I was going to rate and review this, but it's a V.01 and at this point, without giving any room or time for improvement, I felt like that would be a shitty thing to do. I give the developer credit for doing something I haven't. They've got the balls and the drive to start a game and put it out for the world to judge, so for everything else I'm about to say, that shouldn't be forgotten.
Positives:
Some of this is pretty ambitious! There's multiple characters to choose from and play as. You can play, very minimally, as Jennifer, and choose (I guess) between two breast sizes at the beginning of the game. You can also play, more substantially, as the brother (at the moment this is also the only playthrough where I was given the option to name the characters). At some point you will be able to play as Ashley, the bitchy sister with a dark past, as well. That's three different playthroughs. Nothing to shake a stick at or dismiss outright.
There are many, many locations planned for you to be able to visit. Currently you can stop by the-
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Police Station and talk to a supermodel charity worker.
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Local Park where you can avoid a supermodel jogger.
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Grocery Store where you can briefly get involved in a dispute between a supermodel cashier and some local hoodlums, before the cashier's mom steps out with a shotgun. (I was stunned to find the cashier's mom actually has wrinkles in her face, preventing her from being a supermodel, but she more than makes up for it with giant tits, no bra and deep cleavage.)
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Clothing Store where you can bayed clothes from a supermodel cashier who may or may not be involved with Ashley's dark past.
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Computer Store where you can bayed a copy of Windows from a supermodel cashier with resting bitch face.
There is an inventory system that works, there is a Progress Tracker for every girl in the game which will track Love Points, Lust Points, Mind Control Points and more!
This is not a one-star initial release. You may have detected a note of sarcasm in some of what I listed, and yes, I'll admit it, the number of perfect 10 hotties everywhere was a little obnoxious. I've been spoiled by games like Mid-Life Crisis and Light of My Life. But hey, Parental Love also only had exclusively supermodels in its roster, and that's one of my favorite Adult VN's of all time, so fuck it, I'm game if the writing, grammar and spelling drastically improve, and if the story pushes me to continue.
Another positive? Every member of your characters family
looks like they could be related. Yes, they all look plastic, but as a lover of the incest genre, and having a deep-seated, burning hatred for the pussy-footing, cop-out 'step-family' genre, it matters to me that I can look at the characters and go, 'Yeah, they could be related.'
Finally, there are things hinted at in the story that could actually be interesting and/or erotic. Whatever happened with Ashley seems dark and mysterious, and the MC brother has a good rapport with his mother, who seems to have her hand permanently stuck in the downstairs sink (a little Jodi West, anybody? Eh, eh?). This game has the potential to go interesting places and keep me entertained, despite my general aversion to sandbox VN's. Seriously, if it's not Time Loop Hunter, I hate sandbox, but with this one I'd be willing to give it a shot.
Negatives:
Okay. Please keep in mind everything I've said before this. I'm not going to go over nine thousand here, but I'm not going to beat around the bush either. Pre-patch, if you download this game right now and choose Jennifer as the playable character, here is the first line of the game you'll read.
"Years ego I was a simpel young girls with a simplle dream. I had a lovely parents and a happy life. Untill one day, my parents died in a car acciden't"
This is not, 'ooh, entitled gamer douchebag fuckboy mocking a dev for a couple of misspelled words and a missed period'. This is a trainwreck. If a poorly-worded sentence with several misspellings is just a dented fender, this game is the opening of Final Destination 2. Maybe the Dev is not a native-English speaker and is having it translated, which is why some sections are better than others, and I can accept that, but for God's sake, some of this is just nearly unintelligible.
For the most part, the storyline is so by-the-numbers incest it's bordering on parody. As the brother, within three minutes your dad is dead (RIP incest game Dad #9842208, we hardly knew ye', and that looked like a hell of a slide presentation you were giving), your mother has received bundles of forever-money and moved you and your sisters to a McMansion estate, and you all proceed to walk around the house in bras and panties and tighty-whiteys while slapping each other on the ass and eyeing everyone's genitals. It's not particularly invigorating.
And there is a major problem with the dialogue beyond often being borderline incomprehensible and broken. In conversations there are blank spaces between every line of dialogue, so instead of pressing the spacebar or M1 once you have to do it twice. For every line of dialogue. In a visual novel.
I'll give you an example, both of the broken dialogue and of the additional spaces. Here is Jennifer and her brother discussing where their sister is (this is the actual dialogue):
MC (Brother)- "I don't know wish one is her room yet." /Press Spacebar to continue
BLANK SPACE WITH NO DIALOGUE /Press Spacebar to continue
Jennifer- "So am I." /Press Spacebar to continue
BLANK SPACE WITH NO DIALOGUE PLEASE TAKE THIS TIME TO PROCESS WHAT YOUR SISTER JUST SAID /Press Spacebar to continue
The extra spaces
need to be removed.
*Side-quibble: Why are Jennifer and her brother's storylines so different? In Jennifer's story, your brother is away and won't be home for a month, and despite having four bedrooms her mother makes her and Ashley share a room. But in the brother's story, he's never left home, and Ashley, he and Jennifer all have their own rooms. It's feckin' weird, man.
*Side-quibble 2: Quibble Harder: Mom says she's going to make Jennifer and Ashley sandwiches, so you go downstairs and the only thing on the table is three GIANT-ASS CHEESEBURGERS, each with a single slice of cheese. What fucking radioactive site are they living next to? And how are those monstrosities sandwiches?!
*Final side-quibble: Oh, and I couldn't make progress in Jennifer's storyline very far at all. I don't know if there just isn't any content beyond teenage mutant cheeseburger breakfast with mom and Ashley, but I couldn't find any. Finally, in Jennifer's story the game will
CTD when you try to interact with the shower in the bathroom, so be warned of that.
Back to main story (the Brother's path) problems. The first thing you do when you take control of the brother after finding out you need a copy of Windows for the new computer mom bought you with forever-money, is go to your sister's room and get an erection staring at her in her underwear. Naturally. The serious, 'WTF' problems with the story begin when Jenny chastises you for your boner.
Brother's explanation for the boner, and more importantly, why she should feel bad for him and his boner, goes like this. So the brother asked a girl and out she said no, so he went NOFAP. After that, he had erections all the time (because he wasn't masturbating) so their mother took him to the doctor who gave him some pills and instructed him to have a 'normal sexial life'. So he goes to a friend's party and his friend takes him upstairs to a bedroom and inside the bedroom is a naked girl on a bed. And his problem with this is,
he can't get it up.
All of this is explained through dialogue only (no images, no flashback, and remember those double clicks for every line of dialogue!) to his sister, in her bedroom, while she stands in lingerie. And his sister's problem with the story is that he didn't fuck the random naked girl on the bed. We don't even know if the girl was conscious or passed out or knew him at all.
As the main character puts it, "Yeh. I can't had erection when I'm nerveus or unconfrontebal."
But GOOD NEWS! He doesn't feel "unconfortobal or nurves" with his sister, so maybe she could "help him masturbation on." Because he really needs help from a girl that he feels "confortebal" with.
This is not me mocking the developer by making up random misspelled words. These are the actual words used, in quotes. Every time certain words are used, they are misspelled differently, as if a word pops into the dev's head and he just throws caution to the wind and spells it however it sounds at that moment, consistency and little red squiggly lines be damned.
Anyway, after his sister refuses to give him a hand-jammy he goes downstairs to talk to his mother (who is also just wearing panties) and gets an erection while hugging her. She reminds him that he needs to get a girlfriend because of his medical condition. His medical condition of... getting erections because he went NOFAP.
This is currently the incestuous thrust of the plot. The main character got turned down by a girl and refuses to masturbate, so he gets erections. That's a medical condition (requiring pills?!), apparently. And the only way to solve this 'medical condition' is to
fuck that
fam. Are you as turned on right now as I am?
On the bright side, you can eventually go out to the pool and have your aunt try to hire you to take high quality pictures for her lingerie line or something. Perhaps that plot thread might wind up feeling more grounded in reality, once the text gets cleaned up.
I told you I wouldn't go over nine thousand. I won't. I'll end it here for now. But I will say that this story, currently, is an erotic tale as told by a sexually vanilla linebacker who took one too many hits to the head and then kept playing for three more seasons.
For Christ's sake, the name of the game isn't even "Shuttered Memories." It's "Shutteder Memories."
