weaboo cutesy. It is obviously intentional by the author, but it's still annoying (to me).
2. Media has audio AND there is no volume slider AND some scenes just have 3-4 clips playing at the same time with volume on. It's a bit absurd.
3. There is one particular AI-generated jpeg of the antagonist that is reused a few times, and it's got horribly fucked up anatomy.

I find kinetic novels pretty dull since it's just a bunch of clicking for porn (let's face it, the plot is rarely bestseller author quality) and I can do that on redtube if I wanted.

The game for what it is, is fine. Nothing special at the moment (it's a first upload, so..). I found the constant scrolling and clicking to get through the story dull and uninspiring, but the actual content itself was okay.

Specifically a game for people who enjoy/don't mind NTR. If you dislike NTR, you should 100% give this game a miss, you're not going to like it.

Pretty fine start for a good VN, but not really good for a GAME

NTR IS NOT AVOIDABLE! But if you like it and, well, BLACKED theme, its fine. Of course for the game i personally want some more choices, but its a fine start