VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Once in a Lifetime [v1.0] [Caribdis]

Damn, what a game!

Let's begin by its strongest point, in my opinion:

The plot is really well-thought, funny, very intriguing, interesting & out of the ordinary.
I really loved the comic of opposition, and was very taken throughout the story.
Stabby Mike is an awesome wing man/secondary character.

There's a lot of content & many beautiful places to discover too.

The girls are sexy & endearing & the scenes are hot. I think we all dream a little to be in the place of this kind of hero very well surrounded .


Hats off to Caribdis for this amazing game !!

I just finished this only a few minutes ago, and fucking hell.
Of course, spoilers ahead in the review.


I don't even know where to start. All the characters were well down and lovable. Even besides the girls, there was Fat (later Fit) Jack, post-amnesia Tom, and my personal favourites in the whole game: Asmodeus and Stabby Mike.
The comedy was so good.
That whole gang scene with Stabby Mike in the prison had me laughing like a maniac, legit tears in my eyes during that.
Speaking of tears in the eyes...I won't lie, I also had tears in my eyes when we had to kill Asmodeus. Never would have imagined a porn game would make me cry but here we are.
The only criticism I have was that the ending felt a bit sudden, but fuck, I don't even care at this point.
Such a solid game overall.

Welp I just fully replayed this gem after a full one year break, and I gots to say, definitely deserving of top rated. I always liked Once in… ever since my first play through, but if you laugh at the same jokes and enjoy the story just as much on the second, that’s when you know you hit the jackpot.

It accomplishes something I think a lot of visual novels forget, story and relationship progression. MC ain’t boning chicks right off bat, you go through developing the relationship with each heroine, and it’s really fulfilling to reach the end goal. As for the story itself, it’s well written. It’s never forgotten, but at the same time, it’s not overshadowing the casual dating sim aspect. It forms a good balance of romcom and action/adventure, so you won’t ever get too much/ too little of one or the other.

Now, onto my personal favorite aspects: The jokes are funny. Simple as that, the jokes genuinely made me laugh, chuckle, or at least snicker. The dialogue between characters already flows really well, and the jokes make it much more natural and enjoyable. A lot of Mike’s scenes were my top laughs especially during the Prison and killing/arresting the Pedo mayor. Definitely an easy way to make me like an character. As for the countless references to games and other media, they were a really good way at reinforcing the setting/character and was just a great way of making things somewhat relatable even in a porn game. The sex scenes were definitely top notch, and I really dig the 3d but not trying to imitate real life 3d, if you know what I mean. Just makes each of the character look much more appealing aside from MC in the early chpts (I almost skipping out on this game cuz the preview images made the MC look so weird). But Caribdis definitely improved the models overtime, and by the end, even MC looked sharp and polished.

Uhh, I guess I’ll leave one negative note before ending my review. I don’t got much to say honestly cuz it was really good VN by all accounts. My only complaint is how Jas was developed. I think she had the weakest development/story out of everyone. She kinda appeared out of nowhere and was just forced into the MC. Her story arc (if you can even call it that) was really small and rushed. I get she’s not the main star, probably the least important heroine, but she had a really good base for a good story. Instead of just boning her due to something relatively small, I think it would’ve been better for MC to slowly notice her insecurities.And she should’ve discovered her (Spoilers but if you read this far you probably don’t care) dad’s death and led to a better climax between her and MC’s relationship. But all in all, I still grew to like her at the end, so not super big deal.

And that’s all for my rambling. Just felt the need to share my thoughts after replaying. Uhh my review is definitely not fully objective, but it is what it is. If I ever sort out my financial situation, I’ll definitely support the Patreon. This set the bars real high for Eternum so can’t wait!

Basically, I did not like the game.
Story is meh.
Art is HS. While game is pre-rendered, even Real-time 3D games x10 better than this.

Just overrated as hell...

A great game with good characters, surprisingly good plot, and god erotic scenes. A fun read and engaging story with funny moments. I used the walkthrough mod, and without it I proably woul;dn't have gotten the best ending, which was worth the railroading.

A little by chance and out of curiosity, we (yes we are: Brout and Minou) wanted to try this game, but without too much conviction or enthusiasm, and even a certain skepticism. The first 5 minutes of the game shows us a Mc, student in high school living with his mother and his two sisters.... It starts well we said to ourselves. Again and 18-year-old kid who will corrupt his little family with methods seen thousands of times; pills, alcohol, blackmail... And finally no, not at all, at least, the game does not carry all its weight on how the Mc will corrupt his bitchy big sister, his nice little sister, and his too naive mother.

We've read a lot of reviews about this game, good and bad, but we never rely only the game's reading and ratings. We always prefer to form our own opinion, and we're extremely glad we took the time to try this awesome game.

The characters are written in a somewhat superficial way, and I think that's on purpose! Just as this whole story is written with lightness, but great finesse. Here, the goal is not to drag us into some family drama, or into some heavy and dark conspiracy, no. I think the goal here was to create an entertaining story with a lot of humor and a good dose of sex, and I think it's perfectly successful.

Well-written dialogue that doesn't make your eyes bleed, imaged by the characters' facial expressions in some really hilarious situations, and if the renders seem a little outdated (although you can notice a nice improvement as you progress through the different episodes) the girls are really sexy, fun like the rest of the characters by the way. Iris who is an electric battery on legs made us laugh a lot, Fat\fit Jack with this girl who harasses him, Tom who becomes the Mc's personal fly killer, Oliver! Ahh Oliver... Poor boy, but what a laugh with this one, and I won't name them all but all the others of course. The whole staging is based on a burlesque tale with hilarious interactions and a main plot that keeps its commitment despite everything. The Mc crosses paths with many weird and funny characters at the same time, who lead us through adventures full of twists and turns.

So, for that, we both thank you from the bottom of our hearts Caribdis! We went from skeptics to completely addicted in 10 minutes of play, and we really couldn't get away from your game until the end. In short we had a great time, an genuine and pure moment of happiness.

Well i dont usually give my review to these games its the first time actually, but i think this game deserves it.
I enjoyed it so much tho i skipped a lot of text, the plot with girls was fantastic and comedy too (i laughed so hard when the MC started to watch youtube videos when he was infiltrating a house)
totally worth the time thank you
(team lauren)

Incredibly overrated.

Pretty bad character writing. Story that nobody could possibly give a shit about regarding magical occult shit that is barely explained.

The "humor" is okay at best and definitely cannot carry the writing as a whole.

Decent animations, pretty terrible models.

That's it, really. F95 tends to overrate pretty normal shit.

I finished it a while ago but I never left my review of the game... what can I say about this game that others haven't already said, simply excellent in every aspect, don't waste time and play this wonder of VN.

I'm very disappointed due mostly to going in with high expectations due to the average rating on the site. At the time I downloaded this, this game was the #1 rated game here and is still top 5.

• I thought the characterization was very simple and most of the characters underdeveloped. But for what they are most of the girls are quite cute.
• It relies heavily on humor to get through many of its scenes and never managed to elicit any dramatic emotions. You will never fall in love with any characters nor care about them, the deaths feel silly, like pointless filler instead of being affective.
• The plot was terrible and boring. There's no attempt at actually having anything interesting happen.
• By the end it's just throwing rote sex scenes at you to fill up a quota and completely dispenses with making them make sense in the world. The relationship building is bad and unbelievable.
• The sex scenes are not creative in either writing or art. The animation and overall production values feel somewhat dated.

By the standards of absolute garbage porn this writing is slightly better than that, but by any regular media standards the writing here is pretty awful. You can have a VN that's sexy and have great writing guys. It's so bizarre that this site's standards are this low.

With all the disappointments out of the way let's talk about what this game does well.

• It's a solid VN with choices that matter enough and no nonsense.
• Dialogue is good, never felt out of place nor copy-paste between different characters. The dev should've leaned into this more, but instead, interactions with characters are spread thin amongst too many flat characters and far too much time is taken by the bad plot.
• While the sex scenes aren't the best, the characters are written in a fun and consistent way that will still get you to enjoy them. It's still quite good.
• It's finished! As a game product it's competently produced, is long enough but not too long, and everything wraps up cleanly.

Ultimately I didn't enjoy this VN nearly as much as I wanted to and prefer many other VNs here. Thanks for reading.

This is hands down one of THE BEST games I have played on this site. It won't let you down in terms of humour, amount of content, player choices, character models, storyline, etc. This game has made me laugh soooo much which I did not expect at all, and the art quality is visually amazing. Must play game IMO if you are into such visual novels. Late review because I wanted to wait for the game to finish before playing the rest of it, and the ending was very satisfying.

I actually only played this game a month ago, and had to do some digging to check how the development was, well:

Are there any adult games with better story than this one? Yes.
Are there any adult games with better models/animations? Yes.
Are there any adult games that were finished faster than this one? Yes.
Are there any adult games out there you can say Yes to all these 3 questions above? I don't think so.

This is a really solid, high standard VN, and people who might read this may be disappointed with my praising not being very flashy, but there isn't much to say. Just didn't expect a first project (afaik), especially one that was finished that fast, to be that polished and lacking major flaws in it. It is what it is.

5/5 Dev is a fucking unit.

One of the most entertaining games out there. Story is great, choices matter and the characters are well crafted. And there are a lot of funny encounters here and there. It is definitely worth checking out

An excellent, well-written game. The narrative style and pacing more than make up for the offputting models and, let's be honest, rather two-dimensional female characters.

My one real gripe is that there is very little meaningful player choice other than locking out girls; a few menu options are meaningless, and the rest boil down to one correct and various incorrect options. Most of the time it's immediately obvious which is which... but that makes it all the more unexpected when you run into one of the few "wrong" choices don't manifest until much later. For example, you can break Rebecca's ending with very little explanation what you did wrong and no warning in the "on path" system (and almost no other negative effects). I followed along with the source code through most of the game, which is completely fine with me--that's one of my favorite parts of RenPy games, to be honest--but it might be very frustrating otherwise.

This is pod racing!

This game has been reviewed in enough detail already, but fwiw, the graphics are serviceable, the models are adorable, the animations are amazing, the h-content is hot and not cringey, and it's FINISHED, which should earn some kind of medal on its own.

However, what makes this game (and its sequel, btw) really unique (I'd guess I've tried a hundred games and VNs in this genre, and this is top 2-3 for me, if not #1) is the really great storytelling. Lots of games get called "well-written" for having an interesting plot, or characters that make you warm inside, or (rarest of all?) decent grammar, but there's really a joyful, self-aware playfulness to great storytelling that casts a big shadow across all those other stories. And this game has it! From the snarky dialogue to Hollywood-comedy-level camera cuts to silly gags happening in the background of scenes, there's stuff happening here that just doesn't happen at all in most games.

Nobody is going to win literary prizes for an h-game, but as a professional writer, I recognize the effortless energy of someone in the groove. My biggest complaint is that I didn't get to be part of making this!

played this game a couple months ago, just newly discovered this site, this game is as lit as it gets, it is way more than just fapping the story is actually really nice and the characters like stabby mike are funny.

Finally got around to finishing this, and enjoyed it enormously.

There's a lot going for this VN, especially if you like cosmic/supernatural horror -- which I don't, particularly, but didn't mind here. There are elements of school dramedy, mystery, and of course romance. The protagonist grows in interesting and more or less believable ways, and I liked his sense of humor. The girls are varied, though they do fall into fairly standard h-games/anime categories (milf/waifu, sexy teacher, bodere, yandere, tsundere, etc.). The incest and harem paths are fun and relatively believable. The follow-through on secondary plot threads and minor character arcs, reintroducing minor bits from earlier in the story, are a lot of fun. The sex is plentiful and varied.

As a visual novel, it's actually got enough choices/game elements that your decisions make a difference in how the story turns out. (I used the mod, and checked all of the possible endings, which are well thought through. I wish the epilogue montages were a bit more involved, though!)

On the slightly less positive side, the visuals are... okay. It's standard, low-res Honey Select models, which mostly bothered me once I figured out that the story was supposed to be happening in Europe (England, maybe?), at which point the fact that the characters mostly looked vaguely East Asian was a bit distracting. (It didn't help that they actually visited Japan. The sequence was fun -- but the fact that the main characters looked just as Japanese -- clothing and hair color aside -- as the Japanese characters was a bit silly.) The female characters are mostly distinguishable by hair and eye color. Pretty old-school, but this isn't a new game.

Honestly? It's a really good, well constructed VN, with literally hours and hours of fun storytelling. It only suffers in comparison to the developer's next game, Eternum, which has (so far) all of the strengths of Once in a Lifetime -- but Eternum has much better graphics, more varied characters, a more compelling plot (the themes are similar, but the world is sci-fi rather than cosmic horror). If I could give it 4.5 stars I would.

This is my absolute favorite VN. There's a lot to appreciate here:
* An interesting and meaningful plot. Wow!
* A loser protagonist with real character development.
* Girls with fun personalities and great interactions, not just cookie-cutter sex dolls. (Not that they aren't hot. But definitely precious.)
* Humor that still made me laugh after multiple playthroughs. ("Can you please turn down the music?")
* Mike.
* Some actual emotional moments. (Including a long-awaited title drop in the best possible way.)
* Pregnancy routes that aren't gross or a weird afterthought. I usually skip them in games, but I did a second play with 'em on and the added interactions were delightful.

Cons(?)
* Quizzes can be a pain without walkthrough or wikipedia, but I'm fine with "cheating" a bit to sell the "accumulates useless trivia" personality.
* Many early animations still have some clipping and stiffness, I hope these can be polished up a bit in the future.
* A main menu gallery would be nice, but it's simple enough to keep an epilogue save for that.
* No MC/Carla/Rebecca scenes. (Yet? )

Pretty solid but I found it underwhelming for how well received it is on the site.

• I found the story kind of generic, and the humor hit or miss.
• There are some animations, but there's basically no audio during sex scenes.
• The models have expressive faces, but somewhat unrealistic proportions, which I don't care for. Mainly in the crazy skinny waists and hourglass figures. It's not as bad as some games on this site with balloon breasts, but it took me out of it.
• It's also a bit wholesome for the tags it covers - harem ending involves saying "I love you" with every single girl. Loving relationships are great IRL, but in a sex game with a plot this thin and silly, it does nothing for me.

at first when i saw this game i was surprised by how well it was received, after playing the game, i'm still surprised. let me start off by saying i don't hold a grudge against caribdis or anyone involved in the making of this game, this is just my honest opinion about the game. the renders and cgi in this game are quite good, the girls are expressive and sexy, but the male characters are hideous especially the mc. i have no problem with how the game looks, my problem lies within the storytelling. going into this game i was hoping for something sexy, funny and sad at times, what i got was a story with 0 character development, loose threads and bad humour. the characters are lifeless and there's no sense of development in them. one day they get flustered when they see your cock and the next they're jumping on it like wild animals, it has no consistency. this game could've been a simple family corruption story, but we are forced along this mess of a main story. the cult part of the game seems totally unnecessary and it's a slog to go through. the humour is horrendous, it consists of cheap memes that catch you off guard and try to hard to make you laugh. unless you still browse reddit i don't see how you can find this funny, it just comes off as annoying. this style of writing somehow made it into the creator's new game and people are still eating it up. i honestly have no idea why people like this game so much, if i had to sum it up: an overrated, overly ambitious failure.