Ren'Py - Lust Academy [S4 v4.6.1d] [Bear in the Night]

This sandbox game suffers from the "too much girls, too much little events without interest" design. The main quest feels disconnected.
There is fan service from every current show (harry potter obviously but also now wednesday etc.) but there is no real theme.

Finally it is dragging itself, without purpose.

The positive side is that most girls are beautiful and the renders are not bad at all.

It's not exactly gonna get a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, as the writing really is not up to it's source's standard, but the renders are quite amazing, it allows for a diversity of characters and I quite like how it changed enough about HP to make it unique but not too much to hide it's origin.

Overall, quite a nice experience. Basically the only downside is the rather empty writing, which could definitely use a bit of a character maturity update. But if you occasionally skip and don't take it too seriously, it's no problem.

Other than that, it's a nice playthrough. Certainly not as bad as some reviewers below make it seem to be. I especially appreciate the sandbox UI. It's clear that whoever made it actually interacted with a human before. Which alone puts it to like top decile of sandbox builds.

Good luck dev.

bad story. decent animations. bad story. decent models. bad story. the game allows you to skip mini-games and play it like a vn instead of going thrugh maps and shit. bad story. bad, bad story and terrible dialogue.

This game forces you to have interactions with characters that the game again dont even ask if you are interested in, all women in this game for me are a no , maybe sabrina and naomi are a YES ..., so, starting from that point of honesty the game loses a lot of reasons to play it, but the renders are good and i enjoy a good story, so i kept playing it in VN mode, but the events have no sense at all between them, i don t know if its supposely to play it as a sandbox but i hate the grind and clicking in things... i dont know man... this game is nothing special, it wants to state a precedent or something but i really think the girls are ugly and not interesting at all

Let me start with the good.

• The renders are great. You can easily see it from the preview pics.
• The UI is nice.
• The sandbox is VERY easy to navigate. In fact, the built in navigator allows you to see which characters have something to do at each point in time. It also allows you to jump straight to their location, so you don't have to go looking through a bunch of rooms to find them.
• In addition to the above, each character has a little bio as well as a brief description of your last interaction with them. For characters that have no more things to do, the description will flat out say that this is the end to this character for this update so that you know you aren't missing out on anything.
• The sex scenes are good, with decent animations and multiple camera angles.
• There's a lot of plot. Up to you to determine if this is actually a pro or a con.
• You can pick between sandbox mode or VN mode. I really appreciate the dev giving us the opportunity to choose.

As for the cons...

• The most obvious, the writing. It's laughably bad. It's somewhat proofread and edited, so there isn't too many grammar/spelling mistakes. The issue is what the characters say. It feels like some 16 year old with no idea how adults speak is creating the dialogue.
• The main character talks like an anime protagonist, with his speeches about friendship and love. And then at night, he can molest 3 different sleeping girls. Obviously, it's optional, but if you choose to do so, his dialogue is laughably villainous. "Ohoho yea I just jerked off all over your naked body, and you won't even know".
• Pornos are known for having corny lines during sex. But the lines used here are even worse.
• In the final update for S2, there are a couple of bugs that the dev doesn't seem to have any intention of fixing. What happens is that during a sex scene, it will cut out and switch to a DIFFERENT character's sex scene. For example, one second, it's a 3some with two characters, and then half way through, it switches to a sex scene from a previous update with a completely unrelated character. This happens with multiple scenes.
• Sandbox mode messes up some of the dialogue between characters, as they will talk as if you haven't already met previously or they will forget a plot point that already occurred.
• There's an instagram feature similar to the one from BaDIK (who I think did it the best), where a character will post a picture of themselves and you can comment on them. But here it's much more lifeless. Rather than full conversations happening between characters like in BaDIK, it's all just one liners here. You can pick nice, mean, flirty, or funny one liners. I usually pick the flirty ones, but it's just more horribly corny text that makes me wonder if the dev even knows what flirting is.
• The grind. It's a sandbox with stats, so you can expect there to be a grind. I tried to play it legit but gave up quickly and used the cheat mod instead. Makes the game way more enjoyable.
• As part of the plot, one of the characters leaves after S1 to go do her own thing. She doesn't appear at all in S2 (I think? I'm like 90% of the way through S2 so I could be wrong). What is the point of that? This was a dumb plot point.

Love this game. Text and graphics are really good but two things makes the diference:
1.- The options. I can play sandbox or visual novell, play minigames or skip them, all kind of girls (Asian, blonde, white, Black, Milf, Teen, virgin, bdsm and more) and also can choose futa/gay content and other lost in my head rigth now.
and
2.- (This is absolutly esencial for me) We have a real situation to solve. Is not matter of f@ck every girl, you can avoid all of them but you have a central problem not sex related (even when going trhough may lead you there),
I waitting anxious to see whats gonna happend.
My respect for developer.

(please note i am not a harry potter fan so this will be reviewed as solo adult game and the content).

To not going to much in depth and keeping it very simple i will use bullet points with some explanation if needed.

Season 1:

1. The Good:
   *Lot of different characters looks so you definitely will find someone you fancy.
   * You can (for most characters) focus on them without any requirements to reach level X for character Y
2. The Bad:
   *Tried following the writing (story and just conversation ) and couldn't put my focus on it or be engage in to it
   * Doesn't allow you to go an other house (of the 4 you are forced to go Lionheart (aka Gryffindor) )
   *the content sexual takes some time to get there and always is " we not going further then this (take bj as example)" then next time they see eachother going way further then that for no real reason.
   *The sex is pretty limited to certain charters idk why.
3. The meh:
   *sex animation is okeay but not great
   * for a magic and fantasy world is pretty uncreative sexual acts. I mean this by the most basic acts you can think of just in real life is in here (bj, hj, riding, doggy, missionary) but nothing like "fantasy" like potion that makes you invisible and you spy on girls, potion that makes you became a giant or ...

Season 2:

1. The Good
   * More sexual partners then before
   * More sex is put in the game with different characters
   * More family sex (i like some incest games so that is a plus in my book)
   * Let's you choose to enable certain content or not (gay, trans, vampire)
   * Animations does have been improved then Season 1 but sometimes have weird angles
2. The Bad
   * The same first 3 remarks in season 1 still applies here.
   * The housecup tournament is kinda pointless just collect some books and you will win 9/10 times while not going to any lessons or so. Also the tournament only gives you some money but that is it real. Regardless if win or loss you will spend your weekend in Dale.
   *Still lacks uncreative sex possibilities (you need to satisfy yourself with vampire, a woman that can turn her hands in claws during a hj and having sex in a dragon cave)
3. The confusing:
   * when you come back from dale you can party and have sex with that person even tho you haven't in that person story ever had sex. Which doesn't make sense. Why would you bang now during in a party while in story you haven't even kiss each other.
   *The sister content is weird you bang her in the prologue before you sandbox starts but then later you can't bang her and is slow introduction again to it which again is weird.

Season 3 (v1.1d) :

1. The Good:
   *Family sex is back
2. The Terrible:
   *no sandbox
   * solo 2 scenes in it which isn't much of update/release (maybe waited a bit more till there was some sandbox play game dev).
   *Is a lot of jumps in time, come home welcome home then "few weeks later" bit of talk then "few days later" again little talk " few weeks later" and repeat. It feels just weird like you have 7 or 8 time jumps in less then 10mins for no reason i can think off.

Briefly:
1st season - 5/5, 2nd season - 3.8/5

First of all I loved all that wizard & magic vibe.
In the 1st season when you get acquainted with the world of magic you really feel as if you are in a fairy-tale. It's interesting to explore the structure of the magical world and meeting your classmates. Music is beautiful, renders and animations are decent. Great variety of girls and no blue-balling. You may choose whose story to follow and which to ignore.
But the 2nd season is weaker. There are much more useless talk and too many lines are confused between the characters. Near the end even I started to scroll some dialogues without reading. Renders - they are grainy! It was acceptable in the 1st season but not in the 2nd. The main girl - Hailey(Hermione) has become extremely boring. I don't know why exactly, but the girls I found attractive in the 1st season aren't so sexy in the 2nd seson(Hailey, Samantha and Lily). Maybe because there appeared several new more beautiful chicks. Also girls' models aren't perfect. There are plenty strange/awful shots and angles(especially Adele). In addition that season now demands much more grind to complete side route with minotaur. And my personal pain is that beautiful main musical theme during free roam and at the night club have been changed since the first season to the worse.
Nevertheless, I am waiting for the development of the story and interactions with still untouched girls.

I wondered why Lust Academy had a relatively low rating despite being on Steam and having a significant number of Patreon supporters. Now that I’ve played it, I understand the low rating. While the adult content is above average, the story is poorly written and paced and contains significant amounts of filler that you can’t skip. It reached the point where I could no longer be bothered to spam the mouse/space key and gave up about halfway through the second season. I can only recommend the game if you download the mod that unlocks the Gallery so you don’t have to slog through this mess.


The story is a blatant rip-off of Harry Potter right down to Hermione (cough) I mean Haley Granger (cough) I mean Ranger. An adult version of Harry Potter is appealing, but sadly the writing just isn’t there. Much of the grammar is awkward as if the author isn’t a native English speaker, and there’s far too much of it, with thousands of lines of inner monologue telling you things you knew already. I don’t need to hear my character thinking, for the hundredth time, “It’s time for class. I’m going to learn potions! I wonder if Haley is there already.” The first season has less dialogue and was more tolerable to read through, but the second season is heavily padded. This wouldn’t be so bad if the story were any good. The MC is frequently forced to act in a ridiculous manner that defies common sense and relegates much of the story to the idiot plot. Moreover, while in Harry Potter the young magicians engaged with villains in secret, here we have most of the staff happily sending you and your love interests into harms way despite being first year students. There’s another sequence where a character admits to trying to kill you and within two minutes of dialogue the MC decides to trust him anyway. Idiot plot indeed! The story would have ended in five minutes if the characters weren’t all idiots.


It's unfortunate that the story is so difficult to slog through as the production value is quite high otherwise. A complete soundtrack, sound effects during both adult and non-adult scenes, and decent (though somewhat short) animations with multiple angles and positions, at least in the second season. A sequence with a pair of freckled red-headed twins is definitely a must-see and ranks up there with late-game scenes from other top-rated adult visual novels.


The biggest issue is the skip feature, or lack thereof. Most games, to the chagrin of their authors, allow you to skip through content, bypassing the story in order to get to the adult content faster. Lust Academy does not allow you to skip content unless you’ve already been through the scene once before. Despite playing in Visual Novel mode, this became intolerable in the second season when the story got worse and worse to the point where I’d completely lost interest and was only interested in advancing to the next adult scene. I can only imagine how awful and grindy the game must be in Open World mode, requiring playing through boring mini-game after boring mini-game and then having to slog through mindless poorly worded filler. At one point, I spent nearly fifteen minutes spamming the space bar trying to get through several days of dates all of which ended in blue balled “Oh we’ve been interrupted again!” scenes before finally reaching an adult scene that wasn’t even that good.


Lust Academy got off to a reasonable start, but the story quickly went off the rails. Given that the adult content work for me, I can’t take off too many stars, but the inability to skip content is in my opinion and unforgivable sin. Three stars for the poor story but good production value and adult scenes, with a star taken off for frustration of having to spam keys to get through the game’s awful dialogue.


A small pet peeve: One of the love interests professes their love for the MC over and over again, but then balks when the idea of being their girlfriend comes up because they’re not ready. Uh… I took your virginity. We’ve been having sex and dates on the regular, and you profess your love every five seconds… but girlfriend is too far? Geez.

I enjoyed both of the seasons. The best thing of this game is the unique model characters. The animations are well done. I always play the sandbox because is the best way to enjoy every aspect of the cordale world. I wish the best of luck at the dev and i really looking forward for season 3

This game leaves a lot to be desired. To be quite frank it needs an editor. The broken English is a deal breaker for me with most games but this one seems to take it to the next level. It's as if someone used Google Translate to turn the dialogue into English. I hope it gets better in the future but for now, I can't give this game more than 2 stars.

Really good graphics!

A very solid story. Not random. Also quite original.

But I really do not like the story.
I admittedly appreciate it a whole lot more than the "turn your brain off to enjoy" games. Or the games where you play one, you now essentially have played em all.

But I'm not the biggest fan.

Heck!

The only thing that takes away from the game are minor oversights in which character is talking (sometimes has MC/NPC confusion in dialogue) and spelling/grammatical errors. Also, the railroad storyline of the MC's participation in the storyline (why build up his hype then all of a sudden do a 180 and have him flop at a crucial point in the story?). Aside from that, well made.

I've been following this project from it's early days. Played some of the first published builds, then some version around the start of S2, and now the recent build (1.10.1d).

The visuals and the setting is really cool. The sandbox system is well done. General story is fine, the sex scenes are there...

Bear's been quite busy and build a lot over the time, and they DO have my respect for that.

So what's the problem, right? The content is there, right?

Well, the problem is that some 80% of this content is shallow, generic and uninteresting conversations about nothing. There's zero progression in anything. Relations are non-existent. General pattern here is smalltalk->smalltalk->smalltalk->mission->"let's bang". Then everything is forgotten. Sometimes more smalltalk is available. And between that, there is neverending inner monologue of MC... and the levels of cringe are seriously of the charts there.

There are like 4-5 interesting scenes, but the rest is completely dull and boring. There's no buildup, no excitement, no consequences. Just the constant babbling, even during sex.

So that's it. The writing almost completely killed it. Sometimes less is more. 2/5 reflects the amount of the game that's interesting. If all the crap was cut out, it would become much smaller and even simplier, but at least it could be enjoyable.

Whether accidentally or on purpose, this became more and more bloated with hollowness. Even the visual quality started to drop lately... Anyone who's attention got caught by the screenshots, I recommend just unlocking the gallery or export the images/clips. You won't miss anything.

Once, I've considered Patreon support. Then I thought it's not going the right way, but let's wait and see. Now, I'm unwatching this thread.

If Bear is honest about trying to make good games, I wish them well and hope they can learn from their mistakes. I really believe this could have been a hit. Maybe next time.

Good game with magic elements. The renders are good and all the Lis are unique with different qualities BUT YOU ARE FORCED TO ACCEPT THE LITTLE ROOMMATE BECOMING A STRIPPER so 1 star it is. What is the point of having choices if you are forced into this shit. Season 1 writing was good but looks like they brought a writer with cuck fetish for season 2. one li is a stripper another tells you how she had an affair with your dad, another just went away.

Review as of S2 v1.9.1d

This isn't a bad game it just wasn't for me.

The models and renders are good.
The sandbox is actually pretty good.
The animations are decent.
And the worldbuilding is really well done to be honest.

What I wasn't feeling were the characters really. I had an immediate dislike for Audrey and Vanessa but the rest of the LI's were also kind of meh to be honest. I'm also not a fan of if you want to avoid a fetish you ignore the girl entirely. But what really put me off was honestly the MC, I did not like the way he would act, react, or make decisions. Whenever he would do something I would think "Really Bro? I don't wanna play as this dude"

Also some of the choices weren't really choices because it felt like you weren't able to actually stop some things.

Overall not a bad game just wasn't for me so a 3/5 seemed fair. Wasn't bad but I didn't like it.

The game is very good and it shows that a lot of work has been done to make such a rich plot. Renders are great, characters are quite unique and interesting so in that departments the job is well done.

Also kudos for creating two regimes - nice touch to try and appease to wider audience.

What I personally miss is unique kinks and fetishes of the girls, for now most of them are quite traditional and well-mannered. Although in the second season Amelia became much more interesting. Also Molly looks so amazing that she is a kink just by being herself.

Still it's a five star game and I wish all the best to the creator.

Graphics are great, girls and scenaries are really good. The way in what the relationships are or the way how they "evolve" are weird. Like a lot of visual novels, girls will love you without effort, you talk with a girl one time and now she is in love with you. Some of the sexual scenes are pretty weak, like when a girl is sleeping and the MC grope them, he practically undress the girl completly and does what he wants with them, and they don't wake up. People spying each other, people going inside a room and casually someone is naked.
The MC is stupid, he trust in everyone when he knows nothing about magic and that world. Samantha tells to the MC that she can't share any info about the school, because they would be expelled, still she tells him how to pass the exam and without thinking he shares that info with "Hermione", a girl that he just meet, without knowing if he can trust her or what she would do with what you told her, so clearly he is stupid or he doesn't care about Samantha being expelled. Other stupid moments are at the start too, when they talk about magic, he is explained that the magic they use is not about cards tricks or anything like you could see in a birthday party, its something more, and all the time he is talking that he doesn't know any magic trick.
The decisions have no impact in the world, just in your relationship with the girls, this is pretty kinetic.
Romance to me sucks, I hate when a game is too cheesy and that happen in most of the times in games with romance and that happens here too.
Animations are good and fluid.

An above average pornographic reimagining of Harry Potter.

This game has a very lovely cast and setting, it has some minigames that you may love or hate, it has some decent sex scenes with different character types, and *most* of it is above average fiction and done in the style of Young (naughty) Adult fantasy, which will probably appeal to you if you're on this site.

However, there are two frustrating points about this game's writing. 1) The story mode forces you to go pretty deep into relationships with characters you're not attracted to, and slog through some repetitive romantic prose for the third/fourth/fifth relationship you didn't want. This isn't too bad or uncommon in virtual novels, but what was really offensive about the lack of choice in the story was...

2) This game has the absolute fucking worst case I've ever seen of a character being dumb just to advance the plot in a certain way. Imagine that you found out a teacher you barely liked to begin with had tried to kill you. Would you immediately betray your patron wizard to trust his word and give him power, just because he told you: "sorry bro, but actually my attempt on your life was for your own good"? No. Fucking no one would. I've never had my immersion just drop dead in the middle of a story like that because of how lazily a plot went from point A to point B.

...But other than that, not a bad read, and the author doesn't appear to be a transphobe, so it's already easier to support than Harry Potter.

Cheap harry potter porn simulator, except that the MC is weak wanker and the biggest simp. Choices in this game are just dead buttons they do no affect the story even by a little, just styled skip scenes button.
Plus the poor writing, sometimes scenes just dont make any sense.
Also for the lazy dev why would you split the fucking game s1 s2 its not like you release them as complete releases you just update it once in a while.