VN - Ren'Py - Return to Roots [v0.8.5] [Hooldrafolk]

I found the story fun and engaging. Sure, the author could improve the dialogue and the development of the theme, but overall I had fun (and that's why we are here, after all, right?). He doesn't deserve the poor rating he has received so far, so I am hoping my little upvote will help with that.

Also, it doesn't hurt that the art is beautiful.

Decent little VN and the AI art is actually good. It's a fun and quick game to try, I'm giving it only 3 stars because I don't really like the story (MC just forcing the main girl to lewd in a stiff and weird way).

better than most AI CG slogs out there. Just low effort and boring rather than outright unplayable. Better than the worst non-AI games out there. Scenarios felt forced and uninspired, though, and characters were less "characters" and more "one dimensional plot vessels" but there were some moments that were kind of hot

This game is a good case for using AI generate game resource which definitely attracts me. Maybe be this is the break point or chance for me to estimate the quality of AI-generate-game

By the way, from the reply of the author tells me that the final version will be involved music (may be powered by Suno？)!!!

version 0.7 contains music, hahaha

a great game that needs more content. A lot of people have bad things to say about AI CG because using AI might seem like low effort or not creative, but not me! I'm sorry but this is the future! Good on you for taking advantage of the AI revolution! Great game, I think the MP came in a little too rapey for my liking but doesn't take it below 4 stars.

Let's start with the positives, the art looks really good. There are a few oddities like a random nipple in the orange juice, or furniture changing colors between frames and moving, but for a game featuring ai art, it looks really good. The mother seems very sweet and kind hearted and she is pretty easy to like, even if she wasn't flashing you her tits and ass in every scene.

Now for the bad. The main character is not developed at all, he has no character other than gooner. There is a small fragment of a story there somewhere about a tragedy and him losing all his money somehow, but it's never explained. As a consequence to having no story, the audience can't sympathize with him, so all they see is a gooner trying to exploit his poor 'landlady' with nonsensical bullshit in every scene. There is no real buildup to establish trust between the two characters, it's more of an abusive exploitative dynamic. So much of what the mc says and does is paper thin and anyone could poke holes in his nonsense if he was given an ounce of pushback.

I want to like this game, but the mc is such a cunt. I almost think this would've worked better as a female protagonist kinetic novel, because of how one dimensional the mc is. That way it wouldn't matter if the female was naïve, slow and constantly getting tricked into taking lewd pictures for a 'tenant' she hasn't seen for years, that randomly turned up on her doorstep a few days prior.

tl;dr: story needs work, mc needs depth, a goal, something to make people care about him.

version I played: 0.4.5b

I was drawn to this game by the images mostly - even though they are AI renders they look quite good. So let's start with the positives:
Positive:

• AI renders look good

Negative:

• The story is very cringeworthy. Why does your 'landlady' keep falling over, always into positions that reveal either her boobs or her panties. Who falls on the stairs every time they ascend it, is she retarded?
• The English is very poor
• She gets stuck in the washing machine.... need I say more?
• You often call her 'mom' even though I specified her to be my landlady, guess I know what you were thinking about when you were writing the game
• She looks like a teen while she is supposed to be your landlady - or in the dev's mind their mom
• She's really dumb - let's play the 'frog' game, where I just spread my legs and show you my panties, what a fun game, and I have absolutely no idea I'm showing you my panties

The good:
Pretty good art for AI
Nice curvy "landlady" falling out of her clothes
Lots of peeping and teasing (That's my jam)

The meh:
It's a VN with a story you've heard a million times
The text is pure TLR

The bad:
Nothing terrible. But no sex (yet) and no choices. It's a pretty slideshow.

Without reading anything and just looking at the pictures, I know this is a story about 5 or 6 different women in 3 or 4 different houses.
It is an absolute non inmersive story cause there is no consistency in the appearance of the female, not in the room "she" sleeps in, nor her choice of clothing, nor even in her breast size. It is easy to generate sort of random AI images and put them together in something, but it is not so easy creating a character from scratch and go looking for pose libraries and controlnet colormaps to fully customize every image generated.
Even if you do that there are always risks but without that there is a lot of inconsistency, and that is bad for immersion and storytelling, which is bad for any story.
That is the biggest NO this game has, and to make it worst, just in the first sentences of the game, the player is introduced to the house and to the Female "tenant", but the pronoun used for "her" is "it", which means the english is not helping either.

TLDR
There is no point playing this, it is like the game has been fully AI generated and it has 0 atention to detail, it is just a sequence of fanservice scenes one after another without any heart or the supervision of a human being in the creative process.

Return to Roots [v0.2] is a kinetic "novel" made with AI generated art where inconsistency and weird hands & fingers jumps at your eyes in its 5 minutes run time. Breast size, weight, eye colors, jewelry and other "suppose to be" unique markers of the stepmom changes almost in each render.

Story is a classic one, where you assume the role of a guy who came to a "new" home where his stepmom lives after an incident that is not explained. Grammar and wording in descriptions are perfect. Almost too perfect, which makes me think an artificial hand is involved in that too almost surely. And nothing wrong with that part when it is done right like in this one. But pacing? Not so much. I assume since this is just the 0.2 version, Dev wanted to show what he/she can do with what they got. The result is not something I'd think about investing my time on and I mean no ill will or offense by saying that.

With all due respect to anyone who is trying to do something with what they got, I'm going to generalize the new trend of creating kinetic novels with A.I., not just the Return to Roots. My personal view is a bit mixed with these kinds of creations. It is a double edged sword. With what A.I. can do now, games like these are easier to do for sure, (however broken it feels the more you look at the details of the AI illustration as of now with effed up fingers and inconsistency) and will get even easier. It can be done by anyone with a little bit of knowledge on what to do now, which is crazy. This gives the opportunity to people who have great stories in mind but are not great artists to create something great. That being said, this also gives people who doesn't have any talent in story telling or creating a unique story an opportunity to do the same. As we all know, not everyone has the same ambition or know how of handcrafting a real, true art and give it the attention its worth with storycraft and creativity. Because it is likely that when you work on something tirelessly, when you put your heart into the art you are creating by hand, you are going to make damn sure that the direction you take it to and the story that is attached to it will be as good as you envision. I hope my outlook on this won't dissuade anyone from working hard for what they put their mind to. And I wish the best for the Dev and hope things go to a direction they desire.

Edit: As of version 0.3, it seems the Dev took all the criticism to the heart and worked hard on the mentioned quirks of the A.I. image generation. I don't know how he managed it, especially in this short amount of time. Maybe he did lot of photoshopping or generated hundreds of images to find the near perfect one, (I tried AI image generation too, it is so hard to get what you want, even if you feed reference image and tell it to do something specific.) but it seems most of the things I complained about are now alright and I'm sure all of them are gonna get sorted as well in the upcoming updates. Considering this is his first game and seeing this much improvement so quickly, I can safely say he is one of the positive Devs that I mentioned earlier, the kind that has a passion and vision that now he can create with the help of A.I.