Cheating is morally apprehensible and a betrayal of love and trust. This is something that you are taught your entire life and a rule that is held sacred; but something about something so forbidden is what makes it equally tantalizing in a work of fiction.
This is something Love, Lust, and Rock 'n Roll explores. You play as Flin, a teenager nearing the end of his school life in a band with young adults his own age, including his girlfriend Stella, his best friend Eric, and his girlfriend Kelly, who is also Stella's best friend. Throughout the story Flin works is way towards being the rockstar of his dreams with his band, while meeting people, including other women along the way, namely Stella's mother, Julie, a young 36 year old mother who got pregnant as a teenager, and Stella's sister Amy, who is hardly even a year apart in age. As his relationship with Stella gets more intimate, the temptations of women around him increase, and it's up to you to choose whether or not he stays faithful to his fun loving girlfriend or sinks down into the depths of lust and betrayal.
To give a brief summary of the main characters:
Flin: the protagonist. For better or worse his decisions are your own. He's a down to earth guy who is portrayed as easy-going and "cool", but serious when it comes to his rockstar career, having a natural talent at singing. This talent + his looks earns him the gaze of the ladies, though, and it's up to you if he stays faithful to his girlfriend or starts sleeping around with everything flirting with him.
Stella: The girlfriend. She's a cute button of energy and a happy and friendly person. She's basically designed to make you feel a bit bad for cheating on her because she's borderline the perfect girlfriend, though she has a smaller chest than the rest of the ladies (dev fetish detected). She's the only girl who makes the suspicion meter go DOWN instead of UP when doing flirtier dialogue with her, so talking to her once in a while is mandatory even if you plan on cheating. Doing the sex scenes with her also decreases suspicion by a ton (imagine that).
Kelly: Stella's best friend, and the girlfriend of Flin's best friend, Eric, both of whom are in the band together with Flin and Stella, Kelly being the lead guitarist. Kelly is a faithful girlfriend to Eric and loves him a lot, and initially has to warm up to Flin, but depending on how things go with her, Flin can wind up being fast friends with her, and, on realizing they are more alike than they first thought, can wind up rollercoasting down to intense cheating sex. This one kinda hits as a double whammy because both are cheating on their significant other while simultaneously betraying their best friends, ON TOP OF RISKING THE SECURITY OF THE BAND. Needless to say things can get intense rather quickly if Flin ever dares to take her up on any of her flirtatious bets.
Amy: Stella's younger sister, though by a rather short several months due to Julie getting pregnant soon after giving birth to Stella, hence why she's the same age and grade (I assume). Amy is known for coming off as "intimidating" to most of the boys in her class despite having dated several of them and being popular for her looks, but despite that she winds up with a boyfriend shortly after the beginning of the game. Only one issue, she still has feelings for her first crush, Flin. Her sister's boyfriend. Honestly the boyfriend matters very little in the equation less so than how close she is to Stella. It's up to our hero Flin to determine if these feelings she had for him meant something to him or not.
Julie: Stella and Amy's mother. She had Stella when she was in high school and Amy soon after Stella, so she's still in her mid-30s as a result. She is happy with her husband and her daughter's success in her blooming music career but feels like she missed a lot of potential spice in her life by youth to her family. And then walks in Flin being young and healthy and getting into a couple accidental situations with Julie that, if acted upon by our hero, can start to make her forget about her role as a mother and wife and instead have a boy half her age rocking her socks off... and her undergarments.
Samantha: I'll admit, I don't have much to say about Sam. She's a groupie who follows the band's tour. She's got a boyfriend she's serious about. She thinks Flin is hot. She doesn't pop up until half the current content is done, so she feels very much like a side character currently.
Onto the pros and cons
PROS:
-The game has a neat stat system with RNG tied to success rate of generic conversations you have with the girls to increase Flin's relationship with them. The higher they increase, the more likely an otherwise normal bonding event can turn more... intimate.
-Cheating enthusiasts can rejoice, this game has lots of cheating sex. I mean lots and lots of cheating sex. So much so that the only vanilla scenes are with Stella, and those are only a few (so if you want to get rewarded for remaining faithful, they do throw you a bone, but that isn't the point of the game). Every girl in the game is in a relationship.
-Vanilla enjoyers also may rejoice, as cheating is entirely optional. You'll find yourself tempted several times as Flin on whether or not you should kiss the girl in front of you or not despite her not being your girlfriend, Stella. But all of it can be easily avoided and relatively simple to maintain your purity, as Flin still loves his girlfriend at the end of the day.
-Sex scenes are intense. You would think they wouldn't be with how it dodges showing genitals and nipples (more on that later), but with the camera angles, intense make-out sessions, the dialogue, animations, all of it. The scenes show little but leave a lot to the imagination, and every sex scene is highly erotic and intimate. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself.
-There is a new game+ feature that maintains your stat upgrades through the story. This might seem weird considering it's just a visual novel where the stats just determine how to climb up a relationship with a girl, but it changes things earlier on, and faster, and this is where it gets interesting. Normally a standard game involves a few awkward or flirty scenes with a girl as Flin develops a better friendship with them, things start to happen, and later a scene might happen where they both cave and have sex, or nothing happens until Flin decides to enter a "committed" romantic relationship to them.
... however, NG+ with ascended stats change that. The normal flirty awkward scene that happens earlier with a girl like "oops I went back to the wrong bed and we're both in our underwear." can change from just that to suddenly the two of them sucking the souls out of each other's mouths before humping each other's brains out in intense sweaty sex. And this is all determined by a girl's like and lust rating towards Flin, so things can get more intense the higher their stats are.
CONS:
- As a work in progress game, there's a bit missing still. For starters there's an overall lack in backgrounds for the majority of the game. All the conversation windows, for the most part, take place with a black void behind the character Flin is engaged with. This might not seem the most noticeable at first but after a while it starts becoming quite obvious. This is subject to change if the dev decides to add more dynamic backgrounds to the scenes the characters are in.
- A lot of erotic scenes are reused; positioning, animation, camera angle, etc. This isn't as bad as you'd think however because the dialogue still does progress regardless, and there was a lot of love put into the scenarios presented.
- There is a Suspicion and Awareness stat, that increases based on how much flirting you're doing with other characters around Stella, and how many people are witnessing it. This isn't actually a bad thing. The bad thing about this is they hardly even matter. On your first playthrough it's so easy to push Stella into negative suspicion that you could practically kiss someone else with witnesses around and it wouldn't be enough to catch you cheating on her (which is what leads to a game over, apparently. I've never been subjected to it personally). This only increases exponentially on NG+ and beyond as you can get her suspicion into the negative 1000s, and by then the only way she'd catch you cheating is if you were literally humping someone's brains out in front of a crowd with her in it.
- There is no genitalia or nipples. The genitalia thing is whatever, as softcore erotica tends to not show this ever anyway, and one of my favorite hentai artists usually avoid putting focus around the genitals. The lack of nipples however, at times, makes it hard to look at the girls as more than barbie dolls. I get why they're excluded and it personally bothers me little, but the fact remains that at times it's hard to take some scenes in complete serious when ALL scenes cut out the nipples. I'm just saying... I wouldn't mind nipples being added to *some* cuts, maybe?
In Conclusion:
When I first saw this game I didn't think the graphics looked the spiciest or highest of quality (Sorry dev), but seeing the preview scenes made me give it a chance, and I was glad I did. This game is on the fast track to greatness and I'm hoping for and, with confidence, expecting better things in the future, so I recommend picking this game up at any point as this review is submitted. 5/5, can't wait for more.
