VN - Ren'Py - Phone Story [v0.14] [Taptus]

Phone Story [v0.14]

This VN has both very positive and very negative ratings, and as so often, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

General:
You follow a storyline that branches at a specific point. There you can choose between the Love, NTS, or NTR (cheating) routes, or keep going to see where your choices lead. A route only locks if you have gathered enough points in Freedom, Lust, or Love.
My first playthrough took around nine hours. After that, I did a second one in fast-forward, where I noticed a few minor inconsistencies across the paths. For example, on the NTS route after the girls’ night, Lisa cheats with Karl without telling the MC. None of the routes are fully completed yet, although most of them seem fairly close to reaching an ending.

I also noticed that decisions made after locking into one of the three routes feel a bit pointless.
@Dev: It might improve the experience if players could leave a locked path when their accumulated stats justify it. That way, later choices would still matter and carry real weight.

Narrative:
The familiar setup of a bored wife, a husband on a business trip, and a story unfolding through phone messages is nothing new. That would be perfectly fine if the writing were gripping enough. I would like to say that it is, but unfortunately it never quite got there for me.
The chat exchanges are stretched out far too long and often read more like spoken conversations than people texting each other. Even if one accepts this stylistic choice, many scenes feel inflated and would benefit from trimming. Shorter, sharper dialogue would maintain momentum and keep the reader genuinely invested. The inner monologue of the MC also felt distracting rather than enriching.
The storytelling is acceptable and at times good, but it lacks the spark that turns a premise into something captivating.

Visuals:
The VN uses a handful of AI images and AI animations. They work and are certainly better than nothing, but I wouldn’t miss them if they weren’t there. The audio consists of a single ambient background track that loops endlessly. It’s subtle enough, but after about thirty minutes most players will likely mute it.

Bugs:
Some dialogue lines are assigned to the wrong character, and a few images are missing. None of these issues are major, but they are noticeable.

Overall:
For me, this is a solid three-star VN. With some polishing, especially in pacing and dialogue, it could easily rise to four or even five stars. I will update my rating once the VN is completed.

I honestly can’t understand how this game received this rating. The AI art is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. Terrible in terms of quality. Way belove the average. Also inconsistent. It looks like no effort was put into it. It feels like the developer just typed random prompts and threw whatever came out straight into the game. The script also seems AI written, and it’s one of the most average stories possible. Did you think it was over? No. Despite having an extremely simple gameplay, every update introduces new bugs. Is this developer even trying? Terrible. Just terrible.

I just can't with this game....

The game makes no attempt to make the "walkthrough" at all useful. Easy mode or hard mode, it makes no difference, you are still gonna be guessing.

you get 3 categories, and content is locked behind hitting certain point values.

Love - this is most obviously the "we hate NTR" route
Lust - Who knows, maybe NTS? Maybe NTR?
Freedom - Again who knows, NTS, NTR, maybe its just gonna set off fireworks and have a big ol 4th of July party, there's no way to f'ing tell what it does.

There is no clear direction for this game, does it want to be NTS, does it want to be NTR, the two bleed into each other and the routes vary little, some dialogue choices might be slightly different, but none of it is explained

On top of that content is locked behind these with needing a certain level of each or two of them to not lock you out, no way to know until you hit the roadblock. then you have to backtrack and start all over, speeding through, picking different random combinations of choices and points to try and hit that magical benchmark.

To add insult to injury you hit long stretches where you are forced to take points you dont want or lose points you need. 3, 5 10 questions in a row adding Love when you need to lose love or adding Lust when you need to keep it low. No mitigation, answers will be variations of (Love +3, Freedom -2, Lust -1) and sometimes you are forced to lose or add points you dont want to.

The last straw was when the dev clearly became bored and threw in a 10-20 question segment about Lisa and the MC discussing her skin care routine and trying to make it "flirty", the options are suddenly labeled things like "Flirty" or "Caring", but all the options still add points or subtract points with Love being added on every one with no way to keep it low. The lines were just painfully unfunny, unsexy and uninteresting.

Theres just no cohesion to the story, I have heard of slow burn, but after spending literal hours there's very few sex scenes which are limited to a picture or two and some low-end AI animation. Lisa is bi-polar, she goes from puritanical to sucking dick, to ice queen, back to office slut, then good girl, then shes drunk texting some random guy who she lets come over to fuck her and right back to "loving girlfriend" like nothing happened.

Genuinely just annoying to play while also for some reason feeling much longer than other games yet less scenes. Feels like an absolute slog to go through, honestly with the stats that decide what route making it even worse because they don't even really make sense.

Having to restart the game with every new update and speedrun to where you left off is 100% going to kill off future interest.

The game started off well, but if you mistep and don't accrue enough points in freedom, lust or love you can end up closing off content accidentally.

There are far too many phone games out there right now, and whilst most of them may have started out well, I simply can't recommend a single one of them, they all fall foul of a bloated cast, apathy toward the MC or SO, and no real sexual tension to the point where they become wall of text simulators.

This is the first game that made me write a negative review. I usually only review if it's 3 stars or more, otherwise I ignore it, but man this is some next level AI bamboozle.

The game started good enough, AI renders are decent and the story made some sense, then it devolved into a mess of paths that intermingle with each other or plainly don't make sense.
My main path was NTS...and boy I was not prepared. After gettin it on and deciding with the wife that she can get freaky but she should ask for permission, at least at first....but most importantly talk about her experiences, since that's the NTS kink after all...the wife goes around doing stuff, half the time she tells about it, the other half either gives some of the story or completely ignores or lies about it. But she makes sure her BFF gets all the juicy details that the MC doesn't.

NTR path is somewhat better since yeah, go ahead and cheat and lie to MC...but there's BM involved and the character that does the BMing gets one BJ lol ) but other characters get to fuck her. Major inconsistencies here too and talks that don't make any sense.

I haven't played Love path since it's most likely lacking. I'm not expecting love out of a long distance phone game with NTS/NTR around.

Ok one thing for sure. I am stupid. I am stupid because over and over again I give this slop another try. And every god damn time I have to start a new game because some errors in the code. (Not playing every update more like every 2-3)

Now we are at version 0.13 and the game is terrible. A lot of updates, a lot of feedback 1000 times changing the code fucking up saves and still the game is trash.

Hours and hours of reading without any benefit. Story is bad, the routes are bad, the characters are mostly annoying specially.. who would have guesses? the wifes best friend. Another cock hungry annoying tashwhore that calls you cucky and tries to bring your wife into the cuck lifestyle. Like all those AI slop games have the same ingredients. After the beach scene you get locked into a path but you have to collect points over hours and hours just to realize that you don't have the points you need for the route you want to play. What an absolute genius idea. So you are forced to always take that one choice to gather enough points no matter how dumb and stupid the dialogues are with those choices. There is the Love, NTS and NTR route. I ended up on the 4 one. A love route with missing shit or whatever. I am really speechless. This really turned into one of the worst games I ever played. Which is very sad.

Really bad phone game. I played a bunch of them and even with the low standards I use for those, this is far below average. The conversations are so longwinded and uninteresting and feel so unnatural. They also sometimes do not really make sense or are repetitive as if the author added things in the middle of them but kept the previous conversation as it is.

The pictures are ok, but I have seen way better pictures done with AI and this quality is not enough to compete with other games of the same genre or warrant more than 1 Star.

At first the game seem nice but the story flow is somewhat weird and long leading playing the game for some time, I lose interest. Moreover, it's a typical phone game which mean there's not a lot of scene, interactions, etc. Art is somewhat ok but some pictures have really poor quality. Overall, I don't think it worth the time.

I loved the game, much more than the usual suspects of its style. The story is super good, very immersive, a great game for NTR/cheating fans like myself.

Pros:
Very good story

Characters with a lot of personality

Amazing renders

Writing: For me, it's perfect. I could understand everything perfectly, since Spanish is my native language, so I don't care if there are any mystakes.

Cons:
There's a bit of information missing about the current day and the character's stats. I had to start over several times because it's not clear what each stat contributes to each path.

For me, it's 4.5/5, but I'll give it 5 stars because I was super hooked for 4 hours. Great work. I'm looking forward to the next updates.

The game started really well. The first releases were well thought out and coherent. Of course, a story had to be developed first, and we were already past that point at 0.8. The points collected up to that point, depending on the player's decisions, actually play hardly any role. They're only meant to suggest to the player that something will happen at some point that would have happened even without the points system if there was some logic to the story. Conclusion: Lisa could have cheated on MC a long time ago. The story progression depends on the player's decisions. However, the developer wants to gain time to get as much out of it as possible. As announced in 0.13, we'll probably see a condom fuck because everything is dragged out again. For me, the game has become unrealistic because it makes no sense and is completely out of touch with reality. But games end like this when they're being milked. It's now brimming with boredom and everything is predictable.
Rating:
Storyline: 2 stars
Model: 4 stars Lisa is hot
Gameplay: 1 star
Graphics: 3 stars

I'm still only giving it 2stars because the game is obviously being milked.

9 months and the process still the same Except 3 blowjob the game started great but now it's became quite boring

the ai art in this game mediocre I saw many games has better ai art
the story is Interesting but the pacing is terrible
the dv just want more money he's not satisfied apparently

As stated by many, there are many games like this one and I played most of the ones on this site. A couple good CG here and there, a couple of possibilities in the routes. I don't know what is planned next but I really enjoyed the nerdy girl.
Most choices feel akward and you sometimes feel like every choice lead to the same thing or you don't know what can be the best pick for what you really want. For the amount of text, the graphic content is very low. I'd highly suggest to be more concise in the story and to add more pictures and if possible, more animations. Having the choice to be faithful or not is also great.

For all of this game's strengths, I can't honestly really find the appeal in this game. There's tons of these mobile phone type NTR games out there and this one doesn't really stand out from the crowd in any meaningful way.

This game also has some of the weirdest pacing and plot developments I've ever seen. The writing for each character seems to flip flop and there is very little consistency in how the main characters act or behave. The only characters who behave predictably are the one note side characters who fill generic tropes without providing anything new or interesting.

Playing this game was confusing more than anything. It's fine if you just want to see some decently rendered AI artwork but how much is that really worth?

There's some interesting elements and plot points in the story such as being able to spy on your wife, stay oblivious or just open things up and get all the juicy details straight from the (w)horse's mouth. In terms of the AI art, IMO there's needless use it (like why even bother including AI generated pictures of kitchenware?) but for the most part it's passable.

That said the writing screams of being written by an AI in the worst way. I couldn't get into the story at all because so many conversations just loop and go nowhere for dozens of lines my eyes started glazing over. Also the amount of SUBTLE FORESHADOWING that the game constantly throws into each conversation and especially in the MC's thoughts really undermines any intrigue from the story. Also also depending on the route you want to go for the MC's relationship resembles more like he's a psychiatrist talking to a patient rather than a husband chatting with his wife.

In short:
This VN could probably be an average NTR/NTRS story with some forgivable clunkiness in writing but as it reads it's in need of a lot of work. At the very least give the ChatGPT generated conversations a second pass, assuming of course that there was even a first pass...

I hope that the developer will not abandon the game. She's great-visually, in the points accumulation system, and in the hot images. The text is written perfectly. I'm moving along the Netorase route and so far it's been wonderful

Is phone game just a whole genre yet? It's really getting obscene how many of these things there are. Are phone interfaces just easy to code or is it just the natural lean towards NTR content? Maybe it's just because it makes sense to develop it as a game for mobile?

Phone Story has decent art, but can't really give points for that as it's AI. Gotta love the hair fingers on the cover image. Oh, and a bonus torso armpit! Otherwise, the word choice and grammar is frequently awkward and generally inhuman, the point generation and pathing is irritatingly labyrinthine, and it kinda just feels like the writing threw all the NTR tropes in a pot and stirred to see what came out. The end result is very messy, though there are occasionally some decent scenes.

I'm also personally irritated that the game has such an aversion to the big NTR conversation. You know the one, where the MC and LI hash out what's okay and what isn't? Where they actually talk about whether/how they want to explore the fetish and perhaps set some ground rules? Phone Story has hinted about this conversation at least twice in the game but keeps putting it off even as the LI slips further and further down the rabbit hole. As more of an NTS enjoyer who's had a lot of difficulty navigating the branches of the story to find satisfying content, this is really demonstrative of the pathing issues in the game.

I guess the biggest problem though is the sheer amount of competition by other, better phone games. Phone Story is just too haphazard to compete.

Phone games live and die by their writing, and the quality of the writing in Phone Story has been decreasing steadily ever since its very first release. These games seem to only have a vague outline of a narrative structure with a steadily rising degree of sexuality involved but lack storytelling in themes, conflict, character arcs or even a proper plot and Phone Story is no exception.

The dialogue isn't much better. As an example, the way Sam is written to imitate ebonics is just... jesus christ. It gets worse as Lisa describes him to Kira as having a "huge salami" and how he "smells amazing of coffee". If you're a non-native speaker it should be a requirement to at least run what you're writing by someone who is.

Some responses are so robotic it's comical:

"It's shocking. I'm completely confused and don't know what to do next. And I'm jealous."

Click to expand...

A real line from the game. Even omitting the fact that this is supposed to be a phone game which implies naturalistic stylized writing, this doesn't even feel like a line that would ever be uttered by a real human being, through text or else.


The last version I experienced was v0.72 which was a short beach-themed update and it was pretty bad. The writing seems to be getting duller and duller and essentially nothing happens throughout the whole update as Lisa just keeps babbling on about ice cream and lemonade as well as constantly finding new ways to describe how warm the water is.

Once again both Kira and Lisa are repeatedly perplexed over you being into something innocuously lewd even though you've already done/said much crazier things. This will make you feel like you're in one of those episodic TV shows that lack an ongoing storyline so everyone's memory is refreshed every new episode.

At some point Kira will start sending you bizarre pictures of random dudes surrounding Lisa in comical quantities. The whole scene is super vague and even eerie as no activity, conversation, game or anything concrete is described or even alluded to. The only thing you hear from Kira is that your girlfriend, surrounded by an ever-increasing amount of men, "flirts" with them as, in the meantime, Kira, who was supposed to be wearing a mega-slutty swimsuit with her cooch basically out, had nobody hit on her for no reason.

Through this combination of the nosediving quality of the art and dull nonsensical storytelling, the scene ends up delivering a truly strange type of unintentional surrealist comedy, likely not what the dev was going for.


On a more general note, it's seemingly obvious to everyone that the freedom/love/lust system is already a nightmare to deal with and is only going to get worse. Its focus on point-hunting is immersion-breaking and only emphasizes the lack of meaningful choice further. The dev is either going to simplify or cut it or have nothing but complaints about how stupid and arbitrary is as the game grows in size and complexity. Having to replay a potentially sizeable chunk of the game because you're sitting at 119 out of 120 abstract poo-poo pee-pee points is not going to win anyone over.

Anyways, this game feels exactly the same as most other phone games:
Writing is in total free-fall, Updates are getting smaller, narrative progression more artificially drawn out as the game has to substitute its lack of proper storytelling with progressively lewder events but not go too far too quickly. It was never amazing but now it's just bad.

Good but could've been better
Points for being original and for the beautiful art (although there aren't many images due to the nature of this game).

What I didn't like about the game is:

• The whole thing about doing things through the friend Kira like she's a mediator. That was really lame. I think speaking directly to the GF, slowly encouraging and opening up about your desires would've been so much better and realistic.
  A slow burn with the GF talking about new "friends" she met, taking photos with said friends, maybe some incriminating photos with suspicious things in the background, etc, would've been so much better than a weird friend who takes photos of your gf.
• Things escalate way too fast. Story starts slow af, there's a bunch of nothing for half of it, then suddenly your gf is down to blow your friend/enemy in the car. That's lazy writing. This LDR scenario would've been perfect for a slow burn with lots of teasing and suspicious things from your gf. But then it moves on too fast, makes no sense.
• Blackmailing. Hate it. Specially when it doesn't make sense like in this story. A hacker who hacked your phone AND your security cameras and you can't change them? C'mon
• Dialogues aren't realistic. Don't sound like conversations you have with people close to you.

Overall, like the idea of a phone/texting story and I like the whole cuckold/hotwife/cheating theme but the story could definitely be better
A game where there's barely any images of the characters should have better branching, specially one that doesn't rely simply on a points system

Here is my general feedback about the game :

- Characterization :

In a story with relationship dynamics at the core, flat characterization feels especially stands out.
Characters in fiction—whether it's a novel, game, or an erotica story—are most memorable when they feel human. They don’t necessarily need to have loud(distinct) or quirky traits, but they do need depth.
While I appreciate you brushed that part in some earlier scene (the introduction part) I still feel this part needs to be fleshed out more to get the most out of that part, yes she was very kind, yes she was very nice, but why? Why she was acting like she did? Maybe she was kind to everyone but is secretly terrified of confrontation , or maybe she’s "nice" because she craves validation, or maybe because she grew up in a strict household and represses her true feelings.
These kind of motivations/flaws add dimension and depth to the character, my usual advice for this thing is to imagine yourself having a one-on-one interview with your character, and ask them about themselves, what's their deepest secret, desire, etc. and so forth and so on.

The Writing :

- While I don't expect a professional writing, I do appreciate you are going with a more grounded approach on your narrative story telling, but I do think the writing, in some aspects, needs to be better, try to read more about "Show, don't tell" in writing fiction and try to implement it in your work, it will enhance the story exponentially.

And also I hate reading internalized monologue/thoughts from a character in a story, yes, hate is a strong word, but it's true, no scratch that, I DESPISE it. It takes away all the immersivity, engagement, and any sense of tension in a story, when I read a story, I want to feel the story, not reading a character's thought about what's happening in them, there are more subtler, elegant way of getting your points across to your audiences than writing down the exact thought of your characters, learn how to do it.

- Some dialogues does not sound natural and sounds too formal for daily conversations

TLDR : A nice phone texts game that has more a grounded and natural way of it's approach, which is of course the more ideal form of the storytelling. It's definitely worth to keeping an eye on, especially if the author polish and flesh the story more and improve their writing skill.
I personally would rate 3.5/5 but I give bonus point for keeping the grounded feeling in their game.
Thanks for the game, good luck and have a nice one.