Ren'Py - SexNote [v0.23.0a] [JamLiz]

I started to follow the development of this game in the early stages and I was really into the story(not that special, but still enjoyable) and the amount of possibilities to follow.

Unfortunately release after release I began to notice how far the devs are moving from the original story. It's all reduced to a new bangable chick every x months, the same kind of route for unlocking 2-3 scenes and that's it.
I really hope to see further updates and especially a step-back in quality as right now I can't even follow who's working on the art part, as sometimes it seems made by a specific artist, the next one not. Details are sometimes also not very tidy.
Moroever the quality of writing is still the same, even after many suggestions made here by several players and on patreon.
It's a fresh project, but after all this time I was honestly expecting more.

Pros:
- Good CGS, hot girls
- The story involving the ghosts-spirits, sadly no further developed
- Several kinks and possibly pregnancy in the future

Cons:
- Pointless grind, as it's basically almost useless and Agamoto's eye is as well nonsense, or personally I don't like the "Zoom" effect. A free camera would be way preferable
- Story is really basic and not improved, probably won't be for a long time. Characters are as well soulless
- Artstyle: con and pro at the same time. A regular one would be nice, as well the animations are sloppy and some details(see the latest anal scene) seem really made in a hurry

(UPDATE v0.13.0.9b):
I was expecting a little more from the development of this game, but sadly it turned out how I thought, that is stretched releases, several changes in the art-style(mostly in worse) and not a single improvement in the story. Where's it? What's the point of grinding every single skill?
There's basically a lame guy roaming around a town we don't know more about, the school has been totally abandoned in the story and without reasons he clicks with busty chicks even when there's not a single tension between them. The main co-protagonist(the first pixie) has also no more a role in the game. At this point I prefer STS(the old one), because there was at least a little story behind every character. I don't get at which direction the devs are pointing, or if they want to keep the situation like this. Honestly I have this feeling. Remaking a game is also not bad, but 3-4 months for a remake seems quite silly. There're other devs, sometimes 1-man-teams, who manage to release a solid plot, new scenes AND a remake at the same time. I won't spoil names, but I support some who admit when they cannot reach a goal in time, when they need a break, differently they don't come up every single time with excuses or act hurt.
I'll check the status every now and then, but I doubt I'll ever support them on Patreon.

UPDATE v. 0.18.0b: well I tried the game after a long while and I'm quite disappointed and I'm not going to change my rating. Red nose apart the animations seem really poor, I mean it's basically few frames stretched to let them look like a normal animation, but the result is quite superficial.
I also disliked the change in artstyle of some characters. They look the same and the gameplay or the mc have as well no improvement so far. It could have been a 4-5 stars game with the right directions, but it seems it'll stay as something easy to forget, at least for me. 2/5 instead of 1/5 as I'm a big tits lover, but apart that I won't play it again.

EDIT: giving 1/5 because they're really scammers having 2 different patreons for 2 different projects and not even the 1st one is completed. TRASH!

I was skeptical at first, but the game surprised me very positively.
Waiting for more versions ^^
Art: 5/5
History: 4/5
The complexity of the game: 3/5

The number of characters is enough to play for a while, but with blonde Mama, the amount of papers delivered to work is quite large and boring in total,
could use a plot with this character in the office at work.
GJ !

Really love the art style and animation, also the spells are interesting and how you gather mana is different from others I've seen, Definently recommended.
Would love to see some anal, bdsm and some other scenarios adding to spice things up even more. so far though its one of the best ive played.

Been following this game for a while now, it started off really well and semi original but the last few updates were just lazy, boring content, no real story, animations looking like they took a big hit in quality too. Also has so much repetitiveness visiting the same person 5 times for small badly animated scenes.

✓ A distinguishable and incredibly sexy art style, one of my favorites.
✓ Plenty of fappable content even in this early stage of development.
✓ Good animations.
✓ Atypical and dynamic sex positions.
✓ It has mechanics! The spell system is very promising but nothing we haven't seen before at this point.

✗ Characters are plain and dull, lifeless. Let's hope it improves cause this game has an amazing potential.

The art is atrocious and is not regular. The characters are bland and their only purpose is to be sexdolls, absolutely horrible writing. There's nothing going on worth of playing in this. Waste of time.

sexy game.
all the busty characters are unique as our hero explores their bodies.
thanks for making an awesome game

Review as 0.10.5

Game seems quite good. The gameplay system is not grindy, and the game itself is fluid enought to avoid making it a slog to go through.

The setting is nothing unheard of, you are a virgin wimp that gets a special power, you have your loving mum and your bitchy older sister, with the addition of a hot step mom in a relationship with your mum, which im looking forward to see how it develops. Also some other tropey characters like the shy friend, the male friend's hot mum, the nurse, the slutty teacher... all are here.

Character design is alright. A few characters being too inspired on people or characters felt odd at first but its easy to get used to. On the other hand, i feel the worse design by far is the MC. For once, the enormous cock seems kinda excessive, although it matches the overall voluptuous character design, probably what I'd improve the most would be the face, as it looks quite off.

To finish it, im looking forward to future updates and really hoping for them to add some progress to the characters that barely have any content as right now.

I'm a fan of this one. Early versions were a little rocky but it's grown into something solid. The developer seems willing to step back and take a hard look at their games, and their passion shows through.

Artwork - Great and unique, definitely nothing like it on the site. Probably not gonna win any awards but it more than serves its purpose.

Gameplay - This is where the greatest strides have been made. They've avoided the traps of subsequent playthroughs feeling grindy by improving the early game mechanics & progression-cheats. Solid hint system. Progression feels natural. Unlocks feels satisfying. Great work here.

Characters - Very interesting. This is a light twist on the standard "boy and his harem family" trope with the second mom & a magical companion. The big supporting also helps keep things fresh.

I'm going to mention the x-ray here since I've never been a huge fan of that trope. Content always feels the best when you earn it, and it often feels like a lazy cop out for lack of content. But this is one of the better examples of it, gradually unlocking it over time and giving you at least SOMETHING to do with the characters who have no scenes and the powers that have no other use.

Overall I like it and look forward to future content updates.

This review contains some spoilers, so be warned. It's also pretty critical, but rest assured that I stand by my 4 star rating.

Gameplay - There's not a whole lot of it. There's a thing where you have to turn on magic-vision and click bubbles, but it's trivially easy and becomes obsolete soon enough. There's also a part where you have to click at the right time to take a picture when it's not blurry, which is mostly just annoying. I ended up just clicking really fast immediately to get it while it was clear and before it got blurry, and rolling back if that didn't work ( I enabled rollback with unren). Besides those two things, it's basically just a matter of following the linear story, which has a hint guide if you go to the second page of the sexnote so you can't get lost. I've seen some complaints about the grind. I didn't think it was that bad, though Jane's story in particular was kind of tedious, with Hinn's a close second. It felt pointless for there to be multiple segments of the day, when 90% of anything that started during the day would take the entire day, whether it needed to happen at morning or noon. Jane's also required going home to get a job from her (always the exact same job), then going to the office, going up the elevator, etc. etc. Hinn's was at least a little more streamlined. Both of them could probably do with fewer repetitions.

Story - Nothing wrong with the premise, but I have to be honest: the writing is bad. Very unnecessarily wordy at times, and at the same time full of very awkward phrasing, to the point that it's laughable and kind of takes you out of the game. The characters also seem to swing wildly back and forth. The mom character gives the MC a handjob like it's no big deal almost immediately, but then way later, after she should be a lot more open to things, he feels the need to use his magic command voice to rub his dick on her feet? There's several other instances of characters being implausibly slutty, or of the MC using magic when he doesn't seem to be meeting resistance. Implausible sluttiness is fine, but inconsistency is jarring.

Art - This is what kept me playing. The art in this game is uneven at times, but when it's good, it's fucking fantastic. Lisa's later scenes in particular were really great. Some characters did seem to look too different between their portraits and their scenes, which was disappointing (I thought Kylee looked really hot, but most of her scenes I thought she looked weird. The therapist looked weird to me in portrait, but hot in scenes), but the high points absolutely make the game worth playing, and even most of the more questionable art was A) Interesting in its own way B) Probably uneappealing to me mostly due to personal taste.

Overall - Like I say in the art section, the scenes really carry this game very effectively. Personally, I find scenes more enjoyable when I've actually gone through the game to get them in context, but I see why others would prefer to just unlock. I hope at some point the writing gets edited, and Jane and Hinn's questlines get streamlined, especially given how unrewarding Jane's feels currently.

Wishlist - Kind of suspect the devs aren't fans of anal given its total absence so far, but I'm hoping it will get added at some point. I'd also love some more explicit cum-swallowing, etc. and more cases of the girl still having cum on her post sex scene like in one of Anastasia's yoga scenes. Finally, more risky scenes like with Sue while Jane's there would be cool, ideally with at least one where the MC gets caught, there's some drama, but then it eventually results in a three-(or more)-some. Other games I've played just have characters eventually acknowledge that they kind of guessed, and brush it off, which is underwhelming and undercuts the tension.

Very nice game loved it, nice graphics, nice animation, very intresting and fun story line. Great ex scenes I would love to play the full game one day props to the developer! I would love to see the story expand more and more i can not wait!!

The art is good (and the later art is better than the earlier art). Everything is hyper sized, so if you don't like that... But the dialogue is bad, it's wooden and full of typos and grammatical errors.

Pretty good storyline.. really love the game...can't stop playing..I will suggest some of my friends to play it..they will also love it..the developer did a good job.. really impressive.unique story line.. specially this the story starts ..can't say how dramatic

Imma save you some time - don't play this! You grind through uninteresting chores to be rewarded with sexy time. Just get the gallery code and enjoy the scenes because that's where this game shines. If you're worried about looking at sex scenes without context, don't worry because there is none. You do chores, you get sex...that's it. No other context needed. The characters in here are made to fall on the MCs penis for hollow reasons like bringing them coffee so if you're worried about missing a story, don't be. Just use the code and enjoy

This game is so basic and uninteresting, it is boring. Lots of grind for so little a game. Also very little animation and story. I would give it a one star but can appreciate the attempt at a game. it is just not interesting.

First i want to say that the models looks amazing! But so far its the only good thing about this game. I found every scenes boring. Way too plastic soft vanilla. Like if you paid a prostitute the minimum required and you can see that she does no effort and she doesnt like you. I would like more hardcore scenes -that we could enjoy her big butts- and stuff like that.

As a sandbox , this game is not really good. the girls keep moving changing place and we repeat the same stuff. -sometimes its somehow kinda fun and addicting?- but not in this game. its really really boring. I really don't like the magic thing its just dumb i mean whatever reason so that we can see the girls naked? i get it but still...

The most annoying thing for me is the adamato eye... In a perfect world, we would get to know the girls better a little, then we ask her to flash her tits. But in this game, the sex is cut into cutscenes, which are really tedious and boring to unlock without cheats, and if we want to see the girls naked, we need to use the adamato eye to scan their bodies but the problem is that the camera zoom x10 and we can't really see like we should. instead i think its obvious the camera should stay the same and we just see the girls naked in the room view.

So overall, amazing models but alot of things to work on the game.

VERSION: 0.10.5

SexNote, superficially, is an erotic satire of the DeathNote anime which, oddly for a western title, exhibits several of the tropes common to that medium. It is, nevertheless, an extremely welcome addition to the array of independent adult games and a supremely promising one for fans of MILFs with big tits!

As of this release, a signficant degree of content remains incomplete or merely planned, none of which is a blackmark against it given the early revision value. As such, any objective measure of quality must be rooted in the existing content and, in that respect, SexNote ranks easily amid the upper tier of animated games.

Although several assets throughout the game, notably the town map and certain interface elements, are in dire need of replacement, the character art is both uniquely stylized and utterly gorgeous. While higher-resolution, or merely vector-based, images would be ideal, as the women appear pixellated when "taking a closer look" at them (an in-game option during which the camera pans slowly along their body), the moment-to-moment interactions and subtle bits of animation aptly demonstrate the creativity poured into arranging such a diverse cast.

True, certain characters resemble others in more mainstream media (my initial reaction to seeing the artist's rendition of Hinata Hyuga was shock), the characterization is sufficiently distinct that any similarities lend themselves more to an air of admiring-homage rather than some paltry imitation.

Better yet, SexNote features a wealth of animated events, unilaterally of a sexual nature and all worth watching. There, however, the glowing praise halts: while undeniably an improvement over a single, static image, the manner in which these scenes are animated leaves much to be desired. Altering the speed of their playback, which can be accomplished at whim by the player, reveals the middlingly few frames from which they are comprised. The result is a stilted, almost robotic attempt at motion that somewhat undermines the effort.

Mechanically, SexNote plays in a fairly stereotypical fashion for the genre and its engine of choice: the features you'd expect are all present, from a reliable one-click save system to GUI-hiding and navigation via highlighted environmental cues. There is some attempt at originality in the narratively-driven "magic meter" mechanic, which sees you gathering magic (either clicking on resources after entering an alternative dimension of each room or automatically by passing through them) as a resource both to fuel your abilities and sate the needs of your "shinigamy" spirit.

Best of all, for a bonafide deviant such as myself, SexNote permits the player to specify both the name and relationship of several key individuals throughout the plot. This accommodation, which more developers ought to embrace, ensures both that incest-lovers and those who despise the fetish can comfortably enjoy the narrative escapades they prefer.

Prior to closing, however, I would like to address an earlier allusion I referenced to silly anime tropes. Notably, our protagonist, the player, exhibiting the reticence and wooden-reactivity so prevalent among anime men. Whereas the average male teenager would react to bare breasts with overt carnal hunger, here the player exhibits a sort of stolid composure that seems strikingly unfitting. Faced with the large, exposed tits of a statuesque MILF, he doesn't so much as blink, much less swallow or achieve a semi.

He's also, seemingly, reluctant to embrace the numerous opportunities presented for some sexual liasons up until the moment they occur, at which point he idles through them passively. No passion, no youthful need or desire. A few grunts, groans, beads of sweat, wide-eyed expressions or whines of suppressed lust would help sell the idea that the player isn't a souless automaton.

ART ---------------------------- 8 / 10
DIALOGUE ------------------ 7 / 10
GAMEPLAY ------------------ 6 / 10
INNOVATION --------------- 5 / 10
SCORE =============== 26 / 40
ABOVE AVERAGE. Further development appears to herald a fabulous game and what already exists is worthy of some acclaim. Keep an eye on it as things progress.


CONSTRUCTIVE CRITIQUE: Consider seeking some (or further, as the case may be) aid with environmental art, the town map, notably, demands some loving attention. Animations should also be touched up, if only to include more frames and, ideally, further motion throughout the body (I would suggest a look at MnF games for more fluid, handmade examples, provided their style is suitable for the engine); some alteration to the expression of the player-character, for example, would help to sell the idea that he's enjoying the experience.

Review for 10.5

The game is honestly so much better compared to earlier versions.

This game can be a grind at times but once you get the hang of it and understand how it works it can deliver. The story is lack luster because the art is brilliant! Cannot wait for more content!

This review is gonna be too short cause imho this game has all it takes to get a 5 star rating from me.
great job dev. keep up the good work.
Art and Story are amazing, characters are beautiful and very varied

Translations could use some work, there's a few bugs here, and some of the early animations aren't the best, but the art style is solid and the later animations are pretty excellent! Looking forward to more from this creator!