VN - Ren'Py - omiSt [v0.0.5] [Hanamura]

This review is for version 0.0.5. so bear that in mind. The game is in its infancy but it already impressed me with what it has shown so far.

Pros:
The characters are interesting and I like the friendship dynamic between the Mc and Olivia and the friendship with Jace. I can see myself potentially becoming invested in the characters and the potential Lis.

The renders and the animations are pretty good and the sex scene was pretty hot.

There is fair amount of humour.

There is an interesting scifi/fantasy mystery developing.

Cons:
The one sex scene is forced which is never good as players tend to hate that.

The jokes are hit or miss as jokes usually are and the ones involving
Lucia fail spectacularly as she comes off as a complete psycho for no damn reason.

Overall a strong first showing and I will be following this one.

The 1 star I'm giving this game is from the small stuff I've seen from the story that could've made it better had they been the main focus or expanded upon (i.e. the science experiments, the uncle focusing on his projects, the sci-fi futuristic vibe of the setting, the humorous moments happening in the background during the intro and the expo).

The minus 4 stars is for everything else: from the actual story being wholly derivative and does a great disservice to the setting that it has, to the unoriginal character writing, to the renders having this weird "unfinished" look and have proportions that look "off," to the music being ho-hum, and to the overall experience making me less interested in seeing what happens next.

Just terrible all around in my opinion. Avoid this one like the plague.

Review for Demo

Right away this game does itself two disservices, the first being the overview. Anyone remotely familiar with AVNs on this site knows the concept of "young guy moves to new town to attend new school and meet new people" has been beat to shit. You've likely played five other games with the same idea. Thankfully this game is almost deceptively deeper than that.

Things start to deviate from that cliché a bit with the setting. The world is more technologically advanced than our modern day. Automatons, hyper-advanced ai, crazy inventions, etc etc. Not a new concept either by any means, but it feels a bit fresher. Then, without spoilers, the current demo ends on a cliffhanger that completely upsets wherever you thought this might be going. I was pleasantly surprised.

The other disservice I mentioned is with the renders. It starts out pretty rough graphically, and in my head I was thinking it would probably be the games biggest issue. But then, like 15 minutes in, it all improves astronomically. It kind of boggles my mind the dev didn't take the extra time to just rework that opening given how important first impressions are, but regardless the problem was solved. Don't judge a book by its cover I suppose.

So with that out of the way, I gotta say this was actually pretty solid for a demo. Characters are fun so far, dialogue is solid enough, MC has been fine to play as, it has music, the list goes on. It's a bit early to talk about a lot of these things in-depth since there's only an hours worth of stuff to go on, but at its core the game has some personality and that is an important quality of an AVN imo. Once again the plot is moving in a much different direction that I thought it might as well, and I'm interested in seeing how that plays out.

You can tell the dev is new with game development in a couple areas for sure. Some spots need grammar/translation(?) improvements, the writing falls a little flat in spots, some of the poses and models can look weird at times, humor doesn't always work for me, and again the list goes on here too. But really there was nothing major that would turn me away from this. The only aspect I can't speak on is lewd stuff, as it doesn't exist yet. We had the cliché girl walks into our bedroom while the MCs dick is out and rock hard while he sleeps (the accidental dick slap was funny admittedly), but no actual sex scenes yet.

All in all a surprisingly solid start. Need a lot more to go on to determine how I realty feel about this, but I'll return to it after some updates for sure. Worth keeping an eye on for now.

2/5 A below-average AVN

The writing is pretty bad, the game is filled with cringe dialogues, cliche situations, etc. with very questionable humor, in my opinion of course. Can't say anything special about the music, some choices were bad and the rest of the music wasn't catchy enough to point
something out.

When it comes to characters, I can say that they look somewhat unique but at the same time have some weird problems like gigantic eyebrows (MC), very shiny hair (MC), and extremely glossy/shiny skin (Miss G, Clara, Olivia). Nothing special about their personalities as well, everything felt basic and "tropey", at least when it comes to the first few introduced LIs. The facial expressions most of the time are not quite there I can appreciate the dev trying to add details like this but he hasn't executed it well yet.

The posing was quite basic and sometimes unnatural with occasional and noticeable clipping, also a bit overused gestures/poses.
Lighting is very chaotic in this game constantly changing in-between renders for no reason, shadows are jumping all around in the same scenes, and in some moments lighting doesn't make sense and is either too strong or too weak. and sometimes you can see random lights that seem to be coming from nowhere like the blue light in the restaurant.

The amount of references is a bit overwhelming I think that a game should be able to stand for itself and only have the occasional subtle reference/cameo.

I was kind of conflicted about animations, it's good to see some casual non-lewd animations but so far, most were a bit out of place. For example in Rich's house, Simple camera work would've been more than enough no need for the weird diving/swimming animation, the Clara walking one clipped a ton and I think just a camera movement around the character would have been a better introduction, The fighting one had very rough not smooth movements I think that so simple timed renders would have been a better way to execute this (also remove the white flash bombs from it), on the other hand I think the spoon animation was nice and smooth. As for Lewd animations, they were significantly smoother than the others which is good but the forced transitions with a lot of blur took a lot away from the scene it could also use slower camera movement imo.

Humor is one of the most difficult things to write in my opinion since it's very subjective but to me, the "funny" moments in the game felt a bit forced and didn't cause any reaction except a facepalm here and there.
The developer should definitely spend some time proofreading or find someone to do it, there were way too many problems with grammar/spelling.


Overall, it could be a decent HS game once the developer fixes a few things: rework the first ~200 renders (before he changed presets I assume), proofread everything, fix rough lighting/shadows, floating items (plates in kitchen scene in the first house), change or remove unnecessary animations, and fix the glossiness of the character's skin/hair.

P.S. The font in the main menu needs to change.