VN - Ren'Py - Mirror World [v0.01.4] [Profile Games]

v0.01.4

Game has some good models and generally like the writing for the female cast. Story even has an interesting premise. But everything falls on the execution.

To start MC, while not a bad guy, is still a womanizing player with a devil's tongue. Refreshing not to deal with another naive teen protag but I found him deplorable. And being on a first name basis with you MOM is just weird.

Though my biggest complaint is with the logistics. There isn't any.
A pair of MC's friends are devs on revolutionary VR game, and just loan out tens of thousands $$$ prototype kit for him to share with his friends. No NDA or questions asked. A VR project of this scope will easily be 1/2 BILLION $$$ to produce. It's one thing to turn off your brain for these stories but your mind would literally have to be a vegetable to buy into this.

One of the LI invites the MC over to her home for a steak dinner, that she grills outdoors while wearing the skimpiest bikini possible. And not even technically being a "date". While flirtatious she's not written as some cheap slut so the entire scene is just absurd.

Then the dev is experimenting with an amount of animated renders. For most of which the uncanny valley just comes off creepy nor add any benefit to the scene. It's fine the dev wants to learn this but such early alpha progress should not be released. Worse is many are bugged playing 2x. Also agree can be difficult to keep track of who's speaking. Particularly with many characters in a scene.

Profile does seem to have some talent but is trying to make something well above their capabilities. And script for whats here would need a substantial overhaul to keep my interest. As is I found it a chore.

Visuals are OK.

Dialogue is not coming up in correct sequence so either badly coded or badly written.

Game is honestly just boring, nothing that really got me hooked into the game/story. And i honestly don't see myself trying to follow this until later in development if it ever gets that far. I have my doubts.

V0.01.3

visuals are the strong point. looks pretty enough that many will no doubt flood it with 5 star reviews thinking that this will ego stroke the developer into continuing, regardless that money is the only speech that really matters.
evidence of that apparent, but as i have never been gullible enough to buy incomplete games, a minor negative.

writing is not bad. the plot is interesting enough but not a wild excursion of the imagination. similar to a few others already in the make/abandoned.

coding. by far the worst part of this game. not only is it chock full of renpy errors without a choice to cause it, but who the hell is talking? quite often the dialogue makes little sense as someone seems to be answering themselves. not sure why the only choices are the whole screen, but somewhat pointless as continuing only leads to further BJ rather than actually advance players who want to skip it onto sex. somewhat pointless.

it boggles my mind why any dev looking for funding/sales would have such poor standards when releasing.
if your food is half cooked then you send it back and think twice about going to that restaurant ever again. product might be different but sales are still sales.