Ren'Py - Refuge of Embers [v0.17a] [Escape Sauce]

As of v0.17a

The game is very good. The art and the LI's very likable. The story is enough, as well as gameplay but...

Every update is a baby step. This game came at 2020, 4 years ago. and still there's like 20-30min gameplay if you chase one LI.

It is simply not acceptable.

I want to play more of this game, the game has a lot of potential but the updates usually come small and short. It's been 4 years. I think It is natural for me to want more from this game.

The game needs boost immediately.

Version 0.17a

A very straightforward VN, nothing you haven't seen before, and with how early the latest release is, it's expected to have this little content in this game. Still it's understandable given the amount of detail and care put into the illustrations, especially the characters and the backgrounds. Some scenes are even animated, which is pretty rare for a 2D VN, and those animations are also brought in to the adult scenes.

Which is great, but the sex scenes here are pretty underwhelming. On top of being very vanilla despite the premice of this game, the very first one in the prologue is actually the best of them all, simply due to the fact it has pretty much all the fetishes advertised by the devs; incest, breeding, all that. It's not big of a deal, but it kinda hurts replayability to get all endings, since once you've seen one of them, you're pretty much done as the rest will be of the same caliber, if not a bit lower.

But that doesn't detract from the overall quality of this VN. It's still ver much high-quality all around. The characters all feel pretty credible and likable, the story leads to something interesting (altough not much of important has happened and it kinda drags on at some points) and the art is incredible in every panel. Might be worth recommending this, although I would wait until it gets out of alpha, once a good chunk of content has been added.

One of the best games I've ever played, I'd love to see more of the characters. The story is amazing. I hope more people will enjoy this game and make it more popular. I want to be the main character so badly. It's a well-made game that has been around for a while with consistently good content. I recommend this game to anyone.

I’m going to preface this review by just stating the elephant in the room. Refuge of Embers is in a very early stage of its development. The amount of content so far in the game can be summarized as the entirety of the prologue, and the inception to the call of adventure after said prologue. Given the amount of time since this came out on F95 back in 2020, almost 4 years ago, and you can start to visualize just how glacial progress has been for this title. It feels weird giving a review to something that clearly hasn’t finished baking yet… but I don’t know if I’ll have the time to properly review this when it eventually finishes, if it ever will.

With that being said, Refuge of Embers has some good things going for it. You can probably tell just by looking at the previews that its art is its main selling point. While the art style of the characters personally isn’t what I typically like in a visual novel, it is unique in that aspect. The characters and backgrounds have an almost painted quality, you can immediately tell the handcrafted nature of it and the backgrounds are so detailed. I know some other visual novels have pretty generic looking backgrounds from scene to scene, in comparison the level of detail in each background here is honestly a little mind boggling and I can only imagine the amount of time and effort it takes to get each one finished. This is a double-edged sword, with only two people working on the project and both on their own spare time, progress is going to be slow and since you can’t really cut corners with this level of handcrafted detail I can start to see why it has been slowly inching out progress with each update.

Each of the characters in the game feel unique enough, they have some personality to them and I like that, you don’t get to spend a whole lot of time with them so with what little screen time there is it is nice that you can sort of get a jist of what each girl is like. The story feels like something I’ve seen done before, not from any one story that I can point out but it has this familiar quality to it, that's not a bad thing though, if it ain't broke don’t change it. It’s a fantasy setting, not quite sure if it’s high fantasy but that’s how I’d describe it so far. I’d like to see where it goes cause it’s interesting enough for me that if there was more content I’d still have kept playing so that’s a good sign.

That’s about everything that I can say that is good though, there really isn’t a whole lot of content to praise it more. So what’s bad or in this case lacking? Well to put it bluntly, if you downloaded this just to see what the erotica was like, well... the first minute into the game has a dream sequence (probably a vision of the future.) and that has the best sex scene of the game so far, and that’s a problem. There’s only seven sex scenes in the game as of writing this and calling each one a sex scene is kinda me being generous here. Every scene I saw was very short in length. Given that this isn’t a game with mechanics and more of a traditional visual novel it would have been nice if those scene were expanded on. You don’t have to go full on verbose mode but it would have been more enjoyable to have some more detail and characterization to the sex scenes to make them more memorable and enjoyable. Like I mentioned before the only reason I like the very first sex scene in the dream is that it features actual penetration with a very detailed impregnation x-ray image, and that’s hot. If you were looking for more of that well... yeah it ain’t here chief. At the very least some of the scenes are animated so they’re worth at least seeing once, and you can do everything in the game in about 3-ish hours I’d say.

And that’s really all there is to the game so far, a short prologue with the start of the next chapter, a handful of erotic scenes sprinkled in and cut to credits. This would all be great if it all came out today and honestly if I didn’t know that this game had come out back in 2020 I would have assumed that it came out today. But given that it’s been floating around here for quite some time I'm starting to resonate with some of the comments and reviews on here who are frustrated with the current pace of updates and lack of content. I just played this for the first time the other night but I had seen this at least two years prior and what initially got my attention was its art but I stopped myself from actually trying it because it looked very early in its development. Don’t hold your breath on this one, it needs a lot more time to cook.

Honestly, this has to be one of my favs. Fantastic art, interesting world and good writing. Yeah progress might not have been the fastest, but I feel like it's accelerated somewhat.

Eryn and the mc make for an amazing couple as well

After the amount of time put into this game you really can't tell its been that long by the amount of sexual content found in it. I have heard of slow burns but generally they require you to actually light the match instead of just holding and looking at it. You know that tag for Vaginal Sex? Well you got it in the first 5 seconds of game play. Hope you enjoyed it. The cow excites me more than my interactions with the female characters so far. The cow at least runs around fast and peeks at from behind the bushes. Great artwork though. Too bad that is about all the excitement you get for all the years this one has been in the making. 0.15b? Not impressed at the lack of effort this one has been showing after the amount of time its been around.

Amazing game. Beautiful art, interesting characters, cool story and hot women! I haven't finished the game yet, but I hope the ending is good. It's just a shame that apparently Eryn is the protagonist's biological sister... The ideal would be if she were a half-sister or "consideration sister", therefore, she would be the ideal love interest, she is even the cutest in all.

Great game, and I really like the broad options it gives you. It would be interesting to give it some RPG mechanisms, since we will probably be fighting against (or with) the cultists. Waiting for the next updated to keep on playing it.

Honestly, for what's currently in the game, it's pretty dang good as far as quality goes. The story is going in a direction that I really like. Character development is nice so far, and honestly I really don't have a complaint. Yes the story is fairly short at the moment, as there isn't much content. But as a basis for the game it honestly seems like it's gonna be really good.

This game has been in development for a long period of time, but what A LOT of people don't realize(because apparently they don't do much reading) is that the dev team consists of 2 people. And they both have full time jobs. They purely work on this project in their spare time. So when most people are whacking off, they're still working.

Given that, I'd say the progress they've achieved over the past few years is adequate for the most part. HOWEVER, What has been recently noted by the devs is that their artist, will soon be working full time on this game, as the total monthly income for the game has reached a point that will allow a person to leave their full time job come July. Meaning content updates should start rolling out quite quickly, and be far more beefy.

So those that are purely giving this game a thumbs down due to the lack of content, will likely be switching their reviews soon enough. Why anyone goes into a game that is at v0.15 thinking there will be a slew of content, likely also hasn't seen the light of day for some time, as anyone with half a brain would at the very least take a guess that the game is in a very early state.

That aside, the upcoming content should be quite good, as the foundation of the world and the story that is beginning to unfold, should prove to be quite good. And the main romance options, and with whom they involve are ones we don't often see. Not to mention the romance options aren't purely corruption and borderline fk'd in the head like many games out there with these tags often are.. Instead this game is far more wholesome. Which is incredibly refreshing. The cast of romance options are also quite diverse, and appear to alter the story. So the final product will likely be a good one.

I'll definitely be keeping a close eye on this one, and will be eagerly awaiting updates. Cuz lets be real here, anyone that has play'd this game knows we got some milf content coming. If you add Milf in with the current tags, I'm sure you can figure out what 1+1=...'s

The perfect game. Wincest with planned pregnancy. Beautiful art, well-paced routes. Lets you focus on a specific love interest instead of forcing you into a harem. The only complaint I can make is there's not enough content but that also doubles a compliment - 'I want to play more of this'.

Hope the dev will steadily keep adding content and finish a great story some day. Kudos!

Obviously you can see the quality and potential in this game. It is very rare for this kind of games to come in reality nowadays. I hope for more updated to come with more content and upgrades to this game. 5 stars

I've finally decided to play this and it was a huge let down.

Pros:
- graphics
- characters
- writing

Cons:
- sex scenes are weak, really weak
- lack of content

The game is pretty nice, but there is not much of it, I've seen bigger v0.01 releases than this here v0.13 and i'm talking about overall content, both in volume and in substance. If that wasn't enough, the sex scenes are way too tame, even for vanilla foreplay and there are only 5 of them (4 if you exclude gay handjob). 3 years of development for a short prologue.

I unfortunately echo many of the other low score reviews of this game.

Beautiful art. Well designed models that emote a lot of personality for various girl arch-types (bookish shy girl, sassy tomboy, helpless damsel, kinky farmgirl, etc).

But after nearly 3 years of post-0.03 release, it still feels like a 0.04 release. There are what, 3 days of in-game content? Spanning maybe 10 minutes of total time for an average reader? And 5 "paths" if you can call them that, which are basically "who do you spend time with today?" If you pick the right paths your reward is either a HJ, BJ or TJ scene with one of 2 girls, followed by the kickoff of the "main event"; hero needs to go save the world......And then that's all folks, check back in for the next update.

3+ years of development, $25k or more from Patreon support, and this is all that is produced?

I'm inclined to put this into the category of "games that should be considered abandoned, but the devs want to milk their patreons for all they can"

Absolutely beautiful art, from backgrounds and UI to characters and animations. Decent story too. Biggest shortcoming is that it is quite short, but I have high hopes for it, and see fairly regular progress posting in the Discord

You know some games just won't have any content by looking at the art. This is one of those games. The art is great and is a great respite from the 3d models we all see in every game but it's literally a 30 min gameplay and it's being developed for almost 3 years now. The vaginal sex tag is a lie, they just put 2 pictures at the beginning in a dream. This was an immense letdown.

Art and writing is very good, but there is a shockingly low amount of content for a game that has been in development for 2 and a half years... You literally just get to a first kiss (if that) then the update ends. Massively disappointing considering the tags they claim are already "current content". Would rate 9/10 if not for being misled and blueballed

EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that the "current content" is technically accurate, but only for 3 out of the 5 characters and only 1 or 2 scenes for each of them. The characters I was most interested in (Eryn and Lena) have no content so I gave up at that point without checking the others. I also wouldn't consider the opening scene enough to warrant claiming pregnancy and vaginal is in the game yet but that's subjective. Either way just wanted to correct myself, will keep the rating at 3 stars for now as it's still a huge concern that the game will never be finished at this rate.

The charm of this game is off the roof. The art is exceptional and the writing is really cozy and down to earth. I really liked the relationship between the siblings, seemed very natural. The only downside is, as with most games of this quality, that updates are small and very far between.
I think this game deserves a lot more attention.

Great story and interesting world, it's rare to see a good incest story. The breeding aspect is also really nice to see as it's hard to find games with breeding.

Hopefully, the game continues to have the same quality for every update. Also, hope that the game gets music and VFX soon as it would make it even better. Overall very nice game with great potential.

I'm gonna give this game three stars, I'm also going to throw some money at the Devs.

The reason I'm doing those two contrasting things is simple. There is a LOT of potential here. RoE plays well, is better than average in dialogue and intriguing enough story (if formulaic), however its the art style that is the real draw. I say that even though I love the pregnancy fetish, it really is the hand drawn characters that make this game playable. That said this is at best a game demo in terms of total content. It's been years since the development started, and at the current pace, it will be decades before the game is finished or far more likely abandoned. I really hope the Devs will put the work in going forward and I'm happy to contribute to that end.

But as it is, this game isn't worth playing yet.

A suggestion.
Hand drawn style is one of the slowest to develop, for obvious reasons. Consider making slightly more dynamic pictures and letting them drag out longer, ie have more dialogue per picture. That way you can release more content per episode, which will also drive up subs. You will have to punch up your descriptive writing a bit to compensate, especially during sex scenes.

I see potential in this game, mainly because of its art, however, currently I get lost on what to do or what not to do to get the scenes, of course it is the typical routine of just as click and that's it, but I feel that this can confuse people Many. In particular, I played it for 1 hour and I must say that I was getting bored at the end, however I see a future for it, I would have to wait until they continue to release more updates.

As for its plot, well it's interesting, but I feel like there's no development, there's no clear objective... so I'd say "normal" among most 18+ games I've played.