Ren'Py - Lust and Power [v0.69 Regular] [Lurking Hedgehog]

Following the game since one of it's first releases. It's always the same content in these 4 years. Adding a scene - deleting a scene. Adding mechanic - removing mechanic. Constantly reworking the same few scenes. If you played the game 4 years ago, and then played it 2 years ago after which 2 month ago - no drastic changes. Same shit - different angle.

I played this game over a year ago and dropped it into a "I'll come back when there's more content" bucket. Now imagine my surprise when I play version 0.40 and after going through the tedious grind only to find out there is actually LESS content than what I played. Over a year ago. It's all layers of RNG time sinks here. Random chance to fight monsters to level up your skills, random chance to get quest items to improve your relationships, and of course the relationships areat a very basic level (dominate your "landlord", seduce your "roommate" and if you try to dominate your "roommate" you'll just be penalized with stat decreases so it's very much a "I call it a sandbox but there's only one linear way to play" at the moment). It's a goddamn shame to see a game get less content under the guise of a revamp.

First I should say that I've been a Patreon supporter of the game for years, no longer though or for the foreseeable future. I'm speaking primarily of the "remastering" of the entire game in version 0.40 which is a complete disaster IMO. Previous versions of the game had a much simpler and cleaner UI and mechanics. This latest remaster throws all that out the window in favor of a uselessly complex series of mechanics in virtually every area of the game while resetting content back to a level of two or three years ago.

For example, this is the second and worst time the combat system has been revamped. The first revamp was not an improvement over the original but I could overlook it. The latest combat system as of 0.40 is absolutely overly complex, tedious and boring to say the least. I'm able to grind through it but the entire time I'm asking myself "why". This started off as a Renpy porn game but now it's trying to be DOS2.

If that wasn't enough, every little inventory item and associated action has been changed and for what. The items do the same thing as before but now you have to navigate through several more screens, search through categories and select an action after you've already selected the action to give an item in the first place. The original way worked better which is for example: here is your battery. battery is removed from inventory. Very simple.

I would say the idea of creating a neutral path is OK because the original two pathways were somewhat rigid, and the game didn't handle switching between the two. However, it doesn't need several middle-of-the-road paths like it supposedly has now. Every aspect of the game like combat, inventory, messaging, etc. didn't need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to achieve this.

So basically, what you're left with is no change in graphics and hot scenes from what I can tell. But now, most of the hot scenes and other features that've been around forever are locked again behind "under construction", and there are new bugs everywhere to fix. How long is that going to take to restore. Months or years. The bottom line is that even if I exclude all the missing parts of the game from my review, what remains is much less fun to play. The reason I give this game two stars instead of one is because I think the previous version 0.37 is worth playing but this is not the current direction of the game. Perhaps, one day if the content is finished and the game is working, I'll change my mind on a review and support. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Okay, here is a little bit of backstory for this game as to why I rated it so low:
Reboot,
Reboot,
Reboot.
Each fucking time either to add, delete and then add back some features like incest. Each fucking time forcing you to regrind all of the progress, or, pay 15$ a month for a cheat.
This time however, reboot deleted about 3 years of content, scenes and all, and all that was added are a bunch of new bugs and a slightly changed inrto, that reintroduced incest and deleted most of the rapey demons, with no mention if rape scenes, safe for imp trying to dick your mom/land;ady will even be added again.
The game as it was in v0.37 was not bad, 3 maybe even 4 out of five.
Kinda grindy, just to sell you cheats, but at least it had content to fap to.
Now you need to redo all the shit again, wile the damage output is nerfed into the ground and health bars got up by a margin, specifically so that the grinding would take even longer this time around. This is some EA or mobile paywall games rated fuckery.

I have just started playing this game and I really hope the developer is okay and we have new updates soon. I really liked the game, a good fighting system, a nice story and very good art ...

Waiting for new updates and having faith in the dev and his team that this gem is not going to be cancelled

Sex script are good also the art but need more content, it it is still in development so it still has potential, another thing they need to improve is the battle system, I Feel it is too easy , but if intentional is acceptable if they lack staff. still has good potential hope it get a good ending.

Great story, great scenes, great mechanics. My only suggestion is that it would be awesome if you could change their clothes. Like slutty clothes, bondage clothes, etc. where they could wear around the house. Other than that, great game.

All have been already said before, to sum it up :
- Combat ok, but far too slow, even with ctrl hold all the time And repetitive over time.
- Binary relationship : either you develop love (and sub decrease) or the other way around, leading to the same result, there is a lack of synergie between these stats.
- Some time-logic are quite fucked-up, I didn't expect my shower to take 2h, nor climbing the stairs up from basement taking 1h (or leaving a room after seeing someone naked for 30s taking 1h too... you get the point).

That being said, this game strike my kink and interest, I hope it will develop well to change my note in the future.

The dev REALLY doesnt want you to have fun. Grinding for everything. Bad endings in every corner. Relationship system that just exist to slow even more the corruption of the female characters. Quests that takes waaay more than they should. Patreon paywalls for every character. And last but not least, the prohibition for the cheats, that was remove thanks to a patch (thank you F95 community, you guys rock) but is still something that he really wanted in his game. Why? I dont know, maybe he is trying to make the first pay to win porn game.
The result is a game that while being ok in his story it kill the likening of its own themes through useless mechanics and grinding filler. Oh, and hope you like updates that are half new stuff for the game, and half ''balancing'' (thats it, you guess it, more grinding and boring mechanics). The earlier versions of the game, while having less content, at least were more fun to play. It is ok if you have nothing better to f** with, but there are far better games on this site. Hope to see a modded version when its finnished that removes the grinding parts and the ''love'' of the relationship system, those things just slow down the experience a lot.


EDIT: Just finished the last update. This was one of my first games in this site, almost 3 years ago now. Almost no new content since then, even when its updated every 2 or 3 months. Scratch that ''half new content, half FUCK YOU mechanics'', the updates are almost 4/5 shitty, grindy, useless new mechanics, and 1/5 new content. I have seen games with the triple of content be finished before this thing. Play something else, or cheat the fuck out of it with the anti-cheat removal patch, at least to piss off the dev. One less star for the lack of content.

By all rights, this should be one of the best games on the site. Instead it's the worst.

The developer is obsessed with making sure players don't enjoy his game.

He works hard to make the battle system even slower and more tedious in every update.

He works hard to remove players' ability to make the game more enjoyable through use of console codes.

Dear Dev, please: Just RELAX. LET GO. Stop trying to force players to suffer. I'd be a Patron for the maximum monthly amount if you would stop WORKING to make this into the most unpleasant experience possible.

Edited for version 0.41

Incest is back, performance is WAY BETTER while graphics look better than before.

A lot of content appears to be stripped off and i actually didn't find any locations - nor batteries, which is bad - but overall step into good direction. This game is worth to watch again.

Well that game play completely into my fetishes so obviously that's great for me. Beside that the art is really nice. The system is stil partly under construction like many parts of the game as I write but what is there is quite fun to play and what seems to be planned should be make nice additions to the gameplay. Though unfinished there is quite a bit of content and several routes to follow "dominate" or "love", "demon hunter" or "demons". The author tries to implement some humor but though in ambiance and in style I think he succeeds the writing is still a bit lacking for humor in my opinion.

To neatly sum it up: wasted potential. The game consists of an endless grind, wherein "leveling up" feels like nothing other than struggling to remain on a rapidly rising playing field. The story is bland, the characters are somewhat sexy, but once more the grind prevents me from enjoying any of this. The combat boils down to "what animation is the enemy doing" in terms of tactics as well.

Great game.

It didn't appeal to me just seeing the screenshots, but the monthly amount it gets on Patreon made me think it could be worth a shot.

And it was.

I enjoy the system and combats a lot. It's refreshing after so many visual novels where you just "click".

I think the 3.5 current stars makes it no justice, so here I am trying to get it a little bit higher so more pleople are inclined to play and enjoy it.

For its style of game it is very bland/tame, demons take over a whole town and what do they do, standard sex, did the creator even need to make then demons?, they might just as well be sex crazed/possessed humans.

Where's the tentacles, demon breeding farm(theres not even a pregnancy tag), body modding, slavery, petplay, i'm not saying it should have all those things or even those things(just grabbed some tags at randon) but it should have something beyond normal sex(just look at the tags it does have), it needs anything to stand out.

Beyond that the rest of the game is also bland, no incest(or way to change relationships) which brings us to the slow corruption of charaters and without them meaning something to MC why not just leave them until they leave the house and die then take over and get more women later(why put up with them?), slow boring combat and althrough the 2d images are well done the MC is ugly and there are lots of demon dicks.

Didnt find any errors but some annoying lag.

Its an ok game just very vanilla.

One of those games I stopped playing for a long time waiting for content to be added, only to be rewritten to remove all incest. It had potential, combat was ok, history was going nice, and the art style was cool, but all that ultimately doesn't matter when you are willing to rewrite and outright destroy the whole story. If it was a bit silly before, right now is just nonsensical. "You are a complete stranger, but you can live here now", yeah, sure.

If nothing else, this game has the most hilarious cum-shots out of all the ero-games. They make me giggle every single time. It is overall quite humorous, even when you can easily play as a rapey creep.

What bums me out is the quite slow development progress. I want to play more of the game and not bump into "still developing" stickers and notes at every corner. That said, there is enough content to play for a few hours.

The combat and loot mechanics are okay-ish. A bit grindy, but if you hold down the Ctrl-key all the time its bearable.

Game has great apocalyptic atmosphere. Sexual invasion of demon world is something really good entertainment. Artwork drawing style is beauty. Main aspect of the game is the gameplay. You need to loot and fight or do quests at the postapocalyptic town. Usually I don't like fight and stats in games but in this game fight system was perfect for me. Theres challange in it but if you have a little logic then it is easy and entertaining. Stats balance with the girls is always a hard topic games like this. As I see people complain about grind if the game starts lacking content due to early version of the game so I accept this and do not complain about it.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the level of polish that the game has considering where it is in the development cycle. The engine is also very competently used to create a decently tactical combat system with plenty of variety and I've only encountered one or two programming errors that actually impacted game play.

The writing is passable with very few errors in grammar or spelling but does come off a little artificial at times, but the progression with the various female characters is well done and the art is very well presented. If future updates are able to polish some of the rough edges even more, I'll happily change my rating to excellent.

It's okay. Not great. Not terrible. Right at average.

The art's decent, and the character designs aren't bad. Only thing to knock truly is that demon dick is thrown in your face so damn often that it starts to get obnoxious.

Let's dive into why it's bland.

Okay, so. The combat's pretty trash. Like, really, really trash. It's made out to be turn based but you can stun lock demons and easily kill them, even later being able to insta-kill them. All in all, though, it makes for repetitive fights of doing the same moves on repeat. Eventually did encounter an enemy who was immune to your stun ability and ignores you shielding ability (which killed me, admittedly), but it was a long time before I encountered them. So the majority of the game is spent facing the same mooks who you can kill with ease, except it's time consuming because the fastest you can kill them is in 4 turns. But you can access your best energy restoration only in combat, so it's more like 5-6 usually. Repeat the same skill order ad nauseum. Plus there's extensive delays between turns, despite your enemies showing their moves through their postures), that's around 1-2 seconds.
The inclusion of an auto-battle mechanic would alleviate this immensely, or a better battle system with more important decisions. If the former is implemented, it would be best if you could script your moves or something similar, since the same skill order is always used.

Next up is the interactions between characters. It's incredibly lack luster, as you're often given the choice to either be extremely friendly or extremely arrogant, with no in-between. There's no room for the player to express themselves except with two extremes, while the protagonist acts either as an incredibly loquacious bore who only says compliments en masse or a massive cunt. It would be better if there were more dialogue options for the player, so that they can feel like they have more dynamic choices on their interactions with the characters. Also, the relationship mechanic in general needs to be re-done (it's either love or submission) so that the two have more inter-lap. It's been in my experience that there is none, they have no effect on the either in general, and that they both do the same thing in different ways, instead of achieving different results because of different methods.

Finally, game mechanics. Things like returning home empties your inventory. While useful to quickly deposit things and free up space, there's no option to keep items from being dumped. This is problematic for when you need certain items on hand to give to certain NPC's. Setting out while forgetting to grab them can be extremely annoying, especially when certain encounters where you need them are random. Another game mechanic is food. You must gather food at all times to feed everyone at home, at a rate of 2 food consumed per day (breakfast and dinner). You can get anywhere from 0-2 food per raided house, among other things. Whereas at first, this isn't that bad, but only because the encounters you experience are limited. As the game progresses you encounter more scenarios that over all give you absolutely nothing except to waste your time, i.e. combat with a roaming enemy or an encounter with an NPC you don't care about at the time. Furthermore, touching back on raiding for food, you often find other items of interest (alcohol, batteries, and chocolate). In my experience it averages around 1 food, and 2 of the mentioned items. So per house is around 3 items, while you only have inventory space for 10 things. You can dump things but it's generally not a requirement, but the issue I'd like to address is that somethings you find too much of one thing while others you can't hardly find at all. Giving the player options for what they "look for" would be best, i.e. "Search for Food, Search for Batteries, Wander Around", etc. That way the player can effectively deal with any needs they have, rather than praying to RNGesus every time they go out.


All in all, the game's pretty average. The plot I didn't touch on, because the whole point of the game is to get you fucking women, but also because it's pros and cons are pretty subjective. Also because this review is long enough as it is. With improvements I can definitely see this game being something you can fondly remember, but as it is now, it's really meh.