Ren'Py - Straitened Times [v0.53.1] [HRelease]

Great Graphic and good character . But a little bit Yeah little bit that Task is hard to read and hard to find another place But totally good. in other word i really think this game is a Good in my list H game.

EDIT: 5/31/2021 Updated Review

He's made some minor improvements. That's great. However, it's all still too confusing.

The problem is the mom is so hot, she distracts me from being able to think logically, so figuring out the game becomes ten times more difficult.

There's still a problem of TOO MANY WOMEN. He's added so many women, that he can't give them all enough content.

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This game is a double edge sword.

PROS
- I really like the renders and poses of the mom. I enjoyed working to unlock the scenes with her. I was not into any of the other women though. If you're like me and you REALLY like the renders and look of the mother, you should play the game. There are some VERY hot scenes with her, especially in her bikini.
- The furthest I got after 3-4 hours was getting hand jobs from the mother. I was mainly interested in scenes where she was in a bikini. Everything outside of that was uninteresting. I would not play the game again to attempt to unlock anymore of the mothers content. The game is too grindy, so it kills the mood after 3-4 hours.

CONS
- Omfg the grind, mechanics, interface and quest journal are a NIGHTMARE. I had to get help from 5-6 people just to learn the basics of the game.
- I still don't understand what the hell the Discover Interests mechanic even does. It doesn't tell you it's basic function. It doesn't say, "If you click all the circles, and the circles turn blue, the following happens...." I would randomly click those interest circles, BLUE for GOOD, RED for bad, and it didn't seem to do anything. The interface doesn't show you any result from it.
- The game doesn't tell you that if conflict between your family gets too high, it results in game over. Maybe it does? But, I didn't see it.
- The quest journal bombards with you 490580489 different objectives at one time. You can't do that. The new player should only have 2-3 basic tasks and choices throughout the whole game. Don't bombard them with so many objectives, because it gets confusing, especially if those objectives aren't porn related.

SOLUTIONS
- He should go through each quest and simplify everything. That means make LESS objectives. Hide the ones that don't need to be shown.
- Make each quest tell you EXACTLY what to do. Don't be vague, expecting the player to be a brilliant puzzle solver. These people are playing a porn game, so they're not in the mindset of figuring out some psychological crime thriller plot.
- Explain the exact purpose of the discover interests mechanic. Explain what is actually causes, what results you get from clicking each of those circles. What happens exactly? Does it raise a stat? I have no idea. The whole time I was doing it, I honestly felt like nothing was happening.

Playability: -10/5: (Yes negative 10 out of 5.) This game is extremely difficult to figure out. I had to get help from many different people. I even had to talk to people in Private Messages just to figure out the game. I couldn't figure out how to unlock the swimming pool area for 2 hours! It turns out you have to talk to the hotel manager lady at least twice. So you literally have to re-ask the same question. That's odd.
- The game changes the colors of each dialogue randomly. It's annoying and serves no purpose other than to confuse the player.
- The Quest Journal is worthless, and most of the objectives ARE VAGUE. The purpose of a quest journal is to provide guidance, not to present puzzles. Just tell the player what to do. From a programming perspective, he did a good job designing all these systems.

Story 2/5 - The story is extremely generic. The dad is in jail. You lost all your money. You live at a hotel. The idea of going from rich to poor is interesting, and I guess it works okay.
- I talked to the dad one time throughout my whole 3-4 hour play experience. It was just too boring to talk to him again. Not worth giving him the time of day IMO. Unless you cuckold him and destroy him or something. I'd be open to destroying his soul so he kills himself. That would be fun!

Originality 1/5 - Nothing special. The renders of the mom are SOOO fantastic though. I really like the model he used for the mother. She's a favorite of mine on the DAZ3D website. That's probably the only reason I gave this game such a huge shot.

Mother Character Morph & Texture Quality 5/5 - The mother character and her renders are great. This is the whole reason I played this game.

Character Morph & Texture Design 1/5 - Unfortunately, I found the rest of the 98% of the women to be unattractive, falling into the uncanny valley. (However, the MOM came out FANTASTIC. I really liked how she looks.)
- I think one of the step sisters looked okay, but I never found her in game. I only saw her render in the games images folder. The game seems to hide a lot of women and finding them is extremely difficult. The name of the folder is StepYS. She was attractive, but I never saw her in game after 3-4 hours of gameplay.

Sound 3/5 - Good sound effects, but no music.

Bugs - The game had one bug so far. Somehow the room you sleep in went from double bed to one big bed, even though I didn't' change it. Not a big deal. (From a programming perspective, the developer knows how to code well IMO. He does a good job programming all these systems.)

Amount of content - I think the game has a good amount of content. Keywords: I THINK.... I focused 100% on unlocking the scenes with the mother, and that was after 3-4 hours. The game is VERY grindy in a negative way. I would never go through that grind ever again, maybe like two years from now when there's double the amount of content for the mom.

OVERALL VERDICT: The game is worth playing at least once and GOING ALL IN on one of the women. Find one woman you like in the game and focus on unlocking all her content. If you try to unlock all the women's content, the game will take too long, and it won't be good for fapping.

I'm giving the game 3/5 stars JUST BECAUSE OF THE MOM, that's it. Because I liked her A LOT! Her scenes are totally hot. If you like her, then it's worth playing just for her, but be ready to be frustrated to hell with the mechanics and interface.

- I would give the game an extra star if he simplifies the Quest Journal, and makes each objective more specific and less vague.
- He should also explain precisely what the Discover Interests mechanic does. The bubbles fill up, but for what purpose? What is the purpose of the Research Interests mechanic on the phone?
- After 3-4 hours, I still had no idea what any of these things were for.
- After 3-4 hours I could never find the NPC called StepYS (folder in the images directory). Too bad she's not your main sister. I found the red head step sister unattractive, her look was annoying, but I think a lot of other people liked her so that's cool. I REALLY like older women, so I'm weird like that.

Quality renders and gameplay so far!
Would definitely love to see the game more fleshed out in the future and where it goes from there.
Could do with some work on the discussion system and a few small things though

The UI may be grindy. Yet the story line and models are better than some popular games.
I would say its a good sandbox game (with actual time and resource management instead of just running around) that worth to try and be tolerate with those flaws.
I sincerely hope the dev do not give up despite its being underrated.

Great game. Bit grindy but can be solved with console. No idea why people rated it so low. Models are good, the character interactions are more believable than the standard VN and the MC doesn't look like a pre teen.
I really liked the detective plotline that the game is building up.
Other reviews talk about engrish, but I didn't notice too much of that.

The game contains original graphics with really different shapes and figures.
The mechanics may seem a bit too much but and grindy but the introduce some freshness in games like this.
Keep up the good work

Finally - an incest game where slow burn makes sense. Beautiful milfs (there is ebony one too), decent writing, believable characters, some very good dirty talk during sex scenes. Yeah, there are some cons - grind, grind, grind and not that much content behind it - but it is 100% worth it. Also my dick will kill me if I rate it less than 5 stars

This game is great. The dev needs to redo the entire grind for sure, but just use console commands to give yourself money or to adjust character relationship values if you need to, and it is super hot and sexy as fuck. There is a slow burn of sexy moments in which sexual tension increases for both the characters and the player.

The incest fantasy is entirely based on the fact that characters have familiarity and rising sexual tension, rather than strangers fucking which is hard to do correctly in a way that makes the player get invested in the sexiness. Because of that, the sexual tension and moments that build up between characters in this is amazing - this game could be one of the best on the site if it fixed the grind and as it stands it still is if you console commands to negate the unpleasant parts of the grind.

From the older sister's unbashfulness about you seeing her naked, to the younger sister's increasingly obvious sexual infatuation with you, to your mother's strong commitment to regular morals, this game has some of the best sexual tension in the industry. The models are sexy and believable.

I would give this one a try, use console commands once you don't wanna grind, and don't let these other reviews get you down.

To another well-liked review below - you can study interests only 3 times per session, not 3 times per day. You can just sit in a single night and max them out, it's really not an issue. You have a lot of extra time in this game, just get them to max early in your downtime and then everything is easier from there.

To potential players: make saves when you find out what 5 conversation topics a character likes, so that you can just open your save menu and double check later one what they like once more.

I don't understand that this game gets such a low score.
This game has great potential and is full of attractive characters.
If I were to pick the game that I look forward to the most in the future, it would be this game.
It can develop further depending on the story that will come out.
It's a shame that I don't have a "competition" between my favorite main character and another man.

This one is a hot mess. It's loaded with Engrish, a ridiculous grind and hidden mechanics that cause you to lose stats over time and can lead to a game over/no win situation. I couldn't recommend this to anyone.

excessive grind. don't waste your time on this. it just isn't very fun to play. it's more like a chore to play. cannot recommend this in its current form. heres hoping they make drastic changes to the gameplay. just isn't worth it in its current form.

I want to like this game. The characters are well done and beautifully-rendered. But there's just wayyyyy too much grind for wayyyyyy too little pay off.... the "Interests" fade with time, meaning you have to keep doing them, which eats up time.... and you're only allowed 3 per day (in version 6.2) which means you can't get up the many many many way too many interests to a complete level before half of them fall again.... it's a good concept, but you need to streamline it... make it so once the interests are maxed out they stay maxed out.... if you wanna make them go down until then, fine, but make them static with max out.... it'll make the game less grindy and more focused on the central plot.....You have a potentially great game here.... right now it needs a lot of work though.

Good graphics and nice concept. Very little variety in game play, i.e. it grinds. Developer seems to have confused the two, game play does not equal grind and vice a versa, IMHO. Knowledge increase on topics is not linear, in other words if I spend the three points on one topic and three point on another they do not equal. In addition the values decay over time, in addition graphs only give a rudimentary feed back to knowledge level yet hints are specific, get 30% to talk. better system IMHO would be is to allow the MC to talk on the subject but award no points or negative points as obviously he does not know what he is talking about.

To tell my opinion for the story, dialogues, models, render quality and scenes is pointless. The reason? The game design and game mechanics are terrible. Unfortunately this game has EXTREME GRINDING and on top of that the story / events are very bad organized without any useful guide. Personally I don't mind some grinding but within reason. Roaming around every day, spending hours doing again and again the same things or initiate the same dialogues with the various NPCs blindly just to check if there is some progress is crazy. And there is also the possibility to miss something. At least if there was a guide / walkthrough to tell you what you must do and how many times (for repeatable events) to progress with the main story and the individual events it could make the game playable. But there is no such thing. There is just a scrappy task page with bad design and errors that confuses you more that it helps you. It just mention some repetitive events that you already know.

Some times I wonder if devs actually play their games or not. If the dev doesn't reduce the grinding significantly and make a good organized guide the game is not playable for me. But I doubt it because it doesn't have to do about knowledge or experience. It is a matter of choice. I don't know why some devs design and organize their games like that. Maybe some people like it. But for me is 1 star. It could be a good idea such games to get a new tag like "excessive grinding without guide". In that case I wouldn't bother to download it and the game would have 1 negative review less.

It could be a nice idea but it needs a better development.
The grind is too high and it's very easy to lose interest. Renders are acceptable but could be improved. I gave it a try and I waited some updates to see some improvements but for now unsatisfactory.

Grind is heavy and I don't like the "interests" thing at all as a way to grind, but overall it's the lewd game with the most potential for me.
Definitely going to support the author on Patreon next month.

I'm rating based on version 0.5.1.

The best thing of the game is the main milf, the other 2 girls are really pretty too but not as hot and I really like the few naughty scenes.

At this point of the game there is no enough content to make the insane grind worth it. You'll just be repeating a lot of actions that feel like a chore and get too little reward.

May be when there is more content you'll unlock more scenes just by accident and that can make the playing more enjoyable.

This game is like playing Carmen San Diego but with porn on it. Even with a lot more content I think the dev should do something about the game system, simplify the 'misions', even the UI is confusing.

With more scenes and a little simplification the game has the potential for a solid 4 stars game, but it's a long way...

This game is fantastic!

What I love: few charecters. it not big, not small - just ideal. You can develop you relationship by 1in the speed what you want and easy to focus.
Small area. Yes, I realy like it. Сoncentrated and understandable environment, easy 2 learn. Love it.
Beatiful characters and good plot.

What i don't like: i want more events, situation, the explore their relationships more deeply and more plot ofc.

Tnx to author and gl!

Although i do agree that this game needs better instructions i do think that the it would be in a good place if you know what to work towards.

What really shines here is the function that if the girls(3) stay together in a room to long they will get frustrated with each other , so every few weeks you have to switch the girl that sleeps in your room. This is fun managing mechanic with thought behind it tying it to the story.

There is a bit of a problem with the game which is the grind it's like a 3/5 with no cheats and easily a 5/5 with cheats.

This is a very hard to rate game, as it has many faults but it's still a very hot game.
The first fault is the grindiness followed by the lack of instructions making it hard for you to know what to do at first.
For exemple it took me a few hundred in game days to understand how to get my first job, which is probably something like 2 or 3 hours of gameplay.
I kept trying the phone's function "find a job" without success while all I had to do was go to the diner and speek to the owner (a dude, which is why I never spoke to him before). That's kind of confusing... How was I suposed that the very visible option "to find a job" is basically useless to find a job at the beginning...

And that's the thing, you need to speak to EVERYONE, and grind their affection (and for some lust too) to unlock more things elsewhere.
The good thing is that the girls are hot and that the scenes are hot as well... once you reach them.
There aren't many scenes but progress is slow which is a good thing, this makes just masturbating in front of your mom as she look at you that much hotter since you had to really work for it.
But this is not for everyone. I would definitively rate this badly if the rewards weren't good enough. But they are... So I give it a 4 out of 5 .