Ren'Py - Abandoned - Magical Family: Laboratory [v0.35] [LMDC]

A buggy mess. I clicked Map and it punted me back to the main menu. That was the final straw after having to deal with "feature (or LI) not implemented yet" and the most nonesensical story of all time.

Someone hypnotizes your mom via text. So to free her from the spell, you hypnotize her yourself and give her superpowers? There's some bizarre dream sequence implying that you are a god? I actually feel dumber after spending an hour with this game.

It could have been a generic mind control game with good renders, but it amounts to nothing more than a buggy mess with NO CONTENT.

I tried it since it was abandoned to see if there was anything to it and trust me when I say it wasn't worth it. A few good looking LIs and renders that will do nothing but give you blue ball and psychological damage from game bugs.

I'm not the one to give review to a game which is so early in development but I wanna clear some misconception here, specially some very biased review.
First of all, those who don't like Sandbox game just see the tag and leave, there is no point to give a game negative review just because it's Sandbox, some gave 1 star, really man???
.
I am giving 5 stars just to balance it out. It is more like 4 stars at this point.

The story premise is great, I mean, super great, an indication of powerful but unknown villain, mysterious father, beautiful model, great render. Alas it has very slim chance of being completed.
Anyway, I hope it gets completed, it has great potential.

In its current state it is bafflingly bad.
The Time slot system is shoehorned into a lot of these games and exists to give an illusion of gameplay to separate it from a VN. Unfortunately a grand majority of developers, this one included, do not understand how to use this system correctly. These types of systems are intended to mire a player in choices and be a puzzle in themselves as to how to manage their time and meet their goals by a deadline, the gameplay should not revolve around waiting a whole week to do one thing before you have to once again wait a whole week to continue progress in said thing. While further update may alleviate this issue to an extent I doubt it can be executed at all well enough to actually have it be anything other than padding.
The navigation is horrendous and can simply be fixed by further adding a hub system that some game have, having an upstairs hub where you can go to the bedrooms the bathroom or down stair and world map, one for the first floor that allows you to travel to all connecting tile and the world map and so on for any other areas involved. The foot print system is insanely hard to see and doesn't actually communicate where the player is going that intuitively and with a hub system you would be able to cut areas that are completely unnecessary. Also why are there two steps to get to your lab rather than a small transition screen, you have to open your lab then click the option at the stairs to go down them it's completely unnecessary.
Than there is the RNG item stuff why is this in the game is this padding why are you padding the game like this why are you wasting our time with this is it really necessary to have us wait until a specific time in a day where we have nothing else to do than try to get people to show up not have them show up have to wait another day and repeat until they do only to have them not have the item? Its a giant middle finger to anyone playing this. It is an extremely disrespectful waste of everyone involved time, remove it.
The art of the game is solid, elizabeth's hair is a bit on the ugly side as far as hair styles go but that the only real complain i have for it all in all you have a long way to go before this starts to resemble anything good but it is a diamond in the rough please fix the issues I have and don't give up on it!

I especially like the game's graphics and the character designs. The ladies look super sexy and our MC, a short teenager with a big penis is what I was waiting for. Looking at the game's map, it can promise exciting content in future updates. Great job, keep up the good work dev.

I've been let down by the game. As it exists today, you spam click around a sandbox map for 1.5hrs to see a titfuck scene and two handjob scenes. The animation is great. The art is wonderful. Unfortunatley the scenes are limited but the UI within is good. The sandbox is poorly implemented (takes forever to navigate, very difficult to even know where to click to do so) but can be fixed. The writing is sloppy with typos all over the place. The story is at least a bit of a twist on the standard incest flick.

I like it, not many mind control games that have actual mind control as the theme. They put it together well. Please don't be one of those people that leaves 1 star reviews cause you don't like anime boobies. Thx.

Good animations, needs walkthrough though, hopefully this game goes a long way.
Need bigger booties and bigger thighs imo but all in all I play this and pay for patreon if it keeps it going not like icsestor or what ever and Aorrta lol

[As of v0.31]
Currently, I do like what is available. For once, the main character that we play as doesn't act like a complete dick despite kind of looking the part and despite the story being somewhat ridiculous, that's kind of what I expected coming into this.

My biggest issue currently is that there's very little to do between events. There's the opening event with the mom and aunt, and then you have to wait until Friday evening to do anything else. I realize this is still early in development but maybe there can be something to make the moments between events feel less boring, that'd be great. Even if it's just mundane things like you going down to the lab and realizing that the supply of potion is getting low sooner to introduce the other areas faster would be a bit helpful since from my perspective, there is literally nothing to do between the opening and waiting until Friday evening by spamming the bed.

7.5/10 - What's there isn't bad, but it definitely feels like it is a game in its earliest stages. Temper any expectations you have before going into this. Otherwise, fairly excited to see what comes next!

I'm going to give it 4 stars, which might be too high for the current state the game is in, but I'm hopeful for improvements since it's the dev's first game, and I can see they actually try to improve.

I played the game twice this update, 0.3 and 0.31, and I didn't get to the pool scene both times, not sure if it was cut, but I saw it in screenshots, so it's confusing.

I appreciate the effort to quickly add a journey log on what to do next, but the implementation is horrible. It's not pointless because you at least know when certain events take place, but you have no idea at which stage they are and if there is more, or if it's just the same event on repeat. Things like that you need to check add up to frustration while playing, when you have to skip time and check every little thing and not be sure if that's the end of the content.

My suggestion is to:

1. build a decent journey log on what to do, which keeps track of:
   a) Progress of repeatable events (3 states - new events available, repeatable event no new scenes, you need to progress the main/side story more or higher hypnosis etc.)
   b) Progress of the main story. If you want to go with the main story separated from character stories, like with the new ninja character, I'd suggest separating them in the log with clear indication which content end is to which story branch.(an indication if you saw all the scenes in the game would also be nice)
   
   
2. Put the characters in the world during the day, creating routines for them, which would make the game much livelier.
   They don't even need to be clickable with events at the beginning, but simply adding them would add so much more immersion to the world.
   
   
3. Make an indication from the current location where a given character is.
   What I mean is, for example, when we're in the hall, display on the doors and footprints, circle portraits of characters that are in these locations.
   It would make finding characters so much easier.
   If you did a journey book with multiple states like I said, you could even give an outline to these circles if there's a new event to be unlocked if we go there.
   
   4. Is there a reason the journey book is only available in the bedroom? I can understand the option to call someone to be there or even the map, but it's super annoying to backtrack to check what to do next.

All the things I've listed above are objectively good and can only improve the player experience.
As a developer, it's up to you how you'll implement them, but please don't skip over them to push the story forward because it's pointless if the medium to convey it is so confusing and frustrating.

Btw. in software development never give the exact time estimate which you think you'll be able to do something, because it'll always take you more.
When you promise people you'll do something in X time and don't deliver on time but in X*1.2 they'll be angry. (Like you've already experienced)
But if you promise to deliver the same thing in 1.5*X time and deliver in X*1.2 time they'll be super happy and you'll have less time pressure on you meaning usually less bugs, better productivity.

Hope I'll be able to update the review in the future and give the game 5 stars.

Game so far is a mess full of bugs that lock you from advancing to what little content there is available so far. One should wait until the dev has sorted out the technical problems and there's actually some tangible content (I finished the current version of the game in just a few minutes and I didn't skip any text).

I'll start out by saying I prefer sandbox games to VN's because I enjoy the immersion and the challenge. However, this seems like a sandbox designed by someone that doesn't play them. The point of a sandbox is choosing your own path and being able to pick which part of the story you want to interact with. That doesn't work when the dev designed everything to be linear so you have to figure out which day, time, and location will trigger the one available event. There are about 15 locations, 4 times of day, and 7 days a week, so that's 420 clicks to check everything if the events are a week apart, which is the way they frequently are.

The other clue that the dev doesn't play sanboxes is the character locations. You know how normally, each character has a place they'll be at various days and times? This one doesn't do that. The characters a gone if they aren't there to trigger an event. So all that clicking I described above is through empty locations.

So, here's the constructive feedback:

1. Give the characters some life by putting them in the house. Make them have things to do throughout the day so we can interact with them.
2. Have a display that shows where they are and whether there's an event to trigger
3. Create a hint or walk through display. Spare us all the endless searching!
4. Get rid of the barely visible footsteps as navigation and just have clickable areas of the screen. You've done that with some of the doors, so why not make the stairs clickable? The footsteps aren't intuitive at all.
5. Don't release the game without testing. After all that grindy bullshit, the next trigger was bugged. You either didn't test the game, or you knew there was a game breaking bug and put it out anyway. That's shitty.

doesnt matter how good a game looks or how well the premise seems when the "gameplay" is just skipping time and then cant even progress the story because the button isnt even pressable.

cant reccomend it at all currently because its litterally not playable.

I am not the fan of such model graphics but in my personal opinion this game is quite good. The story is simple but interesting. you have a lab in your room which feels just right as if you want to control women then you need such place to have =D you can do it on your personal pc, lol =D
then I was a little bit confused what to do at the beginning of the game, but later on you can see hints which are useful. so great great and good luck

Models are great, hot women. Gameplay is point and click, which I dislike.
Plus, after the "intro" the game starts on a Monday and there's basically nothing to do until Sunday? Why would I waste my time with this?
Good looking women aren't all a game needs. It needs actual gameplay, which this is sorely lacking.

Review on v0.3

I hate to rip on games I actually like, because this game has a great premise and despite many attempts by other devs, there was rarely ever a corruption incest game where MC corrupted all his family members into submission until the final stages where they all have group sex, etc. The majority of these games get abandonded halfway through or turn into a vanilla shitshow where MC falls in love with one or all family members. It is yet to be shown how far this game will ever make it, but before it ever will, it does need some serious gameplay improvments:

1.) Renders are great , also from the surroundings etc, but the way the house and the viewing perspective of the rooms is arranged is horrible and feels like a complete rabbit hole. They should definitly introduce a quick navigation bar to immediatly jump in between locations.
a.) In addition to that character faces or names should be shown to see who is available at which location, otherwise you keep clicking through all the locations desperately hoping to trigger a new scene.
b.) To enhance this feature even further, there should be some sign next to the character face/name, such as an exclamation mark, which shows immediatly "new content" when you click here.

2.) This update really had not too much content but I am not here to comlpain on amount of content when I am sure dev team does everything they can do as a part time job. Also I totally get that the dream cutscene was for sure difficult to make and at least a sign of some art performance. But what really bugs (literally) me is when the little actual gameplay content there is is not even thoroughly bug testet. The whole progression with the "Mom on sofa" scene was full of error messages once the stage with the additional dress was reached. Earlier progressions could not be repeated etc. Also I had some game crash, I think when searching for the ingredients, but it was rather occasional so I assume somewhat hard to reproduce.

3.) They seriously need to pay attention that this doesn't turn into a grinding shit show. I mean you can do all of this once but the replayability, despite the fact that there is no gallery, is still close to zero. Never do I want to go through that ingredient collection grind again (with a horrible chance to trigger the package btw) just to make some 5% progressions on Mom corruption. Although it's okay right now -given the limited amount of content - you certainly don't want to play a game like this when it has reached a many hundres of renders of sex content.

When these points are remedied (especielly point 1 and 2) I will change my review from 4 to 5 stars.

This games looks good. Love small man with curvy women. The models look good as well. I will save this game for later. But I’m not into SM . Will be much better if include more romantic stories with landladies and can add some adventure as well. Please don’t include too many characters. Maximum 5 women are enough.

Project is still early on [v0.21] but this project seems to hold a lot of potential if it stays course. The models look really nice, the animations are solid, and the set up, while maybe contrived (hypnosis; but with a nice superpower angle), has a lot of wiggle room to allow the creator to come up because of with lots of unique and enjoyable scenarios. There's minor but expected growing pain issues from an early project (mispellings and questionable use of random color accents), But I have the utmost faith that the creator will fix this in followup QoL updates.

v0.2
The game itself is quite sexy. good 3d models, beautiful backgrounds and UI, and amusing enough plot. (dexter lab, but horny)
At the moment there is barely any content (grope mom's boobs once, that is it).
It is more of a tech demo.

I like sandbox, but the free roam segments are not sandbox.
They are just time wasters making you find the literally 1 and only spot you can click to advance the plot.
(not hard as they tell you, but it is annoying)
They really shouldn't be there.
If a sandbox segment is planned later on, then it should be introduced later on.

I would have called it a kinetic sandbox, but there are actual choices you can make in the VN segments.
so it isn't kinetic... but it is quite odd.

I am looking forwards to the actual game.
It is brimming with potential, but at its current state it is not worth downloading yet. Need a few more updates to add some content.

edit: make sure you use the ipatch because literally all the current content that exists is incest.
I would have expected a case of having the same exact scene only with "landlady" and "landlady's friend".
But instead it actually cuts scenes without the ipatch

This has so much potential! My one criticism is that it's unclear who the protagonist is. It's got the feel of a sandbox game (especially at the end) but with enough characters that the story feels clearly linear. Whose actions are we controlling when we click through the story? So far 3 people.

The art is awesome, the animation is cool and smooth, and the concept is really compelling. I'm excited to see where this goes.