TL;DR: Lust Campus [v0.1] has beautiful visuals, some design flaws in the game design, hot characters and a story with questionable beginnings (be nice = non-consensual stuff happens). 3/5
First off, this game has potential and I will keep my eye on it.
As I usually try to do, I slept on it before writing a review. This cleared my mind a bit, because the first impression was strongly dominated by the great visuals. Stripping these away and looking at the game itself the picture changes.
The Good
- The artwork/graphics are beautiful. No questions there. One minor nitpicking (glasses, see below), and unfortunately no animations (yet?), but still a solid 5/5
- The only glimpse of a penis so far seems somewhat normal sized, Lin has small breasts, only MC has very large breasts, but still narrowly within real life reason. Nothing comically enlarged so far. ++
The Neutral
- The music is good, imagining it going on for hours during a full playthrough not so much. It's a [v0.1], so a lot of potential to add and improve.
- The characters are consistent, but rather stereotypical so far. The sexy tattooed bad boy, his equally sexy bitchy and arrogant half-sister, the shy smart nerd, the bluff muscular landlord/roommate, the fair fatherly college professor. All of them solid 10s by the way, even the nerd looks like he could be a lead in a Hollywood movie. Maybe the future will bring a bit more diversity and depth.
- The story is solid and consistent, the dialogues have a good casual quality. One thing sticks out negatively though (see below).
Story-wise the inclusion of Rilke (MC's pet cat, nice nod to the poet) is a good way to have the MC bounce ideas and emotions off of someone. Good story device.
- You cannot choose the MC's name (yet?).
The Bad
- The one graphic element to nitpick, which every wearer of glasses will notice: None of the glasses of Alice, her dad, or Darren seem to have any corrective purpose. These glasses are decorative only. Dear non-glasses-wearer: We notice this. It breaks the illusion (a tiny bit).
- The game mechanics are unnecessarily limited. Having played a lot of Ren'Py games I'm used to things like rollback and quicksave/-load. While in this game rollback for normal dialogues is enabled, decision rollback is disabled. No problem, I'll just use quicksave & -load more often. Nope, also disabled.
Using Ren'Py and then limiting these mechanics is like buying a workhorse and then breaking its legs. In my opinion that is completely unnecessary and will become much more annoying the further the story develops.
- The story has an element which made me very angry. After a very nice intro about MC, her best friend, her dad and her cat she goes to college and because she's late and lost she has a decision to make: Whether to ask the sexy bad boy who approaches her for help or tell him to mind his own business. The latter decision increases MCs rudeness (I looked at the variables, yes), but the friendly, casual approach gets her sexually assaulted(*). Sexy bad boy pushes her against the wall and grabs her chin. MC can then decide whether to get horny and give in to a kiss (+kinky points) or reject him (-kinky points).
This shows an unfortunate correlation between corruption and kinky points in this game. Being a decent person who doesn't condone non-consensual sexual assault gives you nothing. Negative points even.
As someone who prefers niceness, love, and romance I can guarantee that it does not exclude kinkiness. You don't have to be attracted to the bad boys to have a rich, kinky sex life.
Agreed, this IS only v0.1, maybe the dev will change the tone of the story, but I'm not too optimistic. Feels like the "bad girl" route is heavily preferred.
All of this together brings it to a solid 3/5 rating, which - for a game this early in development - is quite good I think.
A lot of potential, now it's on the devs to use it. I wish them both good luck!
(*): Yes, sexually assaulted. Her own words chatting with her best friend later are "he mugged me in the hallway".