VN - Ren'Py - Mirror Mine [v0.20] [Lemonkey]

I've only managed about an hour of this VN before giving up. The whole story is one cliché after another:

- Evil asshole dad
- Loving mom with no personality
- MC is a lazy, unemployed, perverted loser with a blank character, zero life skills, and absolutely no self-control
- MC goes catatonic with inappropriate staring the moment he thinks of anything vaguely sexual, which happens every 10 minutes
- The MC who is an adult with supposedly many sexual escapades sees an older woman in a bikini and reacts like a 13 year-old who saw a porno mag for the first time
- MC sexually assaults an unconscious drunk girl
- MC peeps on a lesbian couple having sex, gets caught

All that happened within the first hour, and I couldn't continue further.

This game is based on his story and that's a good thing!

Now I don't like this story because of the storytelling, all the situations are so cliché, the protagonist never surprises for the better, he is always more bad and indecisive than what a game based on corruption would give.
I ended up skipping the last parts of the story on the corruption side, I know I shouldn't have but cmon !
I find that there is too much useless dialogue, it may be so because the dev wants us to know the characters and their personality but hey,
with so many cliché situations it's just seen and reviewed which suddenly gives a redundancy effect & disconnect us from the game world.

Nice, slow story, suspense, good dialogs, nice renders. Not crowded with characters. The story and the secrets are unfolded at the right pace, leaving room for the story to develop. Just right for me.

I am not going to give me out as an expert in developing games because i cannot, however i can play a game and do enjoy a realistic game. This game is very close to true life for i think a few people. Most games the guy fucks the after an hour.

This game you need to do things realistically work to get the girl/girls. Graphics is not bad proportions of the players anatomy is realistic LoL. The story very good and opens up the game to become a winner. Keep it up. yes there are a few small bugs maybe but all and all very good. Thanks

I had to give it two stars instead of one because the renders are excellent. But, my gosh, how slow can a story move? And how depressing does it have to get? This isn't a game, it's a novel, and I'm getting tired of those.

Some will praise this game for its story, after a while though I thought it has quite a lot of the usual clichés (fistfight, playing a video game, peeking, annoying and abusive male character, etc.). I don't mind it that much though; two of my favorite games have all of that. The renders are good, incl. that the landlady/mom doesn't look like a twenty-something model. The English is readable, with the usual sloppiness regarding spelling (which lets the text appear somewhat generic, despite the effort given to it). Others have lauded the game for its grammar and spelling, but either this has changed with the updates or they have missed quite a deal.

I am all for buildup and tension, though I have to agree with others that even for me it is a bit on the long duration side. This is one of the more ambitious titles regarding writing and again this is one of the games where an "over" is in very danger to end up in front of the "ambitious". As others said as well, after trying out I didn't feel that my choices matter that much. Maybe they will at a later time. On the plus side, there are a couple of scenes that I found indeed titillating. I really wish there was MUCH more interaction with Lizzie (the supposed aunt, I guess).

I can't rate this wholeheartedly **** stars, so it is a somewhat *** 1/2 for the effort.

Pros:

- Good renders (Actually the main selling point. The author puts a lot of energy into scene setups and setting up good lightning. )
- Visually believable "landlady" character that actually looks 40+


Cons:

- lack of choices. It's almost a kinetic novel.
- half the choices (the few of them that are in the game anyway) are no choices at all (meaning single choice "click this to continue" style choices)
- uses "what's your relationship to this character ?" questions to get around Patreon's ban on incest. This inevitably leads a watered down experience as the game needs to acount for the characters to actually being *not* related to each other.

Sorry m8,
but considering the amount of time working on this,
compared to all other even newer developpers....
from me this is worth 1 star max.

most main reason to come here is quite obvious.
this VN doesn't have anything to offer after 2 years.

2 years dude.... not even 1 main character has gotten far.

Extremely slow pace.. Dragging this out for years literally without one good scene.. Dont waste your money or time...

Its been years and not one kiss between the MC and any woman in the story.. It keep meandering about ..

Really good models, storyline, renders, and animations but really slow updates (10x faster than ISCTOR or L&P though). Really appreciate the production status chart on Lemonkey's patreon. Eagerly waiting for updates, I know they'll be good.

Edit: Almost been a year since I wrote this review and the story has barely progressed. What a shame, everything else was so good.

This game is at least a 4 stars game.
It's slow pacing, but story buildup is very good and render is decent .
If you are not seeking for some fastfap game and are fond of well-written story, then please give Mirror Mine a try.

It's one of the more realistic adult games I've ever played. Don't expect straight forward 5 steps to corruption and then massaging breast with oil, or blowjob scene. Nothing like that at all.
It's semi-realistic circumstances of 2 people slowly falling in lust or love with each other.

Everyone's complaining about the pace and slowness of content and releases, but I believe good things take time. So far I feel it is leading up to something climactic.

I must admit, that I didn't want to try this game, since it got rated pretty low, from the day the game was first created. But as I saw the rating keep going up, during a couple of months, I decided to give it a try. The game version I'm reviewing is version 0.16.1. I can start by saying that I completely disagree with everyone who gave this game less than 3 stars. In my opinion, this is, at least, a 4 star worth game. The renders are very good, especially the mother was made very well. She's been aged perfectly in the renders. Unlike in many other games, in which the developer tells you the age, which you then just have to assume, you can tell the age of the mother by the renders itself. Very well done! Also, the story buildup is very well done and appealing. Not too fast and not too slow. The English grammar is flawless, unlike in, again, many other games, which I find quite refreshing and which gives me a "ah, finally" feeling. In short, I see a great future in the making for this game and its developer. Last but not least, you may wonder why I rated this game with 5 stars, after I just said it's an (at least) 4 stars worth game. Well, that's because it's my intention to get the total rating up, more, so that it reflects the quality of the game better to other potential players.

Too slow paced for a tale about a son and a mother getting closer together if you know what I mean and trying to make it more of a story than what it really is. Did not capture me and I guess someone else might find joy in these slow burns. But just the build up and how long it is taking is just too much. Models look ok.

to drawn out last update was nothing dragged out to much and could be a a hard R rating at most is waste of time for download updates. 2 years into it and total play time could be completed in little time. now on my total ignore any new updates list and trashed it off my harddrive to trash

I love it! People are upset about the lack of sexual content but I kind of enjoy the slow relationship build up between the mc and the "landlady".

It's not your typical porn game where you spend a couple of minutes doing menial tasks for the ladies and and voila! you get to shag everyone with your wiener. No no, this thing feels more real and believable and that's the best thing about Mirror mine.

Besides, if you followed the plot, you will notice that it's actually moving forward. It's not going around in circles, the buildup towards sex is there. The was proof of that. You just gotta be patient.

Also, the "Landlady" is the perfect definition of a true MILF. She's imperfectly perfect.

I have high hopes for this game and I can't wait to finally do the deed with her. I just hope that the updates will continue.

Best of luck to Lemonkey!

Meow

Very well done. So refreshing to see a great story and pacing with wonderful renders. Not for everybody as it is a slow burn but totally hit the mark for me. Not your typical game in this genre, that's for sure. Looking forward to the next version.

This gets two stars for having excellent, expressive renders, and a MILF that actually looks a little older. Very unique as far as these games go.

However, there's a few core issues:

First, this is basically a slightly explicit romance story. I would barely qualify it as erotic, much less pornographic. There's slow burn, and then there's this. The writing is all right, but nothing that engaging, so I started to get bored before long. When this happens with Ren'Py games, I simply start holding the skip button to see just how long I would have to wait to see the reason to play these things, the erotic/smut content. By god, I was holding down the button for minutes at a time. A few shots of voyeurism, and a teased hint of fellatio, and that's it. If you're into minimal sexual content, spaced over long stretches of text, this is for you, I suppose.

Which leads me to my next strike against this game: It's barely a game, even by Ren'Py VN standards. You maybe have a half dozen inputs during the entire story as it stands. It's extremely passive. Sometimes there's breaks where you simply have to press the button to continue, which barely counts.

This should be a comic or something, there's no reason to make it a game.

The models may be nice and the writing is passable but the game takes too much time picking up. I can appreciate a slow burn or slow corruption but this is a glacial pace and the writing isnt so compelling to keep you hooked through all the dialogue. I have counted 2 meaningful choices in the whole game the rest is "play scene or nah" or literally just one choice? Bad.

The game is made to have your balls pass all possible shades of blue before giving a glimpse of a payoff. 2/5

Graphics are pretty good with nice scene cuts but the story is boring, extremely long and drawn out, overdone slow burn teasing players for two years having 16 updates and the closest you've come to your goal is a few peeks, a grope and a kiss. Not worth the download and time clicking all those useless dialogues.