Ren'Py - Completed - Of Devotion and Despondence [v1.0.0] [Earliestbird]

Without doubt one of, or possibly the best written game on this website. Wait, that's not doing it justice - this isn't just good writing for a porn game, it's damn good writing in general. It feels very professional. It doesn't try too hard to sound smart, but the writing is very intelligent and ocassionally profound.

The storyis both very original and yet actually very simple to understand.So many fantasy writers spend pages and pages explaining the background lore, but this game doesn't need to. It shows you the shape of a rich, deep world and lets you work out the details for yourself.

I really enjoyed the RPG elements too. Even though there was a lot of moving parts, you are never penalised too heavily for doing the wrong thing, as long as you remember to save. You can ocassionally feel the game straining against the limitations of its engine. I'm not familiar with it but it really doesn't feel designed for this kind of complexity. But they made it work.

One thing I would like to see the dev's work on is the late game balance. I'm at the end of the second major area, and as I see it there are two problems here:

1) I have 4-500 of every resource, including essenece. I have built everything, and there is 0 chance I will run out of them.

2) At the same time, the difficulty curve spikes very hard. some of the things you have to fight feel impossible without very high fortitude. I can't do damage fast enough, or live long enough to beat them. And I can't work out how to increase my attributes beyond the ocassional point.

Now the game does have a rogulite/ NG+ type thing going on I think, and that might be whatI'm experiencing right now. If that's the case I'd suggest a little nudge recommending first time players start again, as they will find it difficult to make progress.

But yeah, congrats to the devs on making this very memorable and fun game.

I personally really liked it.

The writing: 5/5
Very well done. I don't know how to praise it other than saying it was well thought out. The world, the characters, everything writing related was good imo.

The Pics: 3/5
(I don't mind the AI pictures personally, if done well, but they weren't the prettiest still. There were a few good renders though,)

The soundtrack: 4/5
There isn't much, but what is there, sets the atmoshpere quite well imo. . Very good.

I hope the dev will make more games of similar, but hopefully a bit higher quality. Maybe hire an artist?

A lovely game.

The story plays in a not quite standard isekai world. You can enjoy a creatively crafted setting with rather unusual natural phenomena and strange encounters.

I like the generally serious and mildly depressing atmosphere. It also becomes quickly apparent that the developer is generally a good storyteller which makes everything even more immersive.

The art is quite excellent and I absolutely adore the collectable cards of MCs offspring which all grant a specific bonus.
Overall a greatly enjoyable game.

What I would enjoy in future versions:
Personally, I am a big fan of management games and think that there might be more potential for refined management gameplay. Currently, you gather the resources for a building, build it and simply receive a certain bonus for your skills (with some exceptions like the forge). Furthermore, beyond the one time resource costs for buildings, only a small amount of resources is required to train companions. However, every management aspect is purely focussed on improving your skills or the skill of your companions. At some point in the game you have so many resources that you can't really do something with them.

Maybe it could be nice to actually build up a slowly developing village / city that continously requires resources. Considering how dangerous this world is, it is rather odd that MC decides to keep living in an abandoned place with a handful of companions after figuring out that e.g. a faction with a huge and secure temple thinks of him as a holy being. However, if he would actually found a village as a safe place for settlers and his offspring, it would make total sense that he stays there. There could also be a dimplomacy / reputation aspect paired to the village/city building - afterall there are other factions including an actual city.

Maybe my mistake downloading the game. On the start it comes up with choices which you have no idea about and goes further building up character who you have no idea what is going to do or achieve ....
The first thing that suppose to up is the introduction & instructions how to set up and what the choices mean .

DEVLOPER...put yourself in the shoes of someone who has no idea... than start by sharing some information ...
i give you 1 star because waste 3 hours trying to work and than gave up.

Amazing game, from the music to the voiceover artist to the writing, to the art. I love management games and settlement building games, and I hope those aspects are expanded. This developer deserves your Patreon support if they can keep delivering at this level of quality.

Extremely overrated game, I can't even say one good thing about this game. Linear story with pseudo choices, grindy gameplay with zero fun, no actual reward, the closest thing to okay is ironically the AI Generated art.

There is good world building, excellent character building and exquisite storytelling mixed with a bit of turn based combat, some strategic building and a lot of exploring. that's a lot of qualities that reflect the time invested in this lovely game

Simply one of the best games played here so far.

One thing that I genuinely can point out, by force of my profession, is, that even the metaphysical structure of the 'universe' of that game is truly reasonable. It is an invented world (I suppose) but nevertheless has a logically traceable structure. I can not point that out clearly enough; many 'fictional worlds' are invented only to support the according lore. Hence, as its only purpose is to give support to a coherent story, the surrounding universe consists of a load of orphaned concept that risk to be not only illogical but even in contradiction. This might be a main reason for me to avoid games with much lore - until now.

You actually can trace back the reason why you come into a world boosting of 'lusty' women while - of course!- being the only man that can solve that issue. And even the fact that by helping these women, the male hero gets weaker and will eventually die is not too far away from grim reality as we might know it from the world that evolves us.

I don't like reading belletrist texts but this games lore here was that well written that I actually got very interested. The character design is utterly astonishing and I wonder how one can imagine multiple characters who are that versatile with only one mind (which I was wondering already before).

Next positive thing is the aspect of empire and character building. It is still not very developed but its base offer is already very rich. The characters you encounter, do not all fit into the same category, mind the goblin for instance or the "aspects".

The graphics are that good that I lack words to describe it. And the overall aesthetics of the game allow you to enjoy depictions that do not fit into the usual preferences (of the author), as for instance the encounter with the feral being. However, it is regarding the aspect of graphics, where I dare to utter a timid objection: The action described by the texts sometimes largely overpasses the visual scenery you can witness.

One last point: As we are in a fictional world, I am of course interested in the possibilities that fiction gives us. Hence, I endorse if natural limitations which would be in vigor here, on the users side of the computer screen, are trespassed (according to my taste ). Thus, that you actually are almost a confectioner with a magic cream bag is warmly welcomed.

There could have been even more prose from my part if I wrote the comment earlier.

Hats off to the developer,
your explorer.

This game is very promising. Storytelling is great, reads like a book, main girls are interesting and sexy, MC's problems are intriguing. Actual gameplay ideas are nice, combat works well enough, base management with skirmishes keeps you busy until later parts when you build everything, aspects are grindy in the right way. Game gets too easy at the end when you set up properly but I guess it is a problem of limited content when you have grinded too much by the time you do the last quests to see all of it. I am pretty interested how it will develop because gameplay features are good but existing progression doesn't match the scope of the storyline currently.

One thing currently missing is skill points reset - it would really help because at the start you don't know what you're doing and some of LI's traits could really benefit from you actually planning their usage. In general, this game begs for proper tutorial - I didn't have any problems using my intuition and experience in RPGs to make working build (survivalist with CHA focus later on) and not fuck up base management but during character creation and beginning stage you don't really understand how it all works.

Art is great (love me some Bonni) even though sex scenes with main LIs are lacking at the current stage (v0.2.9).

I downloaded this due to the ratings. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't get the hype:

The mechanics are all over the place - it's like the game can't figure out what it wants to be and takes elements from multiple genres without really developing any of them, resulting in an unnecessarily complex, yet repetitive and boring playstyle.

I don't mind AI art - if people get support from using Honey Select/Koikatsu renders or stolen porn, AI deserves at least as much respect, as at least you need to work on getting the right prompts. However, it isn't being used correctly: characters change a lot between scenes, they're deformed -although that's been integrated in the story-, and most importantly: no effort was made to generate sex-scenes.

I'm giving the 3 stars because the game shows that an effort is being made, and it has some interesting concepts. It's just that their execution is pretty bad.

Great art, brisk pacing, believable & unique emotional struggle, interesting worldbuilding, meaningful progression options. Easy to jump right in and start playing. Also nice that the game provides challenges but never punishes you for making a 'wrong' choice - choices have meaning without getting you stuck.

Not your typical game here... Just a nice game overall, I spent more time reading and enjoying the plot than I thought
Art is great, storytelling is great and it's actually an enjoyable experience just to learn about the story and the lore. Scene are a plus to the story

Amazing art, and the Pantheon mini game with the girls is pretty cool. My favorite character so far is Raven, but the others are interesting as well. I think it would be cool to be able to get more residents, and also I think having more to build like building a small kingdom. I am very excited to see where the game goes, and I think having various paths could be cool. Maybe one where you are more of a warlord, and one where you are a king or one where you are not evil and just build a bigger society of residents.

Of Devotion and Despondence is a time-management style resource manager in which you play as an emotionally distant reality exile trying to find his way in a world of man-eating monster women.

I know people have thoughts about AI art. Personally, I feel like a lot of them are very justified. There's a massive number of low effort, quick pay day AI art games showing up on this site. They're all basically the same; bargain bin gameplay, non-existent story, and a handful of AI lewds of popular characters.

This is definitely not those games.

Of Devotion and Depondence has an original world. It leans into the spacey and fantastic appearance of the AI art to present a twisted, dreamlike world in which reality is malleable and the world can warp on a whim. You'll travel from forests, to mountains, to cities, to swamps, to the sea, trying to discover how the world broke and whether you can fix it.

The game has interesting characters. The MC is an exile from his reality, a traveler by nature, always moving on before anyone can get too close. He'll be confronted by friends and foes trying to steal his life force, use him or befriend him in turn. His experiences change him and those around him, for better and for worse.

The gameplay consists of a good resource manager with a solid combat system (after the rework at least). The MC and his companions gather resources and adventure daily, utilizing their finds to construct buildings and develop skills to aid them. It's a delightfully crunchy system all told, though the balance is still lacking in a few areas.

The writing has been good throughout, painting excellent pictures throughout the MC's explorations, whether of the scenery or the characters you meet. There's no animations and few images per scene, but I can't level any complaints otherwise. It's not too good for a quick fap, but there are some excellent sex scenes inside, especially if you're into impregnation or cumplay.

Overall, I feel like Of Devotion and Despondence demonstrates the good side of an AI art game. While there is still the occasional six fingered girl and some people just won't like the way it looks, the story, characters, gameplay, and world design are close to unimpeachable. I'm looking forward to how the dice end up falling.

While the AI generated and fixed images look really nice, I just feel like this is basically a pretty generic kinetic/visual novel with some gameplay gimmicks.

The characters are nice, unique and feel real like, but other than that there is not much going on.

Story is that usual overly lewd different world, encounters are usually walls of flavor text that don't really matter and don't really set up the scene since you can see the scene in the art (what is the point of 5 pages A4s of text that describe what to imagine, when you can clearly see it?), it's more like the game was made text based only and then quickly slammed AI art in.

Gameplay is a gimmick really. At first it feels good, but then you find out it's literally just about selecting one part and spamming attack, maybe some counter here and there that even then costs you more than it's worth anyway.

Sex scenes are really descriptive, but there is no developement anywhere, they feel pointless. It feels like the game would work the same without them. You basically meet someone who wants your seed and that's it, every single time.

3 stars for the gorgeous art, characters and idea. Since it's done using AI art, I would have expected way more images, especially the sex scenes that are mostly just a single image. Might suit your tastes better if you like or don't mind typical VN "games".

June 25th 2023
This game have very high potentials. Good story telling so far, main character ACTUALLY have a brain, able to breathing and thinking at the same time and not thinking only with his dick (well sometimes he does but not all the time lol).
Please keep up the good work!

Has a great foundation and builds it on well, with the creator balancing aspects of the game often to make the journey more enjoyable. The only thing that it is missing is simply more content, which will be added over time

I was expecting a boring incomplete game,
INSTEAD, I found a triple H with better picture and sound,
maybe the format of the game doesn't bring out the full talent of the artist and a collaboration with TF card battle would have led to the best "Magic the porning"
or even make it similar to Nutaku's "Chick Wars" in single player EVERYONE wants.
What to say the sound in painting the "pantheon" is definitely pro-masturbation propaganda.
The characters are in Path tracing with photo realism <3

An excellent first job to approach the world of H

I've been putting off trying this game for a while now, and I'm really glad I jumped at the chance.
The basis of the story is really interesting, I'm a big fan of fantasy and here I'm served.
On the other hand, the ways in which we're brought into this world, its history and its inhabitants are described in a rather peculiar way and should be reviewed because certain elements arrive far too late to stay properly immersed.
I found the art incredible, but I would have liked to have seen even more of it, to better understand and immerse myself in this universe.
I found the resource system boring, it deserves to have some additions, like the collection points that you can sometimes find on the map, but permanently so that you can adjust your needs yourself, especially at the beginning for building construction.
The equipment system is really rudimentary despite the overhaul and I don't understand the point of setting a timer before changing pieces of equipment, I find it pointless and illogical.
The principle of skill points etc is good but it should be possible to reset them to 0, just like the companions' liabilities.

In short, I'd normally give it a good 4/5, but I'd give it 5/5 to encourage the devs because we've got a product that's still in its raw form, but which has the potential to be magnificent!

The presentation is pretty slick that I didn't think was possible with Renpy, and the writing for once I decided not to skip and actually read through.

While AI CG characters have some limitations but I want to say the AI Backgrounds are a perfect fit for the setting of the game and really elevates the game and gives it an immersive atmosphere.
The enemies and events also fit well enough.

We are truly living in a New AI Era, although that is more because this game decided to play to the AI's strengths instead of it's weakness.

The Resource Management, Game Mechanics and Combat are not too shabby even if simple and there are potential ways you can screw yourself and lose from time to time.
And it does require some thinking and decision on how to progress efficiently.