Ren'Py - Power Vacuum [Ch. 12 Official] [What? Why? Games]

The renders are nice and the creepy antagonist is fun. High praise is also due for the excellent writing. That said, the game gets boring very quickly, the sandbox is just a clumsy interface to progress time. Skipping hours and days to progress events is dull.

The girls are too eager from the start, I have my doubts who is corrupting whom because of that. I stopped playing after chapter two started, it wasn't captivating enough to endure the grind.

The thing i hate the most about NTR games is you cant fucking kill the antagonists. Why are you doing this to me. Please let me kill those disgusting pieces of shit with no brains to show.

Art 5/5 except the antagonists they are the most hideous things i have ever seen.

Story 3/5 Interesting but at the same time not my cup of tea because i hate NTR with every fibre of my body

Gameplay 2/5 its at the same time grindy and not grindy. You need to repeat a scene at a specific time to fill a threshold but its always new. At least when its relevant to the story.

Story:

After running away and living by himself for a few years, MC returns home after the death of his "not dad", to reunite with his "not mom" and "not sisters". An old bastard owns the house now, and he plans to bone our lovely ladies. It's up to MC to stop him, while growing "closer" to his family.

The setup is simple enough, but the story is held together by solid writing. The game doesnt take itself seriously at all, constantly cracking jokes and having absurd situations. In most other games, this would be a recipee for failure, but here, the writing manages to be genuinely funny more often than not, and gives the characters a lot of personality.

The one issue is the extremely slow pace the game handles sex. It's one of those "we can do BJs, boobjobs, assjobs, even anal, but vaginal sex is out of the question, that would be weird" kind of games. I get that the dev wants to create buildup, but I cant help but feel the characters should have lost those blocks 2 chapters ago (we are on Ch 8 at the time of this review).

Gameplay:

Very simple, you can choose to visit areas of the house, and have events with the girls. Some events will have you make decisions in which if you choose wrong, you get an NTR scene as punishment (can be turned off). The game does a rollback if you get it wrong though, so there's no real consequence for your choices.
In order to progress to the next chapter, you will have to see every event, so you are forced to engage with all the girls. So in the end, the game is way more linear than what the "sandbox" tag would have you belive.

Presentation:

The renders are pretty nice, and the animations are smooth and well made (except for a couple of exceptions). One nitpick I have is the overuse of ahegao faces. Those expressions are dumb enough on hentai, and as much as some people are trying to make that a thing IRL, they look even dumber on realistic faces. Though I guess that's a matter of preference.
What was a much bigger problem to me was the UI. The text fonts are hard on the eyes, and the objective menu lacks any polish. This is one area the game does need a huge overhaul.
Another problem is the lack of music. It's a missed opportunity to not have some tunes to set the mood for the scenes.

Conclusion:

Overall, it's a very simple game, with a few problems but still manages to be enjoyable thanks to it's humor and visuals. Well worth checking out.

My review is based on gameplay up until Chapter 3 (as far as I got for now)

Pros:
1. Simple Ren'Py game with no walkthrough needed
2. Images are great, clear, look beautiful
3. Fun storyline and dialog about a young man trying to save his family (with incest addon)
4. Simple fail system (NTR) for making the wrong choice
5. Gallery mode after each chapter is completed.

Cons
1. No audio. It's a little boring and personally I'd prefer something in the background to set the mood. Either a happy, sexy, scary mood. literally anything. Even the spicy scenes are without audio, so no moaning, or slapping, nothing. again boring.

The only thing I'd be unsure about is the inability to live with a bad decision. So far as of Chapter 3 (again, as far as I've gotten so far) you can't. If you make a wrong decision there's a quick NTR scene the game gives you. I love when games use NTR as a punishment however I'm not too sure how I should feel with the quick reset after. I do enjoy being forced to live with consequences but I'm not letting that stop me from enjoying this game. I just like to have a game with a little risk and the risk-free style to this game takes a some of the fun out of it. However thinking back on it... allowing you to live with the consequences would significantly increase the workload by trying to come up with different storylines and paths, so I understand the quick NTR scene and a reset to choose the right decision. I don't necessarily agree but I understand.

The best thing about this game is its DEV. He really delivers the content. Regularly. Without any excuses and complaints about a hard life. I'm 95% confident that this game will be completed without any problems. In addition, the game has:
- A funny, pleasant story. But there are too many jokes and wit for my taste.
-Attractive characters. Each with its own personality and troubles. =)
-Sex scenes made with fantasy. Not just some standard porn shit.
- Nice pictures and animation. There is room for growth, though.
-Lots of sex content for every taste.
It's hard to imagine a reason not to enjoy this game. Gentle souls may be intimidated by the NTR content, but it's completely avoidable.

BEST. GAME. EVER! It has everything and it's not even done yet! The humor, the story pacing, the animations. It's both erotic and hilarious! I just started chapter 3 and I'm not doing anything else today until I finish the latest chapter. Don't skip out on this one!

PS. *Bip* made me almost piss my pants!

Fantastic game! The game has an excellent story in which we fight against Hunter, who tries to take away your loved ones with his dirty games. MC develops physically and mentally as the story progresses. The animations and character designs are great. But apart from all this, the most important factor that makes the game different from other games is that the game has an original and great humor. I felt like I was watching(/playing (?)) an adult sitcom. Also, as someone who hates NTR, I appreciate that the NTR OFF option is found.

Superb work, scenes and dialogue. Ophelia is definitely the best character for me and her scenes and animations are unbeliavable. WWG deserves all the praises for this game... I'm sure that more great content is coming!

Look man It's a solid game I won't say no to that but a lot of content here is just repeated at one point you're just holding Ctrl or spamming space to skip all the repeated dialogues. I'm fine and support the idea of grinding and working to get your reward to make it more enjoyable and all …but this games 2 HOURS in and still no action and why tf do I have to watch a soap opera 12 TIMES!!??! why!? to get a kiss? oh comn. The game has good graphic and everything but I JUST HATE the play style and story line the MC dude is full on BETA and weak af, he is literally working mule, being the goto errand boy for all the women while getting insulted by them at every turn of the corner. Like for god sake can this man get a spine? he is doing all this errand yet they insult em at EVERY turn of words I kid you not you get something rude thrown at you every other sentence. Theres a major difference between teasing and being a jerk.

TL;DR please please less repeated contents and make the MC atleast a little stronger at one point mc just feels like a errand boy.

[Ch. 8] review

What it is: A linear and quite grindy VN masquerading as a sandbox without much success. An infinte handjob and blowjob simulator that doesn't let you get to the goods until finally one penetration scene in chapter 8. (Well, there are other penetration scenes but they happen only with side characters or within the NTR-mode, or are anal scenes, neither of which I'm particularily interested in.)

Pros:
Quality renders, especially later on.
Decent writing, although a bit to the punny side.
Nice use of humor.

Cons
- Infinite tease. You'll have to sit through approximately 100 000 handjob, blowjob and masturbation scenes before you get some real action.
- The main girls look like mutants. Enormous tits and ass. The Dev must have realized this around chapter 5 because then we get introduced to some really stunning side characters. I really wish this art style was used for the main girls instead, but I guess it's too late now. The porn game "mom" plays with the futa girl has an extremely appealing art style too. I wish the Dev had gone for this style throughout.
- Chapters 1-4 were kinda meh and I'd rather have skipped them. Chapter 4 was god awfully bad. From 5 onwards it gets a lot better.
- Extremely repeating events.
- Questionable coding. 90 % of all clickables during "free roam" just recycles the assets you've seen before or gives you a "there's nothing happening here"-message. There's really no point in having clickables if they do nothing.
Dev seems to think that longer play time = better game, and accomplishes this by making you do the same scene with tiny differences 12 times or more. It gets old really fast. And what's worse, when the game conditions me to think the game is 90 % filler content I start to click like a madman to get through it quicker. Thus, when the actual non-repeating stuff pops up I'm already conditioned into clicking like a mad man and I miss the intro because of my spam-click reflexes.

This game really needs a remake, to condense the good bits and get rid of the time wasting grind. Dev also needs to rethink the free roam portions of the game, right now it adds absoltely nothing and feels more like looking for a needle in a hay stack. Games where the story is linear and you'll need to finish every available event before you can move on to the next chapter really has no business at all being open world.

Over all though, I can see the potential here, and if you like getting teased for 8 hours then I guess this game is for you. If you do play it, please be aware that it starts out kinda bad but then gets a lot better by chapter 5. You'll need a lot of patience though, it takes several hours to get there.

What a pleasant suprise playing this game for the first time at chapter 8 was for me! Gamewise, it's really a VN, in which you need to follow storylines in a sandbox setting in the correct order to pass on to the next chapter. Cool. I'm here to fap, not play Jeopardy. But it's the art that sets it apart from any other game I can think of.

GOOD

-Obviously this game's signature is the facial expressions, but which go far beyond the emphasis on ahegao. There is true, genuine care given to make these characters alive and kicking, smiling and yelling, laughing and screaming (from orgasms or out of anger). This makes them a lot more relatable and "realistic" than in many other games that claim to be so.

-The sex pace is just right, especially for a family incest porn game. For those who want to know what chapter 8 offers in terms of mommy sex (usually the character the most sexually neglected in a Western porn game, because considered the most taboo), she now blows you repeatedly, and enjoys it to the full. There's no reason why things shouldn't move on as steadily as they've been so far.

-The story is genuinely quite clever, and most of all doesn't take itself seriously, despite noteworthy twists and surprises.

-Excellent game visibility, everything is clearly explained, I didn't need either a walkthrough or visiting this thread on F95zone for answers.

NOT SO GOOD

-The truly admirable effort given to facial expression may hide other aspects of the art which aren't so good... Some characters are really strange looking, eyes are usually not deep enough and any woman with a nose as small as the ones in this game would be basically suffocating herself to death, for various reasons. Most of all, a balloon boob dweeb like meself cringes at the saggy boobs that are given even to the younger female characters...



But who cares? There's enough for everybody in this game, and going through the unavoidable scenes with female NMCs you don't like makes the scenes with the ones you do like all the more rewarding.

My personal favourite is, strangely, the petite Lucia (I'm a MILF guy), closely followed by Aliza, Mallory, "Tefnut" Tiff, Eva and Ophelia the mother. The rest I'll gladly play along with as long as these keep on getting the same attention they've enjoyed so far!

Power Vacuum [Ch. 8]
Overall: Excellent

Story: 3/5
This game isn't going to win any awards based on the underlying story premise, so if you're looking for some high stakes drama then look elsewhere.

Originality: 3/5 (non-NTR)
For those like me who avoid NTR, the plot is not particularly original: MC develops into superhuman love machine and eliminates obstacles to sexual conquest.

Dialogue: 4/5
Plenty of witty dialogue here, with a fairly consistent voice throughout (i.e., it is obvious that a single writer is responsible for the dialogue, unlike some VNs where the opposite is equally obvious).

Renders: 4/5
Art render quality is consistently good. Improvements to lighting and shading are evident in later chapters.

Sound: 1/5
No soundtrack to speak of, though a cameo video provides worthwhile dialogue.

Playability: 3.5/5
This is a sandbox-style game with limited introduction. On my first attempted playthrough, I was concerned that I needed to keep careful track of days/times to progress. Fortunately, this is not necessary; however, it can sometimes be difficult to judge when you are repeating a scene or whether a new scene with different ending is playing. This leads to a feeling of repetitiveness for some paths. Note that ALL paths are required as well - gameplay is highly linear in NTR-free mode, almost to the point of being a kinetic novel with virtually no meaningful choices.

Performance: 4/5
Animations sometimes hitch or play more slowly than they probably should. Single render images sometimes momentarily pop up between animations. I'm sure there are Ren'Py workarounds to these - I'd love if What? Why? Games dev would consult with someone like Stiglet who seems to have developed code that produces smooth transitions without large file size.

Animations: 4.5/5
This game does animations very well. Most are short loops, but there is impressive level of detail in many scenes. Some hiccups with loading though.

Content: 5/5
Despite some grindiness, there's lots of content here to play through, and I expect quite a few more chapters before we hit the end of the story.

Lewdity: 5/5
For a harem game, this is surprising slow in developing sexual content as a consequence of the 'plot' setup. A few scenes like the Brenna and Eve threesomes in the hotel are, however, some of the absolute hottest I've encountered in any game to date. As the harem grows, I can only anticipate how these scenes might spiral into further debauchery.

Aspects of gameplay that I think could stand improvement:
1) Meaningful choices: I know harem games eschew these, but it would be nice to be able to decline certain characters or fetishes. For example, I don't find Mallory to be appealing - mean-spirited, promiscuous, etc. - and would have no issue whatsoever skipping all her content, including the revenge scenes. Similarly, for those like me who are not keen on lactation, humiliation, or other fetishes, it would be nice to be able to sit these out to the maximum extent possible.
2) Fewer girls: I know harem games eschew this too, but more girls does not mean more sex - it usually just means less character development. Would happily trade recently introduced Kumiko and Rebecca for more intimate scenes with other characters (Brenna movie night, etc.).
3) Intelligent timeskip. Rather than having us advance time on an hourly basis with most hours being empty filler, I'd much prefer some code be added to detect when the next scene would be available and skip directly to that time. Quality of life improvement!

Overall, this is an absolute GEM of a game, absolutely worth your time.

for all my annoyance with generic background music, i can't but feel bored without music or sound. Theres comedy true. But the ai saving u form every mistake instantly really takes out any stake. The sex scnene idk 2s

That was a surprisingly fun game. I think it had a good balance of silliness and sexyness. If you are looking for a super serious and deep game I think this game isn't the right one for you. And it looks like each update has good amount of content.

[Ch8] This game is everything I usually dislike in lewd games: Stupid story where MC is only attractive male in 100km radius, everyone else is a creep or fat or whatever, all LIs immediately fall for his charm etc etc. There already is lots of contents, and accordingly the thin story gets stretched to regrettable silliness. Slightly pointless sandbox grind (well, for a sandbox game it is actually fine I guess), arts is fine but not outstanding (I personally strongly dislike the tit monstrosities / hourglass abominations, but that's a matter of taste)

Why I still kind of liked the game in the end: I really enjoyed the writing! It was good-natured and funny, the LIs and even the MC (!) are likable and moderately interesting. The whole tone is kind of respectful (which is remarkable given the theme).

There's nothing I don't love about this game. The first 5 or 6 chapters had me lauging more often than, very well written, and the jokes are exactly my kind of humor. The models and animations are great, the story itself is a nice change from the "you get some sort of power to mess with people while they're sleeping, and they somehow don't wake up" that's become more common, The villain is hateable but in a comical way, like an old (much lewder) cartoon villain. My only complaint, and it is a very minor one, is the use of terms like "the warden", which I fully understand is because of Patreon. If things like that also bother you, definitely play with the incest patch, my ONLY complaint about the game.

This game is excellent. The humor is clever even if it's largely innuendo and word play. All the characters have individual voice and the familiarity between them is great. Not a fan of NTR but the way its done here is hilarious. I've hit the part where his dick is broken, which many say is the falling off point, but I'm still down. Will update if that changes but I doubt it will. Only issue I have is a small one and that's the complete silence. With how much I enjoy this game, it's a bit jarring in a way that's unique here as the other games with this issue don't bother me as much.

Edit: Okay so all of you are wrong. The scene right after he fixes his dick is one of the funniest moments in a story I've ever seen. This is parody on par with Hot Fuzz and I love it. Anyone playing this game without laughing is a heartless bastard and even if it doesn't make you wanna cum every 10 seconds then at least you are entertained. I will now be supporting this creator for the joy they spread to the world.

Well, here it goes my first review on this site, this game is cool, it has the feeling of a sitcom mixed with a porn game(well bc it is a porn game duh) and it actually has some good fucking jokes, don't get me wrong 80% of the time like all the other ppl(myself included) come to fap to a game not to laugh but it's pretty great in both aspects, i enjoy NTR in mangas and damn, playing the bad choices to see those scenes hurt physically but not bc they were bad but bc the majority have context and honestly that's what good ntr is, people cheating for logical reasons and having the one in the other side having feelings for them, all the characters are quirky and that adds some personality to the game, the MC sometimes plain dumb and sometimes it steamrolls with some good fucking jokes and comebacks.
And yeah pretty good in most aspects except for the grinding(it's kinda boring just wait until the right time when ur done everything else, maybe doing it more dynamic will fix that)

I really love the game and would have given it a 5/5 if it were not for the constant witty jokes and banter. It was fun the first two or three hours but now it is just annoying and I find myself skipping through it trying to make sure I'm not missing actually important text. The problem I have with it is that EVERY single character in the game has the same punny sense of humour. And as much as I truly appreciate the work behind crafting all those " play on words " segments I find it to be very redundant and immersion breaking since everyone has the same humour. Other than that the game is near perfect to me. And I hate NTR so trust me if you hate NTR too you won't have a problem with this game as you can turn it off.

This is one of the few porn games that I have played where I have found myself actually "liking" some of the characters. That is not to say that I have hated characters in all of the others, but rarely have I read dialog and motivations well-scripted enough for the women to be anything more than mere objects of my lust. That is not to say that there are no missteps, but I think that Brenna, Ophelia, and Aliza are solid characters in a solid story who just happen to be hot AF.