VN - Ren'Py - Taboo University [Book One v1.03] [ViNovella Games]

Three girls, three stories, three investigations.
An interesting, intelligent protagonist, a crowd of pretty ladies perhaps with many of them we can build a relationship. Everyone will find the right girl here
For version 0.3 it was quite a lot of text (if you take your time it could take hours), the investigations are really exciting although it feels skewed towards the sex scenes. If you remove some of them I think the story would be more believable (take at least the scenes with the horny teachers). In addition to the very well-written dialogue, we have a great visual style and smooth animation. The volleyball scenes are really coolly directed here as well as the sexual stuff with the girls.
The storyline is great although we don't have many plot developments to go on yet. Of the relative minuses I would note the rather boring storyline with the cult and the self-development group but that's probably just my individual intolerance.
Very much looking forward to the story updates hoping to get to the bottom of it with the hero.

Review for v0.3.16

I half skimmed the overview and thought this was going to be yet another run-of-the-mill college game. I was wrong. It came as an interesting twist to find out our true purpose in attending the university, and I think that's when I got hooked. I'm not going to talk too much about the actual plot as to avoid spoilers, but for people like me who are into more well-written games, this is one to try out for sure.

There's a lot to praise here. First, this has an impressively large cast of diverse characters to get to know. It's interesting to see it from a detective point of view, puzzling together how everyone connects to each other. It's got some great renders and the animations aren't bad either. Proper music and sound effects too, but I'll say I turned the voices off instantly. The MC is definitely more of a Mr. Perfect, but I don't find him insufferable or anything which is a rarity.

The style of this game definitely feels different as well. You aren't necessarily given a cast of individual girls to focus on one by one. Rather, you're investigating each clique more or less. You could say you're focusing on different groups of girls rather than an individual. This has both positives and negatives admittedly. A lot of games suffer from not having anyone interact with anyone else, and only with the MC. I like that in this, everyone is connected in some way. Things are happening around the MC regardless of if he's involved. It makes things feel more real. But on the other hand, you're going to be left waiting if you really want to see a bunch of content from someone specific. There really doesn't feel like a lot of "main" love interests as of now imo.

If I had any real complaint, it would be that this is a bit too linear for me. I really do like that you can choose the order of who you investigate first, but beyond that most choices simply seem to be "see this scene or don't." Now there are a few exceptions, but for the most part the player really isn't given any agency. Even just given the option to choose how we respond in more conversations would be great. There doesn't feel like there's diverging paths, but this is also rather early so I'd give it the benefit of the doubt there.

To put it in less words, this is an AVN with a real story to it. Not something you see very often, especially to the degree of this one. This is definitely a slow burn among slow burns, but I'm finding it compelling enough to want to keep going. I'm impressed so far.

Amazing models, detective story looks really promising and intricate, even random SFX here and there, and a QTE (not that "Q" tho lol)
Animation is decent without being top quality

Only drawback is that the game seems rather linear at this point, and some choices appear to matter very little, but I'm willing to wait further updates for more embranchments.

No obvious bugs at this time, game runs fine even on a regular laptop

Excellent game, a must play

Still maintains the author's high quality, excellent animation, excellent characters, excellent story .
The problem remains. It's too hardcore . The last one was a secret organization for extortion , The whole time, a girl was drinking pee like water . This work is a cult in which many people go missing .
Can the next one be a little easier? Lots of sex and big tits and pregnant girls are great too .

Great game so far! Visually pleasing with very high quality graphics easily among the top best I've seen, great banter and dialogue between characters especially about life from the spiritual healing group that you go join for one of your leads in the investigation, confident and not socially awkward mc with a very charismatic charming personality, no engrish, character models dont look generic. Giving it 5 stars to encourage the dev not to abandon the project and to encourage more people to try the game out if it seems interesting to them

Overall, a nice game. The models are good, the music . Thanks to the developer for not being greedy with the renders: they change often and there's no static picture (when there's one picture per dozen lines of dialogue). The story... Well here, of course, it's a matter of "taste". It's there and it's not bad. At the beginning I liked at once that the author doesn't suffer from graphomania, the dialogues are not overloaded and to the point. The truth then, I noticed, all the same began to skid, especially the "theatrical" part. There are very few choices, everything is rather linear. There's not much "content" yet, which is natural. About the trance... In general, I do not understand what the problem is with some people: in the beginning I chose and did not even think about this option. In general, I liked it, let's see.

This was definitely a welcome surprise , obviously gonna up its rank with each update.What got me surprised the most is the level of polish which is quite rare in games these days

Even though I wasn't expecting much but it turned out to have an interesting premise especially as an undercover cop which is a totally badass idea(can't believe no one actually tried this b4).The story is also very intriguing hats off to the Dev.

The MC is a well likeable Chad & all the females we meet are interesting with unique personalities which is always a bonus.

Even though the animations are gorgeous they r really short & repeated with different dialogues which seems to be my only gripe.I do hope the dev starts adding longer sex animations / more positions which will add more variety thus removing the monotonous feeling u get during sex scenes.
Other than that this is a total banger Dev, definitely has the potential to reach greater heights

Surprised to see this game not being that popular when the renders are this high quality and college themed stories seems to be downloaded quite much in this site than games with other settings.
Anyway I like the story of this game, it obviously has a mystery to it as the protagonist is a undercover cop in a mission to find out about the missing girls. So he has the find out their relationships and social life with others while looking for clues.

So far the characters are written sufficiently and I also like that the models/LIs have distinct look to them from each other unlike some games where the models just have a different hair color with a slight variation in body size.

As for the rendering and animations, they are top notch like up there. The camera angles from time to time felt too much after a while for me and there doesn't seem to be any sex scene as of now except a montage from the beginning. The music is really well done too.

I enjoyed playing this one overall and there is that much content as of now so looking forward to the next update to see where the story goes.

For what it is right now, I really can't imagine not giving it a perfect score. Models are great, animations are top tier. I like the vibe of everything so far.

This might be the one of the few, if not the only game where I am genuinely interested in where the story is going. The "world" building is there and the characters all seem quite interesting. I think some will complain about "not enough sex" but I think the balance was really good, and either way I don't mind with the story and dialogue being actually very good.

It might not end up being your cup of tea, but there is no denying with even surface knowledge on design or writing that this is technically very impressive. I've probably played every single renpy game on this site and this is already looking to be in my top 5 easy if it continues this way.

Sweet game!

Models are pretty good and the music selection is very fitting! The audio bits during dialogue are a nice touch too. Renders are pretty good, though not too many lewds yet. Looking forward to seeing where it all goes!

I enjoyed the dev's other game (Fetish Locator) and found this to be both similar and different.

In this game you are an undercover cop investigating a case at the University. At this point, it's all very mysterious and whatever, so I'm pretty interested to see where things end up with it.

Girls look good, scenes so far are interesting enough, and looks like there'll be plenty of potential moving forward.

Mostly good.

For that amount of text - 1 sex scene, 1 hj, 1 bj isn't enough. And it always feels like devs doing shorter less complex/interesting scenes aka bj, hj etc instead of sex just to release content more often. And right here you can't say anything about build up before actual sex, 'cause ladies practically jumping you when you agree to see scene.

Srsly, everything cool, except lewd content. Try it out, you'll like this VN.

It's a pretty good intro, I'll highlight some of the issues I have with it:

- video angle changes that not only take far too long, but are really unnecessary.

- club video (that's 150MB) that could be cut down in run time (or even removed) by 80% and nothing will be lost.
- Training video should probably be cut into multiple segments with some interaction in between by the player. It's 2 minutes long.
- All the video segments could be sped up to get the point across without losing anything (I would argue it would in fact be a big improvement)

- Where the water flies and the angle it lands on the MC don't match up, he could step in and it should land on the right shoulder/chest area. (and drip down to the pants so he would still have to go nude while changing).

- The hair grows from short to pretty long over the course of a month for the MC and MC's current GF.

Overall a promising premise with a lot of potential. Looking forward to what they will do with this.

I'm not a fan of fetish locator but this game shows quite a lot of promise! The renders and the cinematics are top notch, the characters look pretty good and the plot seems to be going somewhere interesting.

Only complaint is Josie's whole car crash face surgery thing which just sounded kinda unrealistic since she has no apparent scars or signs of surgery as most facial reconstruction patients usually show.
Edit: Just realized Josie is a trans woman and I got that dialogue because I chose to call her Josephine lol.

Still a 5/5 game and I'll be waiting on the next update!

Pretty good first release. Seems like there is a good story going on. Animations and visual effects are nice. But MC face looks like a douchebag he seems like an antagonist than a protagonist. His attitude is also kinda like that playboy attitude. This one more like an introduction to the game. Introduced main characters of the game. Compared to fetish locator this one contains a solid story plot don't know how they execute it in the future. There is sound effects it's good and it gives more ampience to the game. But voice effects are annoying like in sims voices like haha, heh, ooh, it's really annoying it doesn't do well with the game. So muted it.

+ Good renders
+ Visual effects and animations
+ Sound effects
+ Story plot

- voice effects like in sims it's annoying
- MC look likes an antagonist than a protagonist

The little that this game leaves us, I already like a lot. It promises great things if the story remains a big part of this game. The character models are really cool, the backgrounds aren't bad either. I hope in the future a lot of impactful choices in the dialogues and maybe learn more about this protagonist.

Fetish Locator is one of my favorite VNs and I had high expectations when I saw a new game from Vinovella. They managed to exceed those expectations and managed to make a what seems a like an excellent mystery VN. It's not groundbreaking, but it is extremely well done.

The MC is the typical VN protagonist but all the other characters seem interesting. The missing persons premise, if executed well, can be taken in very interesting directions and I'm looking forward to it

I'm an amateur 3D artist and the opening cinematic blew my mind. It's not only technically impressive, but the way they edited it made an excellent first impression.

Not a whole lot to go on yet, but seems like an interesting premise. I will not spoil anything here, but I liked the ideas the game was bringing forward to at least make this university setting different from the myriad of other games also set in college.

Visuals are good, like their other game, Fetish Locator, and the animations not connected to lewd stuff is a nice touch. Nice way of do storytelling as well by using slides and short animations, rather then making you read some text. A good screen writing tip is also show don't tell. So nice in that regard.

The only reason I didn't give it 5 as I need to see where the game is going, get to know the characters more and so on before I can say it's 5 stars. Also not totally sold on the MC, he seems kinda like a bit of a douche, but again time will tell with that too.

So all in all, a nice beginning, looking forward to seeing more and seeing where this one goes.

v0.1.4, ~20 min read
Cool intro. Undercover rookie cop investigates a missing persons case. Of course that leads him straight into the stereotypical university realm. From there it's your standard meet students, flirt shtick.

There are audio voice snippets on every line (yay, yes, hey, hmm, uhuh, giggling, sigh, etc). Was unexpected, but after a few lines it annoyed me, so I muted voice audio.

Quality is pretty good, you even have some totally unimportant scenes animated/rendered as bullet time.
Transitions are pretty good, too. The only sex happens in a past recollection memory.

MC is a typical Gary Stu. Buffed, good-looking, charming everyone, star rookie, mega-shlong, etc.. don't like him at all (personal preference).

Writing is fine. I like the implementation of an "investigation board" which serves for viewing character profiles.
There was 1 "choice" in the game (as in changes something). Optional trans content seems to be coming.

Bit stereotypical in many aspects, so I hope to see more of the stuff that isn't (e.g. make us do actual detective work).
Overall, pretty good for an introductory episode.