Ren'Py - Straitened Times [v0.56.0] [HRelease]

Here's a cliche: Don't judge a book by its cover. I stayed away from the game because I didn't find the cover image and the name very attractive. I finally gave it a try and it's very good! I love a grind where you have to build a relationship with a character and a sandbox style too. This has it all. Really enjoying discovering new places, new women!

It is structured a bit like a sandbox but not so noticeable as the progress is visible quite quickly. It follows a fairly clear game progression with many characters getting together. Basically it has everything a good game needs, several job opportunities to earn money and many varied events. And well made designs. I especially like it because there is no competition so far and the main character has free rein and can enter into many relationships.

The character models alone deserve all the stars! The designs are on point, and the main character looks great: handsome and fit without being over-the-top. I'd personally like him a little darker, but that’s just me.

I think the game would be even better as a visual novel instead of a sandbox. VN’s are just easier to jump into and get lost in.

Also, love that there are spots where you can make choices. Choices make the story way more interesting and so much better than just a straightforward, no-options story.

I like sandboxes, I dont mind grind and I especially like corruption. This game has all three but it just doesnt work.

There is tooo much grind, everything works against eachother with every decision leading to utterly ridiculous opinion changes with no rollback

Some scenes end up beign letdowns. Like you'll have a massage scene where the woman is very attractive but ones you progress to fucking the graphics are really ugly.

Theres zero realism, everyone wakes up from everything at night because stupid mc has zero skills but then just says stop, no emotion

Content is soooo sparse between grinds and even if everything is unlocked then the girls always 'need time to recover'

Basically all the fun got sucked out somewhere

Grindiest game I've ever played, and incesty as fuck, which is usually a problem for me, but somehow the very very thin veil of "she's not your mother in this family of yours, she's the Holy Mother of this Commune" amuses me enough to not be weirded out by the happenings. It helps that the characters and interactions are hot, and while grinding everything will take you forever, you can get to some very sexy repeatable events fairly quickly. I liked this game very much, but it's very much a Your Mileage May Vary.

Too much grind and its not like it adds something to the story, its just for the sake of making the game longer or something.
The visuals are fine nothing special.
The interactions sometimes makes sense and sometimes they don't.
I have mixed feelings about this game but good luck to dev

Making my first review. The progression in this game sucks ass. RNG for progress events to triggger? Fuck off. Great storyline and renders but even with a walkthrough this game is unbearable. If someone asked me with a gun to my head to choose between trying to beat this game with no walkthrough or seduce my family in real life, I would choose the latter because thats genuinely more plausible then trying to navigate the trainwreck that is this progression system. If they add an "easy mode" where the game just tells you how to progress to the next scene if you need it (and you're going to need it constantly) it would probably be 4 stars.

The grind is real, but the pay-offs are worth it. Definitely worth playing if your thing, is the slower/more intimate, relationship build-up. The dialogue has been pretty well written throughout. Also probably the only game in two years to provoke me to leave a review, in hopes that the dev sees the project through to the envisioned story conclusion.

An amazing game!
Beautiful models and borderline good writing!

PROS
- Content There is just so much content and that too top quality.
-Beautiful models
-Takes your imagination for a ride as there are so many scenarios taking place together.
- satisfying scenarios
- The only game I have played which connects 3 or more large group of women.

CONS
-Randomness of some events
- Broken money system
-Grind (There should be some a point or bar system so as to check progress with individual characters)

This game has tremendous potential.

They just need to cut 80% of the grind. It is practically impossible to progress relationship with characters without consulting a guide and even then it's super confusing.

There is a lot to like about this title and there are some very good PROS about it but unfortunately the CONS outweigh any PROS by far.

PROS - The Story for the most part is fun and interesting. The character models mostly look good and attractive. It is FUN early on in your playthrough.

CONS -
RANDOMNESS and GRIND!! This game should be called Straitened times the ULTIMATE time waster. To get new content you have to complete tasks and days OVER and OVER and OVER again!! Until some RANDOM event you luckily complete at some RANDOM time, just happens to take place.

The MODS and cheats are a necessity, I could not even imagine playing this title without mods and going through the FULL GRIND!

The Sad part is I was having FUN initially, but then the GRIND set in and ruined this experience. I have played Tencent Gotcha games that had less GRIND where they sell you microtransactions to fix the grind.

I deluded myself into thinking I was having enough fun to come back to this title, and as updates keep passing and I fail to come back I finally realized I was dreading with every fiber of my being playing this title again. 54.1 is out now and there is still no GALLERY mod so I'm done. I can't do it, this is the first game I like and I want to like more but the GRIND has broken me.

This title is good for a dedicated explorer of adult VN's with a crap load of time on there hands.

I salute you players that can but the content is nowhere near incredible enough to over come my dread of grinding out another 50 hours as if I'm trying to beat the hardest boss in Elden Ring on Insane difficulty!!

Give it a shot if you want, the early game is fun with mods but be careful to know when the fun ends and the chore like grinding begins. This is NOT a bad VN, it's a Good VN, saddled with some horrible mechanics.

I'm sad to say, at this time, I can only rate this one 2 stars. There's a LOT of content, which is great. Most games don't have this much content in a full game, much less an incomplete one like this. However, due to the disorganized, unclear, janky, grindy objective/point system per character, it gets really repetitive, tedious and annoying to figure out how to move forward with many of the characters. If some of the options were simplified and trimmed down in how many points you need, it would help this game immensely. This way, you don't have to spend in game weeks grinding the same relationships trying to find some obscure dialogue option you didn't know you were missing. If you don't want to simplify that, there at least needs to be a compact, simplified tracker for love interest based objectives to show you what you’re missing.

Beyond that, I am always annoyed by bad spelling and grammar, which is abundant in this game. This could easily be a 4-star game if some systems were polished, some unnecessary repetition was removed, and some kind of objective tracker with clear hints was put into the game. To clarify, The story quests already have a tracker in the phone in game, which works just fine. This game just needs better tracking for the love interest objectives. Anyway, iron out those issues, and you'll have a pretty fantastic game.

Very good game and highly recommended. It has quite acceptable animations.

Sometimes you can get lost in the character requirements because the quest guide is very ambiguous and confusing at times, but when you manage to continue with the stories, the animation and text are excellent.

This is a really good game with interesting characters and plot twists, great scenes and dialogue. held back by a progression system so convoluted that you'll 100% need a guide to progress almost every step of the way. Grinding is insanely tedious as well.

I really liked the game the first time I tried it, but as more updates came out I always didn't know how to deal with the new events. To this day I still can't access Grandma's house... I simply can't access most of the events... it's really frustrating, no matter how hard I try to follow the guides I can't do it.

I hope that one day they release a more complete guide or that the game is very, very clear on how to get the events.

The game has very good graphics, scenes, etc. but it is simply terribly boring because of the system that the creator came up with.
I have already reached day 450, which is about 75-80% of the game and I do not play it anymore because it bores me because of all this stupid and pointless grind.

If the game forces me to use mods, cheats and use the console to get everything in it, then it is very poor because it causes me to not be able to focus on the game.

One of the Incest/Corruption games of all time!
Decent renders, animations can be a hit or miss though. Writing is actually competent.
What really irks me, however, is that once you manage to corrupt and fuck your immediate family, the family members will still provide responses that do not recognize the fact that you know that they know that you are all fucking each other ("oh no, but what if our sister found out" directly after she ate her snatch as were railing her asshole).
Presently some of the plot-lines outside the immediate family are left hanging and/or are very thin on content.
But the core content is there and is good.

My all time favourite! Everyday I'm checking if there's an update. Just wish they were more often and with a little bit more content. Also updates changelog or walkthrough is useful to know what's new, since it's a complex sandbox.

To be honest, this is a miss for me. First off, the story isn't great nor are the characters in it particularly memorable or well written. No choices that matter seem to exist beyond what actions give or take away points here and there. And it's all packed into a sandbox that feels more like a chore than a game, keeping schedules, looking for money, etc. The help tools to navigate that are good, which is nice, but sometimes are missleading with things like "talk to father about work" and when you go there there is no such conversation yet available. It is very nice though that it lists the different actions you can do and which still can earn you points and which have been depleted.

Render quality is pretty decent, but I didn't particularly like many of the character models, that's a matter of taste I guess. Sounds were mostly absent though can't say for music since I usually turn it off. And I did find some minor bugs here and there with some things not triggering or some minor renpy problems to ignore.

All in all, not the worst game but I think there are better ones out there with which you can spend your time.

Without a walkthrough, its just a chore with too much grinding.
At first its enjoyable, and then it just annoying. I just saw that there's an update, but I dont have a save and cant imagine going through all the mess again.