Ren'Py - Lust Academy [S4 v4.8.1d] [Bear in the Night]

I really wanted to like this one, but it just couldn't get there. Wish I could give it 2.5, but I'll give it that extra bump for the variety of love interests. There's a TLDR at the bottom.

Visuals (4/5):

• What you see is what you get. If you like the pictures in the preview images, then you’ll like them in the game. I personally think most of them are pretty hot. I also think the dev should get some points for the locations, particularly after season 1 when he spends some time freshening them up and tweaking the lighting. It’s a pretty decent looking game.
• There are animations, and some of them are pretty good. They get better after season 1. It’s nothing really spectacular like the animations in the recent updates of University of Problems or Twisted World, but it’s still solid.

Gameplay (2.5/5):

• Like most adult games, the gameplay in this game is “Fine”. There’s nothing very special about it, the sandbox elements are not annoying although there are some weird things going on with it. For example, you might have a 3 second conversation with someone in the hall and all of the sudden time progress as much as if you had gone to class when the dev probably should have just not made it progress time at all. There are also moments when you talk to a character and unknowingly skip through basically the entire day because they wanted to go for a walk and suddenly it’s night time. This can be frustrating if you were planning on doing something else during a later part of the day and now you have to wait until the next day (or even next week for some events) to try again.
• The sandbox can also, sometimes frequently, cause an issue where scenes happen clearly out of order. You’ll do a bunch of quests for one girl and complete most of her storyline and then hop over to do a story mission where the MC muses about “maybe getting to know her”.
• The combat is also fine. It’s not very engaging or anything special, but it’s neat enough that it doesn’t make combat a complete slog.

World (4/5):

• The world in this game is pretty interesting. Unfortunately, it feels a bit like cheating to give this a positive value since it’s… let’s be generous and say “heavily inspired” by Harry Potter. But I will say to the dev’s credit, some of my favorite bits of world building in this game is stuff he’s altered from HP.

Story (3/5):

• Just beyond “passable”. The story does its job as window-dressing to lay the characters and porn on. It’s nothing revolutionary, it’s not even that interesting, but it’s decent enough to not get in the way of the rest of the game.

Characters (2.5/5):

• The characters in this game are pretty basic. Most of them are just your classic archetypes, and only a select few ever dare to step beyond that and gain an ounce of depth. That being said, many of them are still likeable. Probably my biggest issue is with Audrey. It’s like the dev is trying to make her a Tsundere, but instead she’s just a complete bitch who very occasionally says something that isn’t mean and the MC’s inner monologue reminds us that “she’s not actually that bad”. It’s a shame since she’s so hot, but I just hate interacting with her.

Writing[Dialogue] (1.5/5):

• As the title of this point suggests, when I say “Writing”, I mostly mean “Dialogue”, as the rest of the writing is already covered in the Story, Characters, and World sections. The dialogue in this game is just straight up not good. It’s not that it’s full of errors or bad grammar, but every character sounds stilted and awkward. The dialogue during sex is awful and I cringe every time someone makes a bad pun about the sex being “magical” or saying stuff like “you’re a wizard” in bed. It’s not funny and it just takes me out of it. None of the characters speak or behave like real people, often spitting out their feelings like an internal monologue.
• The biggest offenders are probably the comments you make on the “Lustagram” app. Some of the comments, especially the “flirty” ones, are insanely cringy and borderline harassment.
• Additionally, the main character often behaves in a way that makes me really wish there were more choices in this game. One of the biggest examples is when a certain character goes to work as a dancer at the club and the MC just freaks the fuck out. He grabs her like a maniac, spills coffee everywhere, and storms over to the club to try and make the owner not hire her. He comes off as a controlling, abusive psychopath. There’s no option to just… support her? Like I would maybe understand if the point was that she doesn’t end up working there, but she DOES end up working there even though you throw your little baby temper tantrum. So if the end result is her working there anyway, why is there no dialogue option that is just “I understand and support you” until after they dump some really personal trauma on you? And that’s just one instance. It’s wild that the dev just forces you to behave like a dangerous manchild out of nowhere.
• This is really, by far, the worst aspect of this game. It’s so bad that it makes me wonder if the dev has ever actually talked to a woman in his life. The only reason this doesn’t get a 0/5 is because it’s coherent. The only thing that could make the writing worse would be if it was actually unintelligible gibberish.

TLDR; Overall, this game is a pretty looking game with average characters, pretty models and animation, and a moderately interesting setting. But it’s unfortunately dragged into the depths of mediocrity by the genuinely awful dialogue and writing.

This is the first AVN for me I bought it on steam and never regret!

Pros
- Character design is great
- Story is interesting
- Hogwarts experinece
- Render is great!
- Sandbox is kinda fun too
- The neighbor girl ,Martha ,The Founder and Lily are the best!

Cons
- Can be much more magical
- Need Martha scene and many more magic girl

Thanks a lot for great AVN hopes for more

The game is actually very creative.
HP plot mixed with some sexual luggage, and with very good art
Emma Watson as a hot character was the the best touch, honestly
But, aside her, and maybe Lily, the game doesn't have many interestings things to explore and do... actually, it seems like a total waste having so many secondary characters...
I thought there would be some better events for Haley, like potion of invisibility (making her walk naked until the effect worn out), or the silly "your clothes disappear" and things like that from the world of magic
The interaction with her is just too physical, so starts getting bored after a whole while...

Main story is good and i find the side stories of most of the girls pretty good as well, so there is plenty to come for in this game, graphics is good in game as well with a nice college setting.

Its pretty fun how they have put in Emma/Hermione, as some would proberly call Haley, but in truth they failed if that was the goal since she was made with proberly 2-3 sizes bigger tits then IRL and Sabrina Spellman should proberly have been a young student instend of a milf teacher, but Wednesday they made spot on in both look and build, with her friend Enid/Alice they went a bit overboard on the tits again but other then that she looks nice, but still a bit of a fail not keeping it more close to reality when you do make copies of RL characters.

The girls/Lis has a big range of builds but it can feel like the main focus is mostly on big or huge tits fetish which i personaly find to be a huge turn-off, maybe because there are alot more story with big girls then the smaller ones, most of chapter 3 so far was 90% girls with big tits, it will proberly be better now that we are back in college but outside/home story is exteemly boring if you dont like the big girls, since the main girl is Sam and her sister, mother, mothers friend are all big girls and the ones you follow when not in college, they really should add one or two with small build in home story to keep the something for everyone going.

But that said there are alot of girls with more normal or smaller tits as well, a fast count would be 19 big/huge girls and 17 small/normal so ratio is really good compared to alot of other games.

And as you can see thats also a shitload of LIs in one game around 40+ if you count gay/monster as well, but it works and your not forced to be with any one of them, you can still do their quests and just pick friend route insted of sexual which is really nice.

i did the sandbox game where all LIs each have their own questline but you arent even forced to do them if you really dont want to since they arent connected to the main story when it comes to relationships, you will still see some in main story which works out just fine no matter how you play.

The sandbox it self is about picking up a few books here and there, click on the LI you want to do a quest with and just move around the map, there is also some fights with magic which you can skip to win or play on your own, so all in all its a pretty good sandbox game and there is no real grind either.

The only thing missing in this game is pregnancy, kinda supprise its not there considering one LI is desperate to have a baby with MC, but who knows maybe it will be added at some point, but i do see the issue with so many LIs making pregnancy for all would be an impossible workload.

Story 5/5
I like both main and most of the side quests with the girls, plenty of content.

Girls 4/5
It has a wide selection of girls they look unique and has diffrent personalities and there is all kind of builds from small to huge tits so in other words something for everyone.
But cant give it max score since the RL copies should have been done more accurate when you do deside to use RL copies and not just go crazy with the boob slider it only ruins it a bit.

Animations 3/5
They are good enough to enjoy but they are mostly a bit short and i have seen alot better, so they arent good or bad just average.

Music 3/5
Its also about average, it has some sound effects as well, but all in all pretty standard background music.

Choices 5/5
Well nothing is forced on you and you can freely pick any LI you want, to have a friendly or sexual relationship with, cant really ask for more.

I had to lower this from 5 to 4 stars, i just cant stand when story dosent line up with choices, if its better in VN mode i dont know but in sandbox which i played it got annoying, like Sams friend or grilfriend that sucked her magic in chapter 1, i wanted nothing to do with her so i never did her questline at all and that create a huge failure in story since it will go on as you have done everything with her, when she comes back in chapter 3 she apprently loves you even though she shouldent know you and she also says she fed on MCs magic which never happened.

The amount of content in this for the amount of time its been in development is probably unparalleled. The downside is probably 33% of it or more should be cut. Definitely go VN if you play, the sandbox is just a way to waste extra hours of your life on repetitive tasks.

With that said, the writing is some of the worst I have seen, especially given its popularity and levels of support, basic spelling/grammar editing would add a full star or two. Its an Engrish game with cheesy dialogue, characters have minimal personality and would be indistinguishable if not for model differences. The MC could star in the 40 year old virgin in the real world. MC is an immature twat, and there are no player decisions to have them not be a possessive manchild.

I spent hours giving this a shot and hoping it would get better as it progressed but I couldn't make it through the 2nd season, because it seemed like it was just going in circles. The story arc is boring/predictable, and there is zero character development. Every character will quickly drop to their knees for you and is (hilariously) unaware that the MC is banging their friends, teachers, the entire campus.


The models are good and the animations are ok. Thats about all it has going for it

As I saw that it was related in one way to another to HP, I decided to try it and I must say that it is very well built visually but...

THE GOOD
Visually everything is perfect, the scenes, the characters, the inventories. Everything visually seems perfect to me. It has background music which adds points, the +18 scenes are well done, there are a variety of female characters with whom you can interact and with whom you can develop slightly spicier scenes. In this section I think it's a very good game but...

THE BAD... or not?
The story of the game seems dull to me, I mean I really don't have the slightest idea what the hell the protagonist wants... I played it until the complete session 2 and it took me too long... there are good +18 scenes, but I feel that they are very few, but I can think that it is due to how the pace of the game is going. the sandbox... it's not that it's anything wao, I mean it's a super casual sandbox that in my opinion contains nothing. The fact that it is divided into parts seems annoying to me. Now focusing a little more on the plot, it seems to me that there is nothing almost deep (Unlike other somewhat similar games that I have played). I feel like they should improve the plot but I don't know if it can be changed at this point in the story. On the one hand, the sandbox, I think they should improve it, particularly I didn't see anything surprising that this has a sandbox, especially season 1.


I came looking for gold and found iron. The game itself is visually and mechanically very well done but it is nothing surprising in terms of story. It does have good waifu designs, but their personalities and backgrounds are quite empty and lacking coherence.

I want to clarify that this is my opinion about this game, after having played until season 2. I am not a judge, nor an executioner to say that you should play this game or not, but if you ever want to give it the opportunity I invite you to try it and let your review.

Favorite Waifu: Lily

Summary (SCORE: 7.5)
o Character Design/Visual: 9/10
o Background music/sound: 8/10
o Plot: 5/10
o Animation: 8/10
o +18 Scenes: 7/10
o Gameplay: 6/10
o Interface: 10/10

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.