VN - Ren'Py - Stormside [v0.23.1.4] [Atemsiel]

Played Version: 0.23.1.4

Summary: The premise of Stormside is fairly similar to several other AVN’s, basically being “MC goes to college and establishes a harem of some kind”. In Stormside the tone is a little less vanilla than usual, as is evident by the 7 main LI’s having 3 route types each. One romantic, one submissive (romance with “spice”) and a slave route (mostly physical relationship with even harsher “spice”).
MC joins his 2 friends as a reassuring presence, due to the college having some sketchy rules set up for the female students. Through a freak occurrence, the insistence of his 2 friends and a small election, MC ends up in the position of being the disciplinarian of the college and thus the person responsible for enforcing the sketchy ruleset. How MC handles his role is up to the player and results in the 3 route types. At the same time, MC remains a student in the small first year class with the 7 main LI’s and a few other boys, only 2 of which are named and/or seen so far. Later on, the second year girls also return to school and they essentially become the side girls, although not much has been done with them just yet. That goes for 2 of the 7 main LI’s as well. I won’t say much more. If you are familiar with AVN’s you probably have a good idea of how things will proceed from here. I will say that Stormside is a semi-silly avn. It does a good job at laying a solid foundation for a male power fantasy story, while still trying hard to maintain a basic sense of realism. The exception to this are the wacky comedic moments, that are frequent but not annoyingly so. Well, as for realism it is probably worth pointing out that Stormside also features a discreet amount of fantastical elements, namely humans with specific minor magical abilities and the existence of ghosts.

Pros: Options for metric or imperial units to be used. Other QOL options exists in the menu as well.
- LMAO. Atemsiel actually used “That Pool” as a location. What a glorious reference.
- A decent bonus content mechanic where you collect non-canon renders by finding hidden onions in the background.
- Pretty good, no, great animations. During h scenes they had a nice frantic quality to them. And well made climax sequence as well. And afterglow for that matter.
- Moans and whimpers for h scenes were good as well. Not grating or overdone like I have experienced in other avns. Maybe a little dragged out in some scenes, but that’s it.
- Penetration is rendered very well and the animations makes it look like there is actual penetration happening, as opposed to how the clipping is usually more obvious and visible.
- Yes, I got a jackpot. It is rare to see harem AVN’s where polyamory occurs. That is, action between the LI’s, both with and without the presence of MC. At least it seems that way so far.
- On the subject of MC being handed extensive power over the LI’s, Stormside actually tries to explain how it came to be, despite the problematic ethics and weak legal foundation. Things aren’t just handwaved in the usual way with “It’s porn, just roll with it”. This makes the whole thing more immersive, impactful, and HOT. The staff at the academy are a bunch of wierdos to some extent, but even they will acknowledge that the GATDAM is serious business and controversial in nature. I mean, the main point of it is to develop better or more efficient ways to educate young people. A valid and noble goal, but to be achieved through dubious means. Makes things interesting.
The fact that most of the academy students drop out when the GATDAM becomes mandatory further helps with the immersion.
- 7 LI’s is probably a decent main LI number. More would be problematic in several ways.
- The magistrate menu is a great bonus feature. Especially if you are a statistics geek.
- I’m not completely sure, but I assume that some lewd scenes use custom animations, based on the variety in positions.
- Small nice visual touches, like the “Forwarding Video Tape” effect used for the physical tests in gym class. Oh right, the girls also get more sweaty as the exercises go on. This is the kind of detail you wouldn’t see in most AVN’s.
- I think that the LI’s boobs are significantly more diverse than seen in most AVN’s. Not so much the size, but shape and detailed features (nipple shape/size, areola color and contrast with skin, etc.).

Mehs and hit/miss: Gradual time progression, as indicated in the top left of the screen or when MC uses his phone. I like being able to keep track of days and having a general sense of time spent on a given event.
- Neither good or bad, but I noticed that the announcement voice as german in a scene at a shopping mall. Just a curious little fact.
- The climax sequences might be overdoing the amount of wetness and squirting a little bit. But the liquids themselves look surprisingly good. Then again, the specific earlier scene with Cassie that prompted this comment kinda acknowledges that she in fact had more than just a standard orgasm. Either that or Cassie is literally just a squirter in general, in which case this is actually a Pro.
- I was a little confused by MC’s sleep schedule in the beginning. He seem to both sleep A LOT and at any time of the day, as if he doesn’t have a natural sleep cycle.
- While there’s only 7 main LI’s, giving each of them 3 route types is perhaps a bit much in terms of the resulting workload on Atemsiel. This will likely slow down development.
- This isn’t going to be an issue for most readers, but I don’t find it too interesting when MC’s have a seemingly innate talent for bedroom gymnastics and are super confident from the very beginning. I feel it plays too hard on the wish fulfilment. MC is 21 or 22 years old and had been enlisted for a few years’ time, but being in the military doesn’t strike me as a good way to become sexually skilled. Gaining some general confidence seems very reasonable, but I can’t shake the feeling that our MC knows he is an AVN protagonist and that his dick, or fingers for that matter, are literally magical. This makes him come across as arrogant and overpowered during some lewd encounters.
- I always knew that I wasn’t going to delve into the slave route content, but I was still a little surprised about how limited my enjoyment of the Sub route content ended up being. The inclusion of some degree of pain and the concept of being in a position of power was fine. What got to me was how MC came across as a smug little bastard doing things for his own sadistic enjoyment, rather than a mature professional disciplinarian. Man did that rub me the wrong way. Even got a little angry.

Cons: *sigh* Once again, too big of a dong. In some cases I am fine with it, but in most of Stormsides H-scenes it looks jokingly big. I assume that different sizes are used from time to time, because I don’t think that changing perspective and camera angles alone can make it seem like a baseball bat in some scenes and like a natural top 3% in others.
- Not too sure, but Stormside might not be well optimized in terms of file size. It took me several tries before I was able to download the full package. Minor con, but not irrelevant.
- This may improve with time, but I think some LI’s feel neglected. Not enough screentime for them. It’s fine with Riley and Cassie having far more screentime so far, being prologue LI’s, just something to keep in mind. Taliya is the biggest victim of this. Hopefully it evens out as time goes on.

Very good game, the renders are good, the girls are cute, the music works, the humour is alright and not over bearing with the memes, the ghost hunting sections aren't really my cup of tea and I'm not sure I'm digging the whole extra plot cliffhanger stuff, but I'll wait and see. My main complaint is that despite being ostensibly 23 updates in there really isn't that much sexual content yet, I think because the dev has put so many fucking girls in, we're seeing surface level events with a bunch of them, but not getting to delve into any of them. That will be rectified with time I suppose. Anyway, it's worth your time now, has the potential to be one of the bests.

In gameplay terms, this is a typical harem builder with a school theme and slave training with a principle cast of seven primary girls (as of writing most are somewhat scarce on sexual content while other have an abundance) and a number of secondary love interests.

What makes the game stand out is the outstanding characterization of the love interests, the actually humorous writing, and the sheer scope of the branching story that makes replaying a joy. The game also comes with several options to make finding hidden images or following particular paths easier, if you are interested in such things.

The game has a few issues. There are some minor graphical bugs that mark this as an amateur effort (though a very charming one). I also personally find issue with the possessiveness of the main character when it comes to controlling who the female characters sleep with, but that is a persistent problem in erotic games in general and collect-them-all harem games specifically. LGBT representation is also generally lacking with with (currently) two sapphic scenes but no same sex relationships or transgender characters.

If you can move past these problems, it's an engaging and charming game and it's worth trying out. An underrated gem and one of the better games on this site.

5/5

Why? Not because its one of the top games on this site (its not), but its chill, story is nonsense but with its own charm and humor, it's all just fun to play. Simple as that. Also the MC is a normal cool dude, girls are super hot and the animations are so over the top but also sexy as hell.

On the flip side, I don't like choices that block some content. Its probably good for replayibility but definitelly not for everyone. I should probably rate this one star lower because of this this, but screw it, its a fun game.

Really like this game. It's sort of like a chili restaurant where you can choose how spicy you want your food to be. This game has a lot of branching, so there's something for every taste. Slave routes are for those who like their porn really spicy, sub routes for a little spice and love routes if you prefer your porn vanilla. It also gets all the basics correct. The game looks nice, sounds nice and you sometimes forget you're playing a porn game you downloaded from a pirate site when reading the dialogue. And beyond that the game is just really extra. Like the dev goes the extra mile to make the game better. Like animations and gags to enhance moments and make them just a bit funnier. Multiple instances of this goes a long way.

Lastly I absolutely adore how this game builds up to sex-scenes and how it handles the aftermath. A lot of other porn games suck at building up the intimacy and mood for sex-scenes. It's like the devs flip the "sex" switch, sex happens, devs flip the sex switch again and and were back to normal like the characters weren't just banging the fuck outta each other 5 secs ago. It's awkward and feels obligatory, like it's a porn game we gotta have a sex-scene even if the scene doesn't call for it. This game really nails it with proper build-up and proper post coital. Like the dirty talk sort of continues after the deed and the MC plays with the girls breasts while they're talking and stuff like that. More games really should do this.

Anyway, this game is really good. You should play it.

Here are some of my thoughts:

-Story: The premise was quite interesting , however, the delivery was not what I was expecting, not that it was bad but it could've been better. That being said, the game is very short (I was surprised when I got to the end, like: "what??" "that's it??"), but I have faith that story will get better in future updates.
The writing was a bit dense at times, there are too many Mc's inner thoughts, and many uninteresting/unnecesary dialogs as well.

-Characters: Main girls are great (at least the ones we get to know). That aside, I feel like 2nd year girls are kinda unnecesary, I mean, I would've prefered the developer to focus more on main girls background stories. Other characters were ok.

- Renders: A bit dated, but they look ok to me.

- Animations: Good enough. Loved the spanking. I apreciate the effort put into the Main menu, it looked great (music/animations).

- Music/Sounds: Nice tunes and sounds, however the default setting was kinda messed up.

-Others: About the ghost hunt, it was a mess I hope that to be a one time thing only, it was bullshit, frustrating, bad implemented and boring. I know there is an option to skip that section completely and another one to "VN" play it, but, I always try to play games the way they're meant to be played and believe me it was really bad.

Overall, story is kinda interesting (getting better), sadly it's also very short. Not gonna lie I had fun (except for the fking ghost hunt). So I'd give it a 7.5/10, worth checking out for those who like AVN with lots of branching.

1-musics are horrible. there are millions of free tracks out there and u picked those? good job.

2-dialogs are meaningless boring waste of time.
story plot make no sense.
seriously who would give magistrate job to some random student.

3-h scenes are short.
instead of giving u one long cool h scene. dev split one sex scene to 3 parts.
and depending on the choose u made yesterday he lets u play only one part for that playthrough.

4- one of the lamest thing is except for riley all the girls looks like plastic ugly cheap sex dolls

I ran across this game by accident and it was great! It is easily newly among my top ten favourite bdsm games.
I played 0.22.06 - it is a visual novel with a male MC. Is in its early stages, but what we have is great.
Plot is - you join a university and end up taking the role of the schools diciplinarian. Also has some supernatural elements. Has seven main girls and a handful of side girls so far. All girls have their own storylines (once again - game is in its early stages and only a handful routes are in its beginning stages). The fun part is that all girls have three different flavours to their routes - romance (you try to protect the girls and avoid punishing them unless they ask for it), submission (both loving boyfriend and harsh diciplinarian) and slave (not interested in romance, only cares about the girls for sex and punishment).
The characters are engaging and interesting and the routes are awesome - rather than having an A-B Route split, there are both subtle and obvious changes in the game depending on your choices, which makes the game really come to life. Also sex scenes may change depending on your choices and which of the three routes you are on.
So far we have only have bondage, spanking, edging and some submission play but the scenes are hot and well written. Definitely a game I recommend playing, it really earned its high rating.

One of the best VN games on this side. Some games focus too much on story or dialogue, some are all about fucking. But Stormside strikes that perfect balance which I have been looking for. The story and setting satisfactory. The girls are all beautiful and different from each other in terms of personality, body, backstory, etc.

And the actual sex scenes omg, the developer is truly suffering from success in those because I already played the game once and still havnt discovered half of the sexual content available.

It's one thing giving a variety of choices and branched paths narratively, but when you are doing so with sex scenes (which take a lot of work to make), and the kind of relationship you can have with the girls. It's extremely ambitious to say the least and amazing so far. Also the sexual content are like proper 5-10min ones with character appropriate dialogue, and a lot of work/thought has clearly been put into them.

The only problem I have with this game honestly is that theres not more of it. I wish Artemsiel the best in his future endeavours and can't wait for future updates.

You deserve all the success man, please don't abandon this

fucking loved it the comedy was just perfect for me (i do have bad taste in jokes so, also it was nice with the drawing you made in like mspain dude it had me dying) the animeation or like artstyle or what its called is not really my thang but i belive stormside made it work for me, i do like the idea of the ghosthands and the ghosthunts from what ive read people did not really like the minigame of the stage but i find it quite enjoyable. Yes i did get lost and that poem had me fucked up was so lost but the hints help so all in all I found it amusing.

You own your art style and it makes for a really good game. Love all of the girls and their facial expressions are really fun and cute as well. This is a game I hope I can keep following for awhile because there is a lot of potential for where you can go with it. So many different girls!

Great, but not excellent.

I'll be honest with you guys: this review is probably unfair. Stormside is an incredible game, and as a hentai indie VN, it's markedly better than dozens others I've played here that I've given a similar rating to. Compared to the remainder of this website, Stormside is a 5/5, and you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you don't play it. That being said, the game is so good, I'm comparing it in my mind to other stellar VNs, and not to the usual sandbox slop we get; and also, comparing it to what I believe the fully finished game will be, given the current state of development.

Just about everything in Stormside is nice. There's three markedly different routes for each main girl, the soundtrack is fine, dialogue AND writing in general is very good (minus some spelling mistakes; notedly, the dev messes up your and you're sometimes, and is particularly prone to writing "hearby" instead of "hereby"), interactive elements feel nice, the phone system is cute, et cetera.

So why am I giving it a 4? What's holding the game back from the 5 that by all means I've already made clear it deserves?

Stormside suffers from two main issues: there's too many fucking chicks, and there's too much branching. Allow me to explain.

The part of having too many fucking chicks is simple enough: Some of these girls are entirely forgettable. The main driving point of the game, despite some mystery undertones, are the girls and their own personal plots. Therefore, you'd assume that by 0.23 and after two years of development, I'd have some inkling of all the main LI's at least. That does not happen. Olivia is only relevant to the story in some points, and she's memorable mostly due to her character, which is quite different from the others. Cassie serves quite a bit early on due to being one of the only 3 characters really early into the VN, and then gets yeeted out of existence once we get to Stormside Academy proper and assume our position. Taliya just really, genuinely, does not exist. She does not have a single moment where she does anything of note in the entire VN. You can argue Cassie and Olivia have had points where their lines and dialogue affect the story, even if they're few; Taliya does not. Sasha's story also feels entirely self-contained and apart from the rest of the characters and group, and makes it feel very disjointed. This all culminates in a lack of cohesion where I'm unsure how to feel about some characters, simply do not have enough information beyond their stereotype for others, or in the case of Taliya, don't have anything related to them at all. Despite the fact not all main LI's are developed or given the time of day, we're then met with yet another barrage of side characters, who again some get some time in the sun and others don't. There's some side characters that genuinely have more characterization with less time in the story than some main LI's, and that doesn't feel quite right.

Branching. Branching is usually not an issue, but this game overdoes it a bit. I'm fine with leaving a lot of agency to the players, and I think it's wonderful; but I believe this is happening in this game in detriment of other things. Some variance is expected, yes; each main LI is meant to have three routes, after all, and I'd be fine with all three having separate scenes. That is not the case. Riley, for example, has one night where her entire Romance route can branch into - and I shit you not - SEVEN different gallery scenes. Admittedly, some of these are continuations of a previous scene, so in total, there's only really four variants of this scene; but come on, there's FOUR variants of this scene for one of THREE routes?! I spent more time replaying this single night and reading every option than I spent on entire days with all their different options previously. I'm probably not exaggerating when I say this night is like 1/3rd of the game. It's fine with the (sub, slave, romance) versions because they're meant to showcase different entry points into a new route, but even then, they can feel a bit redundant; much like Akemi having three different possible scenes at the end of the update, instead of simply just two. It feels as if the game forsakes progression for variance in the development and in the gameplay; I spend more time branching out laterally, examining stuff in width, instead of actually choosing something and playing it in depth to see how it changes something further down the line, and this quickly becomes tiring, as regardless of the scenes, the plot itself is fairly unchanged between these variances within the same route (romance/sub).

Despite how lengthily I've spoken about these two things, they're truly not that much of an issue. The characters are all quite appealing and work, the game design is fantastic, the characters are expressive, their movements and soundcues are all on point, their expressions are vivid and full of charm; the soundtrack works fine on almost every occasion even if not memorable, and the writing quickly makes you latch on and feel attached to the characters that actually do get their chance and spot to shine (such as Riley and Hikari thus far). The H-Scenes are good, and the difference between routes is markedly felt - there's even some extra mystery in the slave route, with some red pulses on screen that happen when you take actions that are far too harsh with the other girls which point to something more at play in the VN itself. All in all, Stormside is great; unfortunately, with the width issue I've previously mentioned, I'll by no means hold my breath for this to finish any time soon, sadly.

I'm going to break my review down into Visuals / Choices / Writing, since those are the elements I tend to value most in AVNs.

Visuals

The game looks really good. It's easily in the top 5% of games with Illusion-based CG.

The animations are great. Again, easily in the top 5% of games 3DCG games with animation. If you just look at the sample image gifs in the main post of this thread, they might not look that impressive, but one thing that the gifs don't show is just how *many* different animations there are. Any one loop might just look good, but the animations transition from one to another at just the right pace. You're not going to be looking at the same animation loop for 30 or 40 lines.

Choices

The game is almost entirely a pure visual novel, with a few optional free roam segments that can also be played in VN mode. One area that Stormside goes above and beyond as a VN is the variety of choices the player has. Each girl has three main routes (romance, sub, slave) and a possibility for no route, but even within those routes there are hundreds of options, and most of them have *some* actual consequence.

The fact that 2/3 routes are somewhat BDSM focused does mean that players who are into that content will get more out of Stormside, but I would absolutely recommend the game even to a player who only wanted vanilla content, and they would still have choices within the game about how to get to those scenes and what to do during them.

Writing

The general tone of the writing is light hearted and a bit goofy, but not in a way I found offputting. I generally prefer slightly more serious writing, but Stormside really makes its style work. There was only one time I found the style offputting ( ), but that's a few minutes out of a many hour game.

We've only seen bits of the main story so far, so I can't really review that. What we have so far mostly serves to set up the premise of the game and the MC's position, and works well enough for that.

The character writing perfectly suits the general tone of the game. AVN writing in general is not the deepest, and Stormside does not have the deepest characters of any AVN.

But more importantly the characters are fun, and generally likable. Many fit certain tropes and cliches, but they are not entirely defined or limited by those tropes. There's no major character in Stormside that I don't care about, which is not something I can say for every AVN (or even every AVN I would give 5 stars).

I'd recommend Stormside to basically anyone who likes male MC/female partner AVNs, unless they were looking for something very particular. I'd recommend it extra hard to anyone who is interested in mild to moderate BDSM content, but that's not a prerequisite to enjoying it.

What's here is good, the major downside is that the story is kinda boring and there's entirely too much of it (we're here to fap, not read, if you're gonna put a whole lot of story in a hentai game, you'd better at least make it a good one so we're at least still entertained while our dicks are going limp or our pussies are drying up...), I guess some people liked it more than I did, it just wasn't really grabbing me.

but the girls are hot, the animations are good, the sex scenes are good, there's not a lot of them but the vn wasn't quite starved for them either...

But there isn't a lot of game here, I played from start to finish and the only gamey stuff was some lame ghost hunt thing, the description made it osund like you'd basicallybe going around school, punsihing and rewarding girls, but there isn't a lot of that,what there is a lot of is dialogue and generic VN stuff.

To be fair, it IS version 0.23, not 1.0; but to also be fair, it's been in alpha for over 2 years.

This game should be an easy 5 stars but it has one major hindrance to that. And it's already showing in the development speed of the game. There is literally no reason to have a romance branch for the girls. This is a game where bdsm is basically fundamental to the story. Two branches is already ambitious as hell but 3 is going to make it so it's actually 2032 by the time we see an end to this story. Who the hell plays a bdsm game and chooses vanilla romance? The choices should be as simple as 1. Do I want to fuck this girl? and 2. How/what kind of relationship do I want with her if answered yes to 1? That's it. Also, why are we having to choose which Japanese sister to see a scene with? Entirely unnecessary and easily fixed. Hopefully at some point, dev ditches the 3 path nonsense. Otherwise, It's a fantastic game. The girls are sexy and adorable and feel like real characters and the story is solid.

On top of the really good models, characters, writing etc, the pacing is the most well executed part of this game. You aren't having to hold ctrl through thousands of lines of text to get to any good action, but its also not throwing h-scenes in your face so easily they start to lose all interest. Always looking forward to updates.

I love the game so far. The storytelling is great. Graphics are awesome.

My only wish for improvement is to have more interactive punishment scenes like Hikari's first punishment scene.

I have one other thought. This game is very ambitious. Having 3 routes and tying in to many dependencies is going to make coding this game a nightmare. You've done awesome so far but I completely understand if you have to dial that down in the future updates.

Great game, 5/5 easily. The dev has clearly thought through *a lot* of detail about this VN, from the interface to the various paths with each LI, the sheer number of LIs, etc. At the end of the day, it's a VN with soul. One made by a developer with a clear goal in mind and it's just nice to play through something like that for a change. I can only think of a handful of other VNs that have the same soul... and come to think of it, most of them are made in HS...

On that note, I think HS1 renders are not everyone's taste, so I have a feeling this game gets rated lower than it deserves to on average.

Anyway, 5/5 writing and balancing of the paths. Kudos to the dev and I wish them a very successful journey

There isn't too much to say about this game in my opinion, in a good way. Character model and personalities are fantastic, H-scenes are done very well, the writing is fun and entertaining, and although it's not open world, it makes up for it in having 3 "routes" you can take with the girls. Some of the background setpieces are amazing as well, with proper furnishing and lighting, although their quality seems to drop off as the game goes on.

I had fun playing this, got pretty disappointed when I reached the end of the latest update haha. Good writing; I enjoyed the occasional fourth-wall breaks and the overall comedic-ish style of the game.

I liked the animations, most of the time they were funny as heck; and the scenes where the dev could not render because of their hardware restrictions and hence drew themselves was pretty funny. Some renders are kind of wonky, like how Riley's face looks warped in some of them (but that could be some screen resolution issue on my end).

I also think that the sounds effects and BGM were nicely done - really appreciate good SFX and music selections.

Keep up the good work Atemsiel !