VN - Ren'Py - Nephilim [v0.4.6] [BuuPlays]

The game started off strong but delves into madness after the main LI gets badly injured. The whole pirate story is nonsensical and downright boring. The MC has a long love affair with a certain pirate which I have little interest in. The whole island storyline drags on for literal eternity!

The character models are done well overall and the renders are above average. The story is interesting but gets tedious the longer it goes on. The writing is far too verbose for my taste.

I enjoyed the game until the main LI gets badly injured. I wish I would have stopped playing at that point instead of wasting so much time on story I wasn't interested in after this event.

The animation is done poorly through all but the last several releases. Barely anything is moving with the animations through the first two thirds of the game. The sex scenes with most of the LIs are uninspiring and anti-climatic.

The animations and sex scenes are the weakest part of the game IMO.

The game is 98% story and 2% H (sex) content.

If the game would have kept its roots I would have enjoyed it much more. The game losses focus the longer you play it. It's sad because the dev did an amazing job with the story and main LI until she got badly injured.

Well, how do I say this without it sounding mean? First of all, the art is really good and it's proficient technically and... I like the premise and... uhhh...

Ok, the issue with this is that it plays like a twelve year old came up with an amicable adventure for his D&D group on a sunday afternoon. It's all about the heroic manly Protagonist of course. All the girls love him, blablabla. Only him. No one else. Ever. EVER! All the "adventures" are completely basic and uninteresting. The story is as generic as they come.

So they walk through the props and say mostly cringy lines to each other. It feels like the perfect pre-puberty vision of romance. So they love and pout and kill a monster here and there and we all know it's going to be sunshine and rainbows in the end.

The Dark/Light route really only means that you get to be comically evil or decent. Not like it matters.

It is a work of love though, so I really wanted to like it. I just... can't. But you might, right?

VERSION: 0.4.5
SUMMARY: Very good all-round, not perfect, but since 4.5 stars isn't available 5 will do.

PROS:

1. Gorgeous Models, models are very well designed,
2. Renders are amazing and animations are pretty good also.
3. Story is rich, deep and intriguing and written very well, many profound moments and strong emotions are well conveyed and shared among characters and ultimately the player.
4. Pacing is decent and while some characters have their relationships escalate quickly to physical others have a slower approach which does at least give some variation and show forethought.
5. Characters are well developed and each have their own motives, predispositions and agendas though our hero does draw a group that shares the same core principles, they are all unique.
6. Choices do have significant impact though I will be honest and say I did not yet try the dark path during my play-through, but did dabble to be able to say it seems very different.
7. Scope of the world and game in general can be very big if so desired, the lore, map and world is and can be vast, with numerous characters and potential threats that can give this gave a significant shelf-life if done properly. This may require the MC to step away from known love interests for some time to pursue others in foreign lands or even combine them with new adventures and adversaries. The potential is great, it will just need more of what is here, but carefully done.

CONS:

1. I am a bit of a stickler for aesthetics and historically accurate settings, environment and characters, while the former are all good the latter with regards to the MC I am annoyed about. The guy looks like a boy, in a world where there are no real means to shave, one would expect the guy to have some scruff and hair on his chest. Even the dwarf doesnt have a bear! WTF. I can understand the females looking smooth and pretty as the game is focused probably more on the straight heterosexual males, but for crying out loud, can't our MC look more manly and less like a man-child?!
2. Too many love interests could be an issues considering the amount of emotional investment the MC and certain LIs have for each other. It is hard to believe that "harem" route would work especially with the amount of LIs.
3. Relating to above point, the MC does get to choose early on his LIs while not having the full scope or measure available of all potential LI's in the game. This can make it hard to choose who to pursue, also making harem route the natural default for most players.

TLDR: Great game, story, designs, characters and scope for much more. Well worth the play and support. Hopefully the developer heeds some of the points mentioned and can churn out even more and better content. Well done!

Another game With fake choices and Fake RPG flash screens. Wtf is that you acquired that skill or poison resistance or what ever, basically empty flash screen without having any effect or meaning?

Another BS concept is having money acquire text without it having any meaning. Go buy some potions or send LI to quite outfit without having meaningful decision behind it. Does it matter if you spend 3-4 silver for potions, why is there a decision for it. Also scaling up trust points without any trade offs is totally meaningless. if there is no tradeoffs then only single best action will be taken.

Cant belive such crap VN are still made....

Just Falls short of a 5 star rating

Lets start with the obvious positive... active developer, with fairly stable and regular updates... thats worth a star just on its own regardless of the quality of the game!

Onto the game itself, this is a "gotta get them all" style harem game which gives the illusion of game changing choices. If you like Harem games where you are the obvious only LI (which i do tbf) then this ticks most boxes.

Visuals are good, story is predicable however i like the fantasy elements of the story and it is fairly engaging in a basic sort of way. I found myself reading large portions of the dialog and am invested a couple of the story arcs.

As i say it falls short of a 5 star for the following reasons...

1) Lewd scenes althoguh they are plentiful are pretty much all the same just with a different character. There is little to no variation in them at all.

2) the LIs are all decidedly similar.

These are only minor negatives and this is still a very good game which i am enjoying playing.

Great game with romance that has build up and not just jumping into the sex. Majority of the realtionships are slowly poressing towards the intimacy. The story overall is verry interesting and is well established and has lot of potential to be very fuffiling and fun. There is a lot of stuff happening and can be explored in future.
The renders are not amazing or absolutly out of this world but they are very nice.
Another positive is the music.
Negative for some people might be the lack of choice. I do not care about that I enjoy reading the story and do not need any choices if its well written which it is.

This AVN started out great! If I had rated this a few versions back, the rating would have been a little higher, but the story has degraded as time has gone by.

For me, the story started to slide when the MC starts interacting with the pirate LIs. To be generous, they are just silly. The entire story line with the two of them is just silly, but I could have let it ride a little bit until one of the LIs gets turned into a vampire. I mean wtf? From there, the story just slides into lazy writing and the story starts to lose focus.

It's like a TV series... have you ever noticed how around season 3 or 4 the show starts to slide into mediocrity? It's like the show runners had a great idea to start with but once they got to season four they realized they were not sure where they wanted to go and how they wanted to wrap up the story. This feels like that. The dev had a great idea and a really solid start, then at some point lost their way and are now trying to make something from nothing.

The other thing that drives me nuts is all the freaking options for LIs. I mean, I turn down one and yet a few scenes later, I get another option for romance. I tell them the MC is not interested and they still act like there is something between them. How many freaking times does the MC have to shoot them down before they stop? It's nuts. One of the pirates I can't stand, yet she's clingy and touchy and naked most of the time... At least 6 times the MC tried to shut her down. It's stupid. Lol... No means No... ffs.

On a positive note, we have an active developer who produces regular, significant updates. The production is good and despite the story problems, the writing is really good so we should support talented devs like this. I keep downloading the updates so I am vested, I just hope they can right the ship and get this back on track.

[SPOILER ALERT]

I'm just gonna keep it short (not really and it will be mostly about my personal rambling).

I liked this game, seriously. This game is basically like John Wick or Daniel Craig's James Bond but in the fantasy setting, so yeah no guns. Btw, the thing that I like the most from Nephilim is that it has this two "Light" and "Dark" choices along the way. It's more like about being evil or not, but I'm glad most of these choices aren't just an "illusion of choice". They do, in fact, matter to the story. Anyway, the renders are nice, the sex animations are a little bit underwhelmed but overall it's fine by my standard.

"But why did you give this game only three stars if you like it?"

Truth to be told, I was this close to give this game five stars (while making finger pinch gesture). The story was good until that scumbag Taron(?) crippled my future wife for months and I had to sail across the seas for months to find a cure. Well in the end, the cure has been found with a lot struggles. Is there a catch? of course there is a catch. The cure makes its consumer to become a pureblood vampire. Listen my friend, I slayed thousands of them in other games. I showed them no mercy. Remember Serana? the Daughter of Coldharbour in Skyrim? I even managed to convice her to cure her vampirism. But then in this game, the dev put me in a very tight spot and I need to embrace her "new shape" no matter what. Come on man, you can't do this to me....

Yeah sure this review is more subjective compared to my other reviews, but what can I say as a professional vampire slayer? This is a blasphemy!

i got to say the Dev really does know how to tell a story and make it so good i feel like when i play his VN i feel lm either reading a book come to life or a movie or tv show or something it really is something else if they had which i wish they had a VN awards he should get one of the top 3 to 5 of the awards hands down he is that good and talented im sure for some their maybe flaws with this VN but for me i see none i see it as near perfect story telling and renders and everything is top notch and worthy of a sub if any dev on here is worthy of it is is him dude got some serious skills/talent . when you play the VN you can feel the emotions of the characters and the sensations in the dialouge it is really captivating and something else

It took me several evenings to play through v0.4.2: there is a lot of content.

Nephilim is set in a medieval fantasy world with the usual panoply of mythological creatures. One thing that sets the scenario slightly apart from similar titles is the direct involvement of gods in the story.

The MC (I named mine “Creepy-eyes”) is your typical overpowered male-power-fantasy character, that all women love and who can always power-up enough to defeat any opponent. His back-story is told in a series of flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks).

I liked the game. It looks very good, has an interesting story, and great world-building.

There are a few negatives which hindered my enjoyment somewhat:

1. Inconsistent pacing. It starts out as a slow-burn, outright telling the player that it “won’t be a wank every five minutes type of game.” It also seems to be pushing the MC towards a monogamous relationship to start with. Then at some point it flips that script, and all of a sudden there are love-interests throwing themselves at the MC left and right with no penalties in sight for pursuing all of them at once, and wanks start coming so thick and fast the MC might as well give up on wearing pants. This feels like a change of course that over-compensated.

2. Continuity errors. I suspect the dev is creating this from a fairly loose outline, as I noticed numerous points at which a character’s actions didn’t quite make sense, or they knew things that they shouldn’t have known (or visa-versa). There were also cases where the same explanation for something was given more than once: though this might belong in the next category.

3. Writing quality. There is always a balance between an author’s prowess as a wordsmith and how wordy their dialog is. A master can keep the audience eagerly reading page after page in a single scene, while someone lacking that skill might barely manage to make the most laconic characters palatable. This author uses too many words for their skill level. I ended up skipping a lot of the dialog, except when it seemed to advance the story.

4. Current Year. Although not as bad as many titles, there was noticeable leakage of modern dialog and standards into the story. A previous reviewer commented on the point at which the MC gives another man a lecture about ‘objectifying women.’ That was probably the most blatant example, but there were other cases.

5. Sex scenes. While the game occasionally features some fully-animated cut scenes, the sex animations tend to be very basic, and these scenes are far too wordy. They were also sometimes repetitive and annoying, as when the MC is going to leave, but has to return to kiss his girl goodbye...then do it again...then again...then again, with each kiss being the same series of images, but the player is forced to keep clicking and clicking to finally escape out the door.

I think this could be tightened up and polished into a five-star game.

A one of a kind. Worth to try. Lots of content.
A MC which actually feels like a MC in supernatural environment rather than being a pussy. Awesome girls with different personalities. Great renders and animation. The dev can improve the story and plot adding suprising elements to it.

This game is not that easy to be evaluated but I'll try anyway.
First of all it is very long and has a lot of content. If you don't skip the dialogues, it may take you 20 hours or so to read it all. At least it seemed so to me because at some moment I got tired and started using fast forward. You are better than me if you won't

Let's also admit that the graphics are good and don't feel generic. Visuals are certainly a strong point of Nephilim.

The game has a fantasy setting similar to RPG games. You have medieval world, magic, goblins and other monsters... However in a true RPG game you walk freely around the world, talk to characters, level up, collect loot, manage quests, conduct battles etc. Here, it's Renpy game so you just watch slideshows and occasionally make some choice. So it's just an inferior experience to a standard RPG in that aspect.

Okay, but you may say that this game is not about role playing, it's about sex. So let's talk about sex

Actually early in the game there is very little sex. The game begins in a very soft, romantic way, like it was written by a teenage girl for teenage girls. There is basically one girl, lot of kissing and looking deep in the eyes but not much more.

Around Chapter 3 the game drastically changes. I guess the Patreon backers started moaning for more erotic action so the author changed his style Your chosen girl somehow loses her importance, a lot of new females appear and there are much, much more sexual scenes. The story takes some unexpected turns, like some pirates appearing. Unforunately I got tired at that moment and started skipping the dialogues so a lot of story details were lost to me.

Maybe if you won't get tired like me, you'll like it more.

This game is rough to rate. It has 2 seperate values that i am calculating, and they are pretty balanced. By that, I mean +50 for art and renders and -50 for dialogue and meaningless choices.

The renders are amazing, except for one or two animations that were literally physically impossible and the artist needs to go back to school and figure out how someone who is on their knees cannot physically move back and forward without moving their torsoe, but yet moving their lower body forward and back like his upper half is suspended in air and hes thrusting his entire lower body across the bed, like hes trying to rug burn his knees. *facepalm*

The dialogue is not bad. The story and concept is not bad. I have no problems with the overall story and the love interests are unique and interesting and i like them all. As others have pointed out, there is a huge inconsistency with the MC himself. For someone who was -thoroughly- trained, both in magic and hand to hand combat, (and ninjutsu from a cut back scene), he is laughably weak against a couple of human thieves, yet can sink an entire pirate fleet on a whim. The story makes him strong or weak depending on what it needs at that moment and its ... jarring.

The dialogue is where i get tired. Every sexual encounter is written exactly the same way. I appreciate the romance of it, as very few games even show any kissing, love confessions, or intimacy in general so thats a plus. However, as others have pointed out, he has not once told any of the girls that he has committed to, that he has other women as well. So basically they all think they are his only one.

And then the final part that offput me is when another guy looks at your main LI's ass and the MC catches him. His response: "You dont want her to find out you are objectifying her like that." WHAT??!? This MC has been checking out everyone's asses and tits since minute 1 of this very very long game and he has the balls to tell another guy that hes "objectifying" women cuz he looked at an ass? I die....

In my humble opinion this medieval AVN intertwines elements of magic, weaving a captivating narrative. Its moral compass delineates between the paths of darkness and the path of light. Eliza's romantic arc is hailed as an unparalleled love story within the realm of AVNs. The game boasts visually stunning renders, elevating the immersive experience. And the developer's dedication shines through with frequent updates.
Simply awesome dude!
PS: the music is also very good
ver. 4.1

The subpar writing was struggling to maintain my interest from the get go but it lost me completely when y'all put a flashback inside of another flashback. That just feels sloppy.

A shame since the renders were fine and conceptually at least I was into the narrative.

It's nice game overall. Story is neat, characters are likeable, and renders also look quite good. But the stars definitelly need to be subtracted from max score, for having the worst transition between romance and harem I have ever witnessed. I already mentioned this in the comments on the game thread, but this definitelly needs to be also described in my review. Let me say at first, I could see couple of other, smaller issues with the game, like MC despite his training using abilities only when author wanted him to, and not in moments that would have most impact and sense story-wise, or like him being bested by some random thiefs, not thinking logically, etc etc. But those things could be glossed over without paying much attention. Yet the huge issue I have with chapter 4 is main(or more accuratelly, the one and only) cause of me rating the game this low. And sadly, it doesn't have much sense without actually telling what happened, hence the spoilers below.

This game was pretty wholesome experience during chapters 1-3, but then chapter 4 hit it very hard. All we had so far was this one, quite perfect romance and only few others potential interests were introduced so far, but no options of pursuing any of them, the most there was some lewd comments here and there. And then... we have suddenly options to start multiple sexual encounters and romances, one after another exactly right after your supposedly most important person gets paralyzed and all MC thinks (or at least all he says he thinks) about is helping her recover?

It was also perfectly fine to not having any 'serious' lewd scenes, but do dev really had to add the very first one with actual sex in it literally hour or two after MC brought his wounded GF back into bed and rushed to try to find the cure for her? And with basically random stranger, who had about 5 dialogue lines in entire game before??? Really? REALLY? And all those sexual/romance choices in CH4 do not come from those few already introduced and established characters, but completelly new ones.

Also let's get back to this situation, because it gets worse, (at least this involved one of already stablished female characters). When MC comes back to the inn, after the sexual encounter in the spoiler above, the best friend is lying in bed with the main LI, to keep her company. Your poor paralyzed beloved sleeps and best friend is watching over her. And what does the author do? In this very moment, when MC goes to lie in bed next to his seriously injured GF, whom he deeply loves, there is option to start romancing the friend, to promise to take her on a date, and even some slight kiss if I remember correctly? This is absolutelly horrible behaviour for any human being with conscience and I really fail to understand why in the world author thought that this could be a good idea.

If even all above wasn't enough, to rub this absolutelly disgusting transition even more, after this situation MC goes travelling to get cure for the LI. I mean it's just an excuse to expand the harem ,but at least bevievable. BUT after few days there is mini time skip of the travel, and to show that passage of time we get to see slideshow of repeatative images consisted of MC playing with naked women in the water, romancing some of them and getting his dick sucked by other, while his main LI, to whom he does all that for, is crying alone in her bed, because he left her there. You sure this is how you do light path? Because that was dark as fuck.

And while further events kinda washed away the way this episode started, this doesn't change the fact this abomination should't even happen in the first place. Not in the way it did... So yeah, it's 3/5 now, and if writing won't fall like this again, I could change my grade, but so far it doesn't deserve it. Especially becasue if it happened once, the same mistake could be repeated.

Great game! Engaging story, stunning and interesting LI's.
Cool chad MC, not some weak, sissy wimp.
Beautiful renders, good music.
Pure, innocent, loyal and virgin LI's its good thing, i have enough skanks, sluts and whores IRL. At least in video game i can taste love, affection and innocence.
I cannot wait for implementing harem/pregnancy features in the game.

Overall easy 5/5. Keep up good work, looking forward for more

This one is the best AVNs ever IMO
+++
*medieval story with elements of magic
*moral system: evil / dark path / revenge / recklessness
vs light path/ kindness / forgiveness / composure
*best solo romance all time in any AVN - Eliza
*balanced mc
*really nice renders
*very hardworking dev - update times are very decent
*this avn is only 1 year old and already has 6-8 hours content

---
*no objections- ver 0.4

Take care, Yo.

Good graphics with nice models, pretty average power fantasy story and very slow buildup.
The feeling of the story is great but the dialog brings it down over and over again.

Many times i think the dialog is too long and filler like. The characters are very naive, chatty, predictable and pretty boring to be honest. Very much random talk and thoughts that doesn't really bring anything new to the story, the characters doesn't really develop. It doesn't really help with the character building as they go on in the same style and in the same topics over and over again.

The romance dialog is banal and it seems like it's made by someone with no actual romantic experience. It's like if a love smitten teen wrote it and it's overly repetitive.

The characters are very immature for their age.
The MC trained and traveled the world for 10 years, still he's oblivious to most things and has the social capability of a trout. It's like he learned nothing but fighting from his mentor and his surrounding while he traveled.
The first LI, Eliza, had a rough upbringing and is portrayed like a survivor but she is also oblivious about everything. She should be a street smart girl with a little panache but she's mentally like a toddler with a crush. It feels like she brainwashed her own personality away when she met the MC.
The childhood LI, Alice, behaves pretty much the same as Eliza. She looks like an ogre though, I can't really stand her.
It seems like all the characters mental development stopped when the MC got taken away in his youth, while their physical skills did continue to develop.
The characters would make more sense if they were in the beginning of their teens.

There's still a measure of quality in the game but prepare for long boring periods between the highlights. I wish the story and dialog was much more focused, tighter and realistic.