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

(review based on current V.0.23.1.4)
Going into this title i didnt know what to expect based on the various tags.. Happily i can say that this title is absolutly awesome.. the humour alone is enough to get this title to 4 stars and add to that a well written narrative, cute and likeable characters, excellent scenes and a wide variety of route choices and replayability options..
The story is easy to follow and has enough diverging genre elements to keep most happy.. As mentioned before the Humour is VERY well done and used exactly right to maximum results.. Its without doubt a book worth reading/playing and if you have the finaces then support it too or even just take the support for free option on patreon..
With college games a plenty most fail to even grab the audiences attention and instead push lewd over story making it a short term interest.. This title has enough going for it to be a Long term interest and have plenty of years of great story to come..

Overall the story was funny the way the creator interacted through the Novels tools at is disposal was witty. Also enough of flexibility because of the options give to go through the story.
The UI is pretty extensive and has a nice realtime body monitor incorporated, which is a plus .

However, I could not help feeling that the lewd content overshadowed the possibility to feel really captured by the plot.

When a 'harem' structure is plotted It should be done clever; and not by having a character pledge their trust in your polygamy, before it even started. There should be some sort of coincidential fact that leads up to that. Not by having the characters all sooo horny that they just cant resist creating a harem... :/ Something like "hey I wanna throw my self at you, and I m okay if you have multiple partners, but I will loyal to only you, without questioning..."
When this happens without any foundation, this throws you right out of the immersion of the story. ..and unfortunately happens too often in AVNs .

So my final verdict. If you want a light and funny clicker with good fetish lewd stuff, YES. If you want to empathise, or immerse in a lifelike plot with twists and character depth. NO

Honestly I can get the comments of others , but this just was not that for me.

So far so good.

I really enjoy the choices regarding how the fetish content is done. I'm going with the sub route for everyone so far, and I think it strikes the perfect balance between romance and BDSM stuff. The characters are too cute to do the slave route. Full consentorinos for me. Looking forward to the finished product.

A really solid start to a game, but one that I think is a touch overrated.

The characters are fun and destinct but the models are of mediocre quality and do not hold a strong place in my mind. I also worry the cast may be too large and is spread a bit too thin. I only really care for like 3 of the girls and wish the rest stopped eating their screentime.

The mechanics, theme, and presentation are all stellar. But I have seen other great games like Hail Dicktator essentially abandon their mechanics after a year or two in order to become a run of the mill visual novel. This game may be the exception, but I would be concerned.

Overall a great start to a game that I recommend. I will bump this rating up to a 5 if this time next year it hasn't squandered its potential.

Very cute cast. Clearly lots of effort put into the whole thing. The translation effect on the Japanese was a small touch but really cool. And it takes an amazing amount of confidence to put in a high effort subgame (the ghost hunting) that clearly took a decent amount of time, and then still let people skip it because you know the rest of the game can carry itself without padding. I also love the straight-faced commitment to the absurd world and situation. Easiest 5/5 I've given. (Also the joke about increasing the voting points made me laugh out loud. Good job.)

I have played hundreds of H-games in my life, and I am often very critical about games (Though I don't review on websites often, unless the game was either so bad I had to, or so good I had to review it.) so when I say that this is one of the best h-games I have ever played, I don't say it lightly.

The Developer(s)
You can tell this game is being made with a lot of love and by someone who understands what domination and romance are about. I would rate the character writing 10/10. Everyone feels like they have their own distinct personality and the writer knows how to stick to it. A lot of games have a flaw where the writer's personality bleeds into their character writing, but I barely ever saw that in Stormside.

Scene Writing
Scene writing and choreography (Non lewd scenes) is a 10/10, there are so many little details that the majority of other games would ignore because they're not necessary, but it makes everything better. At first I wasn't sure what to think at first, but if the developer(s) (Unsure if it is one person or group of people developing Stormside) think they should prioritize the small details over more story progression, that is their prerogative. Next on the scene writing, and this is a big one that a lot of developers mess up: Nearly every conversation is entertaining in some way. There's no scenes where I found myself thinking "I don't care about any of this" because almost everything that any character says has substance, is fun to read, or leads to entertaining scenes/content.

H-Scene Writing
H-Scene writing and choreography, this is a point a lot of developers either don't understand or do wrong, leading to underwhelming scenes. With Stormside, every scene I have seen has been nearly perfect. The only reason I say nearly perfect is because sometimes scenes bug, where a girl moves into a new position but then glitches back to the previous position. Regardless I will still give the h-scene writing a 10/10, since the glitching is unintended. This is written by someone who KNOWS what is hot, and someone who knows quality. Unlike with the regular scene writing, I do believe the small details enhance these scenes A LOT (I do understand that the details in the regular scenes is fun and often used for comedy, I just personally find it unnecessary, but like I said these are the developer's prerogative.)

Sound Design
For sound design I can only speak on the sound effects, since I almost always mute music in games for better immersion. I like all the sound effects except one, the shocking/surprise/intense sound effect, the one that happens during verbal fights. I feel it is overused, but it's not that big of a deal. The lewd voices are good. I will give sound effects 9/10. I especially liked the sound design during the , and I was actually jump scared once or twice.

Renders
Renders are a bit more subjective. Personally I loved them and I found that even though Stormside has sort of a typical 3D anime-like art style, it still manages to look distinct and has enough detail to be great. I will give it a 10/10. I won't say too much on this, since some people do or don't like 3D anime-like art styles, and I feel I've said my peace on it.

Final and Personal Thoughts
Finally, the last thing I'll say is that if this game continues with this quality and the story is good, and ends up nice and lengthy, it will be my personal favorite h-game ever. At the moment I can only think of one h-game series that I think is better or equal to this, and that series is developed by a famous and old Japanese company full of professionals. I won't mention the series since it is against reviewing rules, but it has many of the same tags as this game, and this game is equal or better than that series in a lot of ways. The only reason I don't like it more is because it doesn't have nearly as much content as a single one of their games, but I think that will change in the future. I especially like the h-scene choreography in Stormside over this other series. If you haven't tried this series, I highly recommend it, and I can't wait to revisit this game in a few years. My only hope is that it doesn't end up stagnant like many games, where they barely release new content over the course of years, and as far as I can see that won't be the case with Stormside.

Really good game focused on "training" (dominating) girls. It's too early to judge it fully, as the main story and character arcs are only getting going at the moment I'm writing this review, but what is there so far is quite fun. MC is also relatively enjoyable, not a edgelord loser, creep or mindless brute (altough you can be an asshole, it's not required). Another big selling point is a strong focus on orgasm denial - author definitely knows what's up there.

Premise is a bit absurd but who cares, I suspended my disbelief way harder for good fetish scenarios. Writing is much better than in your usual porn game, sex scenes are really nice too. Characters are interesting and varied, a bit tropey sometimes perhaps but it's not too bad. You can choose how you approach different girls, mixing and matching your approaches between them, which potentially allows for some delicously twisted scenarios - they are not fully realised yet, but seeds are there. Posibilities are intruiging: do you want to be a wonderful, loving boyfriend to a meek girl shunned by her father, while crushing the spirit of her haughty older sister, privileged daddy's favorite girl? Or cuck your female childhood friend (who's obviously desperately in love with you, since it's a porn game), keeping her a painfully horny virgin slave and forcing her to watch as you fuck her best friend? Because I do, and I hope that I will be able to do so - seems like this is where this game is going.

Still, this title is still very much a work in progress. Some of the supposed main cast girls did not even get a single sex scene yet. I have high hopes for this game, and I will be watching it with great interest - let's hope it will keep earning the five star ranking I gave it.

Version Reviewed: v0.23.1.2

Overview: Competence is sexy

Story: You are a generic porno game guy who decides to attend this school with your sister and her slutty friend. The school has a brand new "we can sexually abuse the girls" rule but in a shocking twist the protagonist is put in charge of the sexual abuse. Ok, this isn't the most unique of storylines, but it works. There are quite a number of supernatural elements bolted on to the side. Ghossts are real. The protagonist has a very useful but underused superpower. There will probably be more over time.

I think the author is a native English speaker and has some writing chops. The game is neither too wordy nor too terse, and there is humor sprinkled in to keep it interesting. Easily one of the best pornogame scripts ever on this site. The sex scenes are also well written and incredibly fap worthy.

Characters: This is a real standout. Every character is unique and distinct. They all have their own storylines (most are not in the game yet) and it's clear the developer has put thought into how this is going to go. Very impressive.

Gameplay: This is a Kinetic Novel/VN (I forget the distinction) where you click through each screen reading and then occasionally get offered up choices as to what to say or do. Your choices can affect future plot developments. Each girl has three possible story paths, Romance, Submission, and Domination. Romance mostly involves you not sexually abusing them and developing a boyfriend/girlfriend thing. Domination is strictly sex with hard BDSM, no feelings. Submission is a mix of the two.

One thing I have to mention is the in-game help. It is far and away the most useful in-game help system I have ever seen. Especailly since this is a VN and there's no need to hunt around for events. When there is a choice the popup can be paragraphs long explaining the possible implications each choice.

There are also some minigames that don't work so well. For example there is a pixel hunt minigame that you can play to unlock extra pictures, but since the thing you are hunting (and onion) is brown and can hide behind things in the scene you are often looking for literally 5 brown pixels along every line. Fortunately at the end of the content you are given the option for unlocking all of the scenes anyway so the pixel hunt is totally optional. The other is a time when it switches to a sandbox style gameplay (this is also thankfully optional) but the navigation is rediculously confusing and the whole scene is dark as hell and mostly pixels hunts. It's kind of funny that I was thinking that the game would have worked very well as a sandbox, and then you hit the sandbox section and are thankful that the dev decicded on VN instead.

Graphics: Honey select, but there are a number of nice animations. Some of the animations even include jiggle, which is very rare in HS games. The backgrounds are varied and fully fleshed out. The dev is also excellent at blocking and framing. No complaints.

Sound: Yep, there are sound effects and background music. They are also well done and improve the game, so break out those headphones.

Conclusion: This game rocketed into my top 10 of all time despite being very incomplete. If the developer can keep it up and finish the game it could easily be a #1 contender. I would rate this 6 stars out of 5.

First time leaving a review just couldn't ignore it for this game!

out of around the 35+ games I've played on this site, this has been my favorite even though it's still early on in its story. Simply can't recommend this enough
Good story, Great Dialogue, Great sound, Stunning renders, Great scene choice and direction.

Well done, can't wait to see more!

Wow, what can I say...!!!

First time in a long time a game caught me like this one. At first I didnt even download it, because I am usually not too much into this 3D art style. Holy shit I am glad I did it. Exactly my cup of tea. You can choose where you want to be dom or where you want to be all lovey dovey.

This game has it all coming from the dev - A walkthrough, a thought out system, actually funny scenes (i lost it when that principal guy came into the room like he was some sort of apache helicopter) - it is really really nicely done.

I think I never wrote a review but did so for this game. Others deserve it for sure but I just today learned how to do it.

Really looking forward to the Olivia arc, this is one thats going on the slave route for sure. Still undecided if Akemi will land on it as well, she is snobby and bitchy but very loyal to her sister, I like that. So maybe only Sub for her.

I find the second year girls to be quite interesting and would love to get my hands on the female staff at the school.

Cant wait to see where this one is going, thats for sure.

Kudos!!!

This is it!

If you have been looking for a new game to follow after playing every good game on here, this is it! Filled with incredible characters, excellent writing, good humor, great animations.. Seriously, it's the whole package, lots of replay value already. 9.5/10. Only complaint is no mobile version.

This game has very good renders and animations that run very smoothly and look very natural and very good sound effects. What I really like about this game is that the girls don't have a predefined route and you can choose between the romance, submisson or slave route for each of them, which gives this game a good replayability. In addition, the story is not too unrealistic (apart from the magic of course) and easy to understand. So far there is a reasonable amount of content that offers at least a few hours of gameplay, even if you play the game just once.
Overall it is a great game that you should definitely try out.

This review is written by someone who hasn't played the 'new' version.

This game is short, but it packs so much story into what it gives you. The dev, Atemsiel, uses every part of the buffalo to give you an enchanting experience with a promise that leaves you wanting more.

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I have some minor niggles, these are not huge complaints. But I feel I should list them all the same.

At the very end of the first version of this game, it is revealed that
Atemsiel has stated that the game will only be focusing on the "core harem" and that we shouldn't get too attached to other satellite characters. But Chekhov's Gun clearly states, "If the author introduces a gun in the first act, then eventually the VN player should get to fuck that gun." And I would very much like to get a hold of that boomstick we just saw, and test out her hair trigger so to speak.

Uhh...anyway.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was how we learn about the story of this game. This game gives you three different routes. One is "Romance" (pink) where your character is a nice, kind man who helps the girls and presumably rolls in ze hay with them. The other is "Sub"(blue) where your character is still nice and romantic but now introduces some bondage and kink. The final route is "Slave"(red), where your character essentially becomes a bad guy and treats the girls to pure kink. When I read about this system I was determined to do a full Slave Route playthrough, and set out to do exactly that.

But I eventually discovered that for one of the girls, if you go Slave route with her, you lock her out of a major story element for her, completely bypassing a minigame unique to her and essentially closing the door on her story. Atemsiel has mentioned that the game is designed to encourage you to do different playthroughs under all the different routes, that there is content that you won't see if you go with one choice. For example I only learned from discord that one of the girls has a sister, because I didn't end up spending time with her to learn about her story.

But I like story! especially if I'm playing a visual novel where text is doing so much of the heavy lifting to get us from image to image. I don't want to close a girl's path and refuse to do her minigames. And maybe that's to encourage me to do a different playthrough, but this now means that my interests and my..."interests" are in conflict with each other.

I know that this is tricky, that my interests might not match another player's. But I would love, as a Slave Route player, to learn more about the girls under my control. If this story was a beach, I want very much to see the intricate sand castles my subjects have built, their goals and dreams, their anxieties and worries. I would even love to help them sculpt it carefully the way Romance and Sub players do. Because that would make it all the better to eventually kick that sand castle and crush it into yet another dune while the girl watches on.

But, again, that's just me.

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Those are the end of my complaints, I really enjoy what this game has shown us. There's lots of humor, the story is riveting, and the main character has actual chemistry with the other characters, everything he does feels natural. Also, seeing that this is a BDSM-focused game with lots of punishments, the animations for those punishments are really fucking good. Whenever the main character gives a spanking, he uses his entire body and there's follow through whenever he spanks. It looks fantastic.

So yeah, I eagerly look forward to where this game goes from here.

Large cast of wonderful girls, has good amount of content, great MC, funny humour, beautiful renders, hot sex scenes, and can select different routes for each girls. Lots of different paths and branches to explore with the LIs. This game is amazing and a must play if your into BDSM. the in game walkthrough is a god send for me so i love that feature. I had to use a pdf when the game first came out caveman times. The way the charcters talk and interact feel very believable. Can't wait for upcoming updates.

Cute girls, fun times and really good writing. An ambitious game with variety and just the right amount of informed choices to make you feel involved but not "grindy".
All of the usual tropes are present but the character writing gets you invested and the built in walkthrough gives you the option to ignore the characters you dont like.

Top notch VN. Really interesting world building with lots of stories to explore. The LIs are all unique and interesting, with plenty of branches for all sorts of preferred paths. The renders are really good , with lots of animations. Would highly recommend.

A truly refreshing entry in the genre with great characters, great renders, and an intriguing story. I've always been nervous about trying out early builds but the amount of polish we are getting in 0.22 is great, additionally, the dev is very receptive to fap completionists, even going as far as to give them the choice to unlock all renders once a build is done. I'm all in on this game, and I look forward to its completion.

A good game hampered by small issues which although not enough to derail the game, runs the risk of adding up to becoming a big issue earlier.

The game is visually fine, the characters are good. Limited by the engine but all in all the girls are fun to look at.

The issues I feel this game suffers from is one of execution. There's a lot going on but everything seems to be an almost light touch, like the dev doesn't know what plot points to commit to and as such the game feels a bit odd to play.

The game starts with a big exposition about the MC's home life and his mom, but then doesn't seem to mention it again. Now it could be just a means to set up the game but enough attention was paid to the intro that you're left going "well that's very chekov's gun like so it must be important" but as you play, it rarely if at all gets mentioned again. And it isn't even a case of "well it hasn't come up" there's a scene where the MC is talking to a girl about her mum and at no point does the MC explain what happened with his mum. So maybe the whole thing wasn't important?

The MC also has magical powers but really the whole thing is so underutilised or explained that it feels more like the dev got stuck in a rut with a part of the story and realised he could just fix it by giving the MC magic hands. As a concept, the idea of magic is interesting but as it's only mentioned like once.... what's the point?

There's also an issue where the MC is supposedly ex-military but there's nothing to suggest in how he acts or talks that he is, so again it feels like a plot point left dangling in the off chance the dev needs to use it in future.

Even the game itself feels a bit odd. It starts off very much as you'd imagine. There's the MC, there's the childhood friend, there's the slightly more adventurous friend of the friend, seen it all before but then a school gets mentioned which everyone decides to go to and then at this school there just so happens to be a new method of discipline..... the plot is fun to follow but it feels clunky, almost like it's ideas thought up independently and then joined up come hell or high water. It's not as free flowing as some other games.

It's not BAD, but it ticks a few cliche boxes and the issues with you being presented with plot points you're not sure are going to be important or not leaves you kind of feeling unsure when playing it.

Loving the game so far!

The characters are great and interesting each in their own way. The setting is quite fun leaving a lot of options for different playthroughs and the scenes are top quality.

Can't wait for the game to be finished!

Not much to complain about here. The game is very well made. Its visually engaging, the character models and animations are really nice. The game uses animations and transition effects and sound design outside of just the lewd scenes to make it a immersive experience. The jokes and visual gags land, the MC is pretty good. The lesbian scenes which usually aren't my thing are very good and story/character relevant which is nice. Riley's first spanking+fingering scene was really hot and the way the MC manhandles her manages to make the rather ludicrous premise of the game believable in that moment (that is, she trusts him and the way he's treating her is both shocking yet arousing, but she still feels safe and cared for).

The choices are pretty complex and impactful so the dev even makes an in-game walkthrough just as a preference option so no mod installation required? Which is nice because its very not obvious what some innocuous choices might lead to and there's some hard choices putting girls on different "routes"

Also out of fucking nowhere there's a ghost-hunt section that's a point-and-click sandbox adventure?? And its like, actually fucking scary and has some amazing jumpscares? WOW. I was super impressed. Only thing was having to go back to the map was too many clicks and it really was super unclear where clicking would take you. even if you knew where you wanted to get on the map it was hard to get there. Still, if thats not your thing, the whole thing is skippable or viewable in linear vn format and you can enable/disable the jumpscares? Again, WOW. Excellent.

My only... ONLY complaint. Is that the dev has a lot of close-up shots that just look absolutely funky and have some fish-eye effect and so certain close-up shots just look really bad out of nowhere.

5/5 absolutely recommend.