Ren'Py - Monster Girl Dreams [v26.1a Alpha] [Threshold]

I passed on this for ages. This was a mistake.

The basic premise is as follows:
You are biggus dickus, the apparent only male in reality. Others are brought up, but never really seen.
You live in a land where a giant magical spell was cast to make physically harming anyone (mostly) impossible
You are excessively in debt, and to pay it off, you go adventure.
The world is full of monster girls who jump on you on sight because of the lack of males, and in lew of physically fighting them, you have to fuck them into submission.
Alternatively you can whore yourself out in the bar, but that doesn't pay much

Combat is fun. Enemies have a surprisingly robust response list depending on how you attack them, and you have a surprisingly large list of options. Kissing, fucking, throwing a net on them, calling them sexy with such arousing passion they spontaniously cum on the spot so hard they fall unconcious. Its good fun.
All it really needs is an option to
A: Invite enemies to do certain attacks
B: Initiate oral (both you receiving and giving) yourself
Because you can initatie anal and vaginal yourself, but if you want to see oral lose scenes, you have to tediously wait around for them to do it. And the girls have a bad habit of orgasaming on you before you ever see them try.

The actual sex scenes themselves are hot. I'm very bias to oral, and this has tons of it. The magical hentai 'girl cums from sucking your dick' kind. The best kind. Not much of you giving it though, mostly just a few 69 scenes.
The MC, Mr. Cocksalot, is apparently really fucking good at sex, so the scenes tend to be plastered with excessive lovehearts, caps and !!!!!!. I like it. Some may not.

But the main reason you play this? The thing that ties it all together? Its the girls. From the church loli (NOT for lewd), the random mushroom girl you dicked so hard your cock mutated, the extremely submissive bat girl to the fox girl you can romance, everyone is likeable.
They want your dick, sure. And they'll fuck you if you lose. But it, with 2 exceptions (both of which are viewed as mistakes by the characters who do it), never really feels sadistic. The MC is never a sadistic ass even to the extreme submissives despite a trait you get being literally callled sadist, and if the girls primarily go for either gentle femdom or mindless multiple day long boning sessions. Even the hypno sessions a few characters offer to make you more submissive to them which you get multiple warnings about maybe not being the nicest thing in the world are mostly them being gentle mommies,
Its just refreshing.
At no point does it feel like anyone crosses the line where they cease to be a character and become a walking sadistic fetish without promptly realizing they were going too far and apologizing.

Even outside of the sex the characters are very likeable. Like the monsters are the 'bad' guys in some way, being incredibly horny sexual predators, but then you get to know them. And they have lives. Jobs. Homes. You can visit a surprisingly large number in their homes. You can even be a sugar daddy for one (worst girl btw, trash character) and help her change her job, home and life around. You wouldn't expect that coming in. But you can.
And some of them are beyond the point of being horny monsters jumping on everyone and just genuinely want love. Which means you, usually.

The fetishes are also pretty varied. Not much foot content, if you are into that, probably owing to its general gentle femdom at most approach and foot stuff being for some reason associated with hard doms.
A lot of oral and vaginal.
A little anal, including a character mostly preferring it over anything else


There really isn't much I can fault this game on
The art is good, and mostly complete. When its not complete, they offer descriptions (I like to see these descriptions even for the complete ones; they're much more exhaustive than the pictures)
The writing is shockingly good
The world is simple but entirely justifies why DickFancy is going around combat fucking everything that breathes
The QOL is even good. You get far enough in a relationship with a girl to visit her house? It'll usually be added to the world map.


My only complaints would be

-The Character menu. Its in right click on the visual novel UI this uses. You just don't expect it to be there. I had to google and find a guy on F95 mentioning not being able to find it to find it myself

-The bat girl hypno sessions are kind of... lame. The fox is a long exhaustive thing that has a ton of scenes and good payoff. Vivian's breast hypno is short and sweet, but does what you'd expect, make you like boobs more. You'd think the bat would hypno you to want to grope her more or be more of a dom or something, but she doesn't really do anything.

- As mentioned earlier, ways to invite the enemies to pounce you aiming for certain body parts rather than tediously waiting, or just being able to force it

- It never really even attempts to explain you can revisit old areas while picking events/quests/enemies and a lot of the games conte t is hidden behind doing this

-You can romance pretty much everyone in the will/power temple, but you can't instantly travel to them from world map, or from a single hub location like you can the forest. You can turn off enemy encounters, but the number of clicks needed to reach anyone except the girls i nthe first areas is extremely tedious

-Working in the bar for actual scenes is tedious. As soon as you get most, its day time. So you need to work there 3 times in a row, in a menu that's strangely slow to respond, to be able to try again to maybe see something new or the scene you want to see

-Game could use a gallery, recollection room, dream memory thingy, whatever, to see scenes like those in the bar in, and some indication of if there are even more of these misc scenes to see

-The 'ebony elf with a thong sucking dick' in the glory holes should have some content beyond you seeing her sucking a dick occasionally

- You have a lot of buffs, but could really use a debuff, or a way to heal enemies (or both), for when you are simply too strong to have any real fun with them mid-fight

Lowering score from 5 to 4. Two years since I made this review has added 1 (one) terrible unfun and broken dungeon and 3 (three) girls that are less interactable than any other girl in the game short of random enemies. They're bosses.

This is a gem especially in it's genre ! I loved the varienty of fetishes,places,the storytelling and of course the monster girls!
PROS:
-Beautiful gameplay,the fighting mechanism is very nice and it's still in development that's exciting cant wait!
-Adorable characters that has different personalities,beliefs and fetishes and getting in different kind of great moments with them
-Musics are nice as well maybe it can be increased/developed in the future but it goes with story nicely
-The storytelling is great it makes nice hype, i keep wondering what's going to happen next and then i start to looking forward to next updates
-Arts is a big plus,it gets the experience another level.Hopefully we can get as much as them in next updates.
CONS:
-I know it even says in game description that it's in alpha/active development but bugs are still annoying still i understand-because it's in active development- (EDIT: Didnt encounter any bugs in later updates so guess it's getting solved)
-Maybe getting new topics to talk with the beautiful citizens that in guild,shop and bar
Keep up the good work dev i'll support this project it deserves 5 star imo.
EDIT: Best game in F95ZONE! (At least in it's genre)

Great text-based game. Despite the game being in alpha, there is a lot to see and do. There is a lot of rich text and a bunch of great art accompanying it. Furthermore, the game has a lot of well-written characters with many ways of interaction. So in conclusion, if you are interested in text-based games or monster-girl genre there really no reasons no to try this one.

This is the kind of game I've been looking for. Quality Erotica, "battles" where you have to strategize carefully, and just enough quality art to prime your imagination's pump. I also appreciate that most encounters are repeatable, and that a "loss" isn't a Game Over.

Up until tis update (V 22) this has been an incredible game with good story, well writen characters with different personalities, a combat system entertaining that builds up well with the game theme and of course lots of H scenes everywhere with all kinds of kinks. There´s also the constant updates that keep the game fresh, the only bad point (and that depends on your likes) is that it´s text based so basically no CG scenes still the dialogues are quite well writen so in general as long as you not only care for what you see you´ll have a good time (btw there´re some images of the characters that even change according to the situation and seems all will eventually get their own image so that´s a bit more of help if you need it or worry to only look at walls of text)

Review for v22.2a

And here we are with another free-clicking poorly-programmed full-of-unnecessary-text game...

First of all - as lots of fight/strategy porn games - you spend the majority of your time farming. By the way, you farm for nothing, as usual : you fight slimegirls for starters, and win each time approx. 20 eros, when you know that you'll spend 200 on buying an energy potion that'll give you only 25 mp afterwards... That is clearly not profitable, and it's only the beginning! It'll get worse and worse as the game continues and the challenges grow harder.
So this farming necessity is just boring. Maybe this is the reason why the devs implemented a modding option (again...). Yes, you could argue it's to offset the lacks of the game, but here it's the 22nd version... So maybe all that unbalanced rewarding/bonus/malus system could have been changed in the past versions, as the player can clearly see the numerous defaults of the gameplay.

Secondly, the art is average : the quality is good, but it lacks of variety. There is not many different scenes, and the content is partially identical from a monstergirl to another. Only you can see few variations on the face of the different mobs. And damn, there is a lot of useless text, making you want to skip it all the time and making you lose vital information that no post, no sum up would give you afterwards.

And finally, as we got a modding system, and marking all these defaults, it would be a shame not to try balancing these with a few welcome cheats.
Foolish that I was... Actually I started the game over with little changes, like less expensive items, more powerful, etc. and still it was unbalanced, and I could only win the fights after a lot of farming.
So I decided I would create an item that would make my character untouchable, a sort of paladin (HP = 10 000, MP = 3000, SP = 200, STATS = 30, SENSITIVITY = -1500%). I started over again. And even with this fully cheated character, I would lose boss fights, my leveling up was definitely slow when it should not be... And I couldn't trigger the cavern's ending leading to the rest of the map though I defeated every boss.
It clearly showed me that the game was coded to make you lose even if you were a demigod... Here is all the interest of a cheat mod : you see clearly all the limits of the game program.

So, no, I truly don't understand why it is so appreciated by the community...

I went in having never played any text-based game before, and left extremely supprised. The writing is amazing, the sex scenes are astonishing despite not having any animations or images (appart from character sprite), and while the combat needs some fleshing out, i believe that Threshold will deliver in the updates to come. Definitely would recommend to anyone who wants to try out a new exprerience.

Honestly, this is the best text-based (with graphics) hentai bfrpg I have ever come across on this site and if you are looking for detailed, sensual, with a touch of comedic flair, this is it.

Great work on the game and looking forward to future updates!

Great game with a lot of potential. Hope to see it continue such high quality development.

The relationships you can form with some of the monsters can get really personal and serious. Kotone's story is so dark and it is a real challenge getting her to open up with yourself. There are lots of relationships like that and it adds so much depth to the game. Really is a fabulous game.

I would definitely recommend trying it. The "combat" is a lot of fun and it feels like there is a real lot of content.

Great game and developer somehow gone under the radar. Similar feel to the original Monster Girl Quest. Enemies have a good bit of personality, with a range of encounters and methods for getting through them. Looking forward to further expansions.

Very well written monster girl text based game with plenty of fetishes to appeal to. Lots of variety in both monster girls and scenes, fun dialogue and deceptively good combat system. Sometimes on new releases there will be a lot of bugs/crashes, but that's usually sorted out quickly by the developer Threshold. The art is amazing, and even the music added in recently helps create moods.

Definitely one of the best games I have played here. Monster girls are my jam, and battle fuck mechanics elevate the turn based RPG combat into something really special.

The sex scenes are well-written and descriptive, the art is amazing and the gameplay is fun and addicting. There are a lot of different viable builds you can make, and from what I can tell every stat has some level of importance. I really liked playing my willpower based sex mage, magically binding my opponents and making them cum with sexomancy. I've completed most of the main path, and I might just restart as a technique build to see how it changes things up.

This latest update adds a new dungeon (which I kind of blazed through with my over-leveled character), it's just a shame that new art takes so long to add. The descriptions for the new girls are great and all, but having the character bust on screen really helps to visualize the action. Hopefully the creator will get more patrons so he'll be able to add more art more quickly.

Also, there is a ton of side content that I missed on my first run. Kaia the manticore and Mika's content in particular took some searching in the discord to figure out. So there's more here than you'd think at first glance. Though, my girl Nicci needs more content! She's basically the poster girl, but there doesn't seem to be any extra love routes or anything for her. What's up with that?

Overall, an excellent game with excellent core mechanics that I wish would progress just a little faster.

The general idea is pretty interesting, as I don't think I've heard of someone doing this sort of thing in Ren'Py; all I know it for in these communities are pisspoor Daz renders. I feel like the writing is probably the game's strongest point. Up to this point, there hasn't been a single scene that I dislike or have ignored. Maybe I'm just a normie fuck, but every single scene is written in a way that feels interesting to go through. There isn't a whole lot yet, but it is alpha. Plus, if for some reason you feel like grinding, nearly every area has additional content, like additional handicaps and superbosses. The overall difficulty shouldn't be too much of a struggle, though. The game's developed pretty actively, with common updates and dev contact.

Modding the game looks like colossal pain, especially if you don't get programming at all and/or don't feel like dealing with a cluster of different files to make, but the fact there's care being put towards mod support is a worthwhile fact in itself.

This is probably one of the better games to follow the development of, not gonna lie.

First of all I will say the obvious, it's a good game and I expect it to grow quite a bit over time.

Having said that let's start to analyze it:

-The story basically tells us that we are a hero with an incredibly big debt, the goddess can be interacted with in the temple and she helps to low our desires and sensibilities, which is quite necessary.

Overall it isn't a really complex setting but it does what is meant to do, give us a setting.

-About level ups and stats: Here is when we come into the most complex part of the game, this part needs a few optimizations to make it better, personally I recommend a tiny buff to level up in which you receive 2 attribute points and one core point, meaning a point that can be used to increase lust or energy. The reason I believe it is necessary is because many skills have high attribute requirements and using points to increase lust or energy can leave you in a tiny problem to achieve it, having to grind much more.

Even if that point wasn't given every level if it's each 2 levels it would be okay, perhaps even better for balance.

Another point is that it would be better that only skills that you can choose while levelling up should appear, rather than all skills, just add an additional option called "show all skills" so that players that want to planify can do it.

Lastly it may be fun a hardcore mode in which fetishes can't be lowered after they achieve certain point (3, 7 and 10) basically if you get a fetish to level 3 you can't lower below that, the same as 7 and 10.

-About the combat: It can be quite fun, while it isn't perfect it is very interactive, overall I would like perhaps that enemies would aim at your fetishes when discovered, if the character has a foot fetish they will prefer to focus on that rather than using diverse attacks. Perhaps it could be a good option for hardcore mode.

-Monster girls level up and level drain: This is a personal expectation but it would be nice that we get some encounters like the slime one in which the enemy is training and levelling up, even more an enemy with level drain may be interesting too.

-About the city: there are too few interactions within the city, and most of them are related to the brothel, it would be nice to be able to seduce the girls that are in the city to have sex or something like that, I personally would really want that nun.

-About blessings: It is quite a nice addition, it would be really nice that we can find ways to obtain extra attribute points or bonuses, low blessings would be overall positive and increase core stats on 1 or 2 attribute points, more complex ones as it is it's okay. Some fully positive and some that can have a counterpart.

An interesting addition would be that you could get cursed.

Overall it's an interesting game to play and I recommend it.

Monster Girl Quest/Lulu Farea, but with femdom and A LOT of content, game is moddable so even more potential content.

Story is good, writing is great, setting is funny and interesting, characters are well made, etc.

Gameplay is good, battle is in battle-fuck style and it is well done, it might become pretty repetitive after a few hours, but you can skip most of them and boss battles are always engaging same with unique NPCs.

Art is great, but there is not much of it, it would be a flaw if it wasn't used so well to complement writing.


TL&DR
Story 5/5
Writing 5/5
Gameplay 4.5/5
Art 4/5

One of the best games i have seen on this site, as i didn't follow this game before i'm not sure how fast is the development going, but the end result will be great.

God damn it ,i loved it.
The characters could react if you came more than one time plus the intimacy and the possible creation of a harem makes me wanting for more.
Nice game one of my favorite ones.

Monster Girl Dreams has amazing writing, ideas and art to go with it. Doesn't have too much content yet but the content in it so far is by far the best I've seen in a pornographic game in a long time. Is still being updated every now and then from what I can tell and has a lot more potential.

Shit, I wrote an in-depth review, but clicked outside the message window by mistake so it disappeared and I lost everything. So I'll make this one a bit shorter instead.
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Update: Looks like I utterly failed at that
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Anyways... Game is fucking great. Great writing and surprisingly good art for a text-game. Especially, great choice in not allowing race/body options. Those things always results in shitty lewd scenes with an incoherent mishmash of useless customization information. Having a single generic MC in mind makes everything a lot more fluent and coherent.

That being said, even great things can be improved, so here's a few suggestions. All (or almost all) similar games suffer from the same problems I'm addressing so it shouldn't be taken as a criticism for this particular one.

Suggestion 1: Kill All Battle Repetition
If I use the same butt-fuck attack 37 times in an encounter, I don't want to read through the same text each single time. You can't possibly make 37 unique descriptions so just give us the ones you got and then whenever I use butt-fuck attack again, simply write an effect summary like this:
----------------------------------
Butt-fuck Success
Monster +42 arousal
You +9 arousal
----------------------------------

Suggestion 2: Kill All Other Repetition Too
So I meet some red slime chick a second time and half-way through the text I start thinking "did I read the exact same thing an hour ago". Now half my brain is occupied with that question. A bit later I realize the question is "yes" and start clicking to skip, but what if something new comes along? Well, I can use the ren'py "only skip seen text" option (if it worked), so I don't click through unseen text by mistake, but then I don't remember the context.

More importantly, all this shit removes focus from the story and breaks immersion. If there's a situation where dialogue would be repeated, then write it away. If I meet red slime chick again and it will ultimately lead to battle, then just start the battle immediately. If it leads to a decision instead, then make the dialogue short so I remember what it's about but doesn't waste time. Oh, and make it obvious which choices I've already made.

Suggestion 3: Kill All Unnecessary Clicks
If I've surrendered to the red slime chick and things are getting hot and dirty in a lewd scene, I don't want to click every 3rd-10th second just to read the next few lines. Make 60 pct of the leftmost screen text, place the picture on the right of it (or vice versa) and remove all other visual distractions (buttons, stats etc).

Suggestion 1-3 aren't just "nice to have". They're absolutely critical for how a game feels. Imagine a 4 hour movie that constantly repeats the old scenes and stops every 3rd-10th second until you click. Sure, you can just fast-forward and click when needed, but you're not really enjoying the movie the same way anymore. The writing in this game is goddamn great and it is a shame I can't enjoy it fully because of these technicalities.

Bonus-suggestion: Lewd Content Accessibility
If you relentlessly murder all repetition like a rabies infected hamster on meth, then what if you want to experience a particularly hot scene again? One way is to simply make it available as a specific dialogue option or an even easier (but less immersive) option is to "dream" about them in the inn.

Regardless of the choice, I can't see a reason to keep content from the user. For instance, I beat the red slime chick on the first battle, but then read in the wiki that she had a loss scene that is now inaccessable to me. Naturally, I immediately began crying hysterically and then just felt empty. Incomplete. This seemed like the only rational response instead of, you know, re-loading an old save.

Not only do the player miss good material this way, but he's also forced to repeat the same battles. Some encounters even have several lose scenes depending on how you lost. Then you have to repeat them each time to somehow end in a specific position and if you fuck it up, you have to do it again and again. Better to just unlock all relevant content when you beat a specific monster girl. In red slime girl's case, I could ask her "what would have happened if I lost" to which she'd say "let's find out". Or I could, as mentioned, just dream about it.

I don't want to end on a negative note though, because this is a great game compared to the rest of the genre. Yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but hypocrisy is an important aspect of being a leader, and if writing shitty reviews of porn games for free is not the physical embodiment of true leadership then I don't know what the hell is.

I love it so far with v19.6 alpha and i really want to see this game go places. It is pretty entertaining and going full on masochist may even hurt your progress with is more than enough to encourage you, the player to make a mixed bag of choices. A lot of monster girl stories that involve a male protagonist tend to lean toward the shota angle, but not this one. This one is clearly out of mandatory schooling as well as elective schooling (training academy, [akin to college]) and the player isnt afraid to get dirty (in every sense of the phrase). This is definitely a game to check out, even if you arent a fan of text based adventures. Come for the lewds, stay for the almost* D&D style game play.

I'm not a fan of text-based games, but this one is quite fantastic. There's a ton of content already, and there is a lot of variation in the type of events that happen (not to mention the writing is quite good, barring a few infrequent typos). In it's current state it's definitely worth playing, and definitely a game worth checking up on when some more updates roll out.

It's also of a rare breed of eroge that actually has a gameplay component with could reasonably stand on its own merits.