Ren'Py - The Crypt of Dracula [v0.1] [Lostworks]

  1. 1.00 star(s)

    Cartageno

    Okay, I rarely review a 0.1 because they usually can go any way, improve on mistakes if they're bad, lose track of a great opening when you thought they were going to be good. But this is an exception. Because it is already clear that it lacks any kind of love or passion on behalf of the creator.

    As the "text based" tag already makes clear, you will mostly read text, interspersed with some images. The text is just filling the screen - using the standard RenPy font which is not ideal for this amount - and full of purple prose and bad clichés. However, it is whole sentences, there are no spelling or grammar catastrophes as in many other games. But despite every noun getting an adjective, every verb having its adverb to tell you how something is, it doesn't tell you anything because it just doesn't gel. Scene 1, you and your girlfriend hear something. "It is louder than a wolf" you claim, she answers "always a kidder". There is no indication of kidding. Anyway, your reply is "You're so hot." - what does that have to do with anything? And people don't just say things, they "tease", they "laugh", and so forth, even if what they say has nothing to do with teasing or laughing. I am pretty certain that the text is also AI generated, but with an AI which learned from books like "How not to write a novel". It is just random standard sweet talk (in this scene) without any regards for the setup or in fact the conversation before.

    And then after some time, some image of a girl comes up. It is nice in and of itself. But only itself. If you compare it to the text it doesn't work. A girl - according to text - has lifted her shirt and unclasped her bra, yet she is clearly still wearing both shirt and bra in the image. Nor do the images show consistency. Next image of the same person has different body proportions, a different hair color.

    Then your first decision comes (actually before what I wrote before), but you might not notice it a first because it appears in the same font just in the middle of another text block. Slightly darker grey if you look at it. Okay, so I decide to climb on a tree to watch my girlfriend undress - why would I need to do that? Dialogue made it clear we were past that point. Her posing in what MC sees is actual posing, not doing her stuff (look at the second example pic in the preview, girl looking straight at the camera, legs wide spread - is that how girls undress? And yes, this is the image with the lifted shirt and unclasped bra mentioned earlier).

    I understand that it takes more than just saying "ChatGPT, write me an AVN with graphics in RenPy" to make a game. But it takes even more than whatever the dev put in here so far: make sure that the text makes sense, make sure that the graphics make sense. Neither does. Also you want to control the pacing. Things in here just happen - and are forgotten. That strange sound you and your girlfriend heard? Ominous, innit? Forgotten for now after you told her she's hot. First you need to see her strip at home. Any author - who is actually human - would have given this scene some kind of closure (for now, obviously later on the howling will be an element), like just dismissing the sound for now as not important, but no. "Oh, a sound, a wolf?" - "No, louder" - "You're a kidder" - "You're hot". End of scene.

    Normally I reserve 1 star for games which have serious bugs breaking the game, crashes, that kind of stuff. This game doesn't do that. But every other game, even if using AI graphics, had some kind of idea, some kind of thread connecting the pieces. Badly maybe, heavily misspelled, with clunky UI. But none I have witnessed so far had this amount of "I don't care that my content doesn't make any sense, I have content" as this game.

    Please, keep your fingers away from this game, lest people think this may be a viable alternative to an actual game or VN story. It isn't. Maybe one day I can say "ChatGPT 3.0, write me an AVN so I can fap", but today isn't that day.