Ren'Py - The Grey Dream [Ep.7] [TheGreys]

Visual/Audio: 4/5 The game has great-looking renders and animations, but the overuse of shallow depth of field effects ruins many scenes. The music and sounds are good but don't add much to the experience.

Character Appeal: 3/5 The characters are attractive, but their personalities are one-dimensional. The LIs are not well-developed, and the relationships are not compelling.

Story/Scenario: 1/5 The story is boring and soulless, with a lack of tension, humor, or excitement. The pacing is awful, and the plot is hard to follow due to unnecessary time jumps and ambiguous explanations.

Verdict: 2.5/5 The game has great visuals, but the poor writing, lack of character development, and bad pacing make it a chore to play. With more attention to storytelling and character development, this game could be salvaged, but for now, it's an underwhelming experience.

Boring

I went into The Grey Dream hoping for something at least mildly engaging, but after spending several hours with it, I can confidently say it’s one of the most underwhelming adult games I’ve tried in a long while. The biggest problem is the script — it’s bland, repetitive, and completely devoid of personality. Conversations feel like they’ve been copy-pasted from a template, and nothing about the writing draws you in. There’s no tension, no humor, no spark. Instead of building atmosphere or character depth, the dialogue just plods along, making every interaction a chore to click through.


The lack of creativity shows up in the tags and themes as well. A good adult game thrives on variety and fantasy, but The Grey Dream plays it painfully safe. There are no exciting twists, no daring scenarios, and no niche appeal for players looking for something distinct. It feels as though the developers just ticked a few generic boxes without giving any thought to what players actually crave in terms of novelty or intensity.


Then there’s the issue with the models. Every character looks almost identical, with only slight tweaks in hair color or clothing to “differentiate” them. There’s no diversity, no unique body types, and no sense that these are interesting personalities you want to pursue. Instead, you’re essentially interacting with the same face and figure over and over, which quickly kills any immersion.


What’s most frustrating is that the game never seems to go anywhere. The pacing is glacial, the storylines don’t develop, and the lack of payoff leaves you wondering why you’re still clicking. It feels like a loop of empty scenes with no reward. Simply put, The Grey Dream has no “X factor” — nothing that makes it stand out, nothing that keeps you coming back. For a genre where creativity and thrill should be at the center, this game delivers neither.


Final Verdict: Forgettable, boring, and lacking any real hook. Definitely not worth your time.

Feels like this is dragged out and has gone too long.

LI's are not really clear because you can just fuck most of them? No Harem tag either.

I don't hate this AVN but I feel like it could be wrapped up by now maybe. Feels like a tv show that has too many twists and turns that you say screw it and stop watching.

If anything this one is definitely the perfect example of "milking it dry", and that's putting it nicely. I'm always wary of AVNs that have been in development for 3+ years and it's very rare that there will be one that doesn't turn into complete drivel, unfortunately this isn't one of the rare ones.

MC : To start off with the MC's shift in personality was lazy, goes from calm and collective to a complete idiot who can't string any reasonable thoughts together, just goes along with anyone who reaches out after
STORY : The story offers nothing in terms of impact, the beginning only seems promising because it gives you a lot of small choices on how to react to specific female characters but then you'll quickly come to the realization that the story itself gives you no real choices that dictates the MC's path. Obviously to avoid the kinetic tag the developer starts to give a hint of a major choice but at this point it's already been 2-2.5 years in the making, let that sink in.

The "LIs" are meh, have that in quotes because they can barely be considered that since all of them claim to not want anything serious. Three of them have copy & paste personalities (Not including the side flings)

TL;DR - You play as a smart lawyer turned buffoon when he realizes he has no control in a plot that he has no real involvement in.

Too ambitious of a story, IMO. There's a lot to like, but unfortunately its become a convoluted mess of writing. Renders really, really good. Character design is great. I wont speak on the sex scenes since I really don't care about them in any game, I'm here for the story, and unfortunately like I said, that's where this one leaves a lot to be desired.

I can appreciate wanting to create more than just your average story, but this is a great example as to why people stick to simple and lighthearted. Its easier. Nothing really makes sense. It screams to be taken seriously yet it's so outlandish it's impossible. That's fine when the game itself isn't trying all that hard, but you get the feeling this one is. There is obvious talent shown here, and I do think there is stuff to like, but nothing shines past the mediocrity.

This game is rather mid for me

Major problem is the Story, not only i have 0 control over the events, i just don't feel involved with anything happening

i often can respond with 2x YES aka Yes or Yes, just tell me which yes i should take.... whats the point of giving me such choice? i assume 1 give me hidden score that later lock me out from content?? or are choices just cosmetic in this instance? WHAT THE F CHOICE DOES IN THIS GAME???

Some of the Sex scenes are total junk, one at the end got me to chose if i wanna fuck girl in missionary or doggy
so i take Doggy, than my character flip her to missionary and end the scene....the FUCK????
Next Scene again missionary or Doggy so i take doggy and get asked again so i take Doggy and get asked again... i took doggy like 10 times in a row and scene refuses to progress, i finally surrendered and took missionary and had option to cum, i chose to cum inside -IMAGE NOT FOUND-
i know its not the whole game, but shit so bad you can't make this up

My Advice: Display what choices do, give more relevant choices, my character say shit 80% of the times without my input and i don't feel like i influence anything

Overall - 4/10
Don't recommend - don't be fooled by the renders

Great looking game - both renders and models are great
BUT too many side characters + mid storyline
Biggest gripe - i swear almost 80% of frames in this game is a headshot of the MMC, unbearable.

four words WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK..... excuse my language but what the hell was going on in this game like it was kind of confusing since the beginning but I was some what aware of what was happening in the story but midway through episode 4 I was like "WHAT THE HELL! this shit doesn't add up and that shit doesn't make any sense and what the hell is wrong with these random time jumps they doesn't make the least bit sense"
Just don't take this very hard this is really confusing I don't know why some people were talking about the story begin cuz it's not the only thing I'm giving this 3 stars is I'm seeing some potential here and no I'm not talking about sex scenes I could care less about sex scenes not just in this game I'm talking about any AVN out there, I play for the story and that only.the renders look great (which is like the second most reason why I'm seeing some potential in this.anyhow from the parts I do understand I'm kinda hooked on this game... just try to fill in the gaps in between the parts that doesn't make sense.


Chavo

soooo...
uhmmmm...

this one is a great example of good renders, pretty models and the beauty of each shot, some decent posing and lighting, which covers the 'V' in AVN..

but as an ADULT NOVEL (both aspects) - this is utterly terrible. I mean - I literally fell asleep while reading.

- MC has 0.0% agency, he is uninteresting, bland and boooooooring as fuck
- the choices are meaningless
- the characters are as one-dimensional as it can possibly be - there is no depth to the characters whatsoever.
- the pacing itself is weird, some scenes that are divided by time jumps make zero sense.
- and the sex scenes. I (almost) never comment on the adult content - but that's some really uninspired fucking over there.

With all that being said, sorry - I cannot recommend this one to any person.

0,15/10 stars

The good looks of the game can't save it, unfortunately.

The writing is bad, and the issue is two-fold: the dialogues are really bad and robotic, and the pacing and construction of the story makes it very hard for me to feel engaged.

Regarding the visuals, even if the characters do look very good, they feel like empty dolls with no interior life whatsoever, no changing facial expressions at all.

I find it impossible to care about the characters or the story.

The quality of renders and attractive characters cannot save The Grey Dream from two of its major faults: bad writing and bad sex scenes.

I will be the first to admit that this game has a lot of attractive women. Even the men are well-designed. The makers spent a lot of time and effort on lighting and camera work, and it shows.

But it's one of these games where you get tired of skipping through dialogue. Some games have a plot and clumsily stumble through stilted prose from scene to scene. In this game you will never guess what happens next because the plot meanders blindly.

Maybe the sex scenes are good? Not really. The first few are all with throwaway characters that didn't get any exposition for you to get invested in them, and the animation loops are all short enough that the camera needlessly moving back and forth gets really annoying.

Their second game looks like it has a more straightforward plot (go to college, fuck chicks), so I hope this means they realized what was going wrong with The Grey Dream themselves.

Beautiful characters and an interesting story, good grammar and at times the soundtrack was good, which earns this 3 stars. Don't take this as anything but constructive criticism to improve, but the dialog is a bit dry. They all speak the same way and carry the same facial expression, like they're bored or sleepy. Makes the reader bored and sleepy, especially when some elevator music starts playing. There were so many missed opportunities for a little humor and just when you think there may be a little action it cuts right back to dry dialog. The skiing scene, party or hostage rescue could have added so much more excitement for example. Props for moving the story along but that alone won't keep the reader engaged. This could easily go from decent to great. Keep improving and your stories could go 5 star.

I feel that I have to give the game a 5.

I thoroughly enjoy the game. I like the more or less realistic relationships in the game. (A couple of one night stands plus the platonic, plus more possible long term relationships.)

The girls are very sexy, the sex scenes are pretty good.
Very nice animation.
Good music and sound.

The story is not bad, but also not the best. it's an average crime mystery case.
The story is the weakest part of the game but is not terrible. It's passible.

The choices is very meaningful in who you get to romance or spend time with. It offers multiple playthroughs to see all the girls.

Maybe a 4 rating would be better, but since the graphics, interface and amount of content is so good I'm happy with a 5.

The Grey Dream looks great, but beauty is only skin deep.

That statement is a little too simplified, as there are some good elements about this VN; it's just that each element is brought down by poor design choices or poor execution.

For example:

The girls are damn fine looking - but they come thick and fast, and many look too similar, that you lose track of whom is who.

The story hook is actually decent enough - seek to obtain a percentage of the business to secure ownership for the Grey family. But the scenes are so disjointed. There is a distinct lack of flow to what is going on.

The animations ain't bad, at least there is a sequence, and the girls are hot. But, fixing the camera to the characters so it jerks all over the place is just not a good way to do it. A dynamic camera is great, just make sure it has its own dedicated spline/track.

Some other things that stand out as bad are:

The dialogue. My gawd, it is terrible. And sometimes verges on the edge of non-sensical.

There is no real rapport with the girls, no build-up, no tension, no sense of conquering - I just don't care about any of them. Personally, I like the chase, but there's none of that here.

The first two main sex scenes are flashbacks.... The rest are random encounters (as of ep3.5 - I had to stop).

This VN comes across as a first draft against a beautiful backdrop. First drafts should never see the light of day.

Man, there's just no soul.

Despite all what I have said, I do think a lot of the issues can be worked out, hence the three stars.

Hence the opening statement.

There is something truly great here, the renders are breathtaking and are some of the highest quality you will ever find, every girl is extremely hot and for the most part well written, the writing is solid, and I love the setting where it takes place in the business world, I think this is a true gem of a game and with more updates and more story fleshed out i think it will quickly climb to one of my favorites

The game simply didn't capture my attention. Played for about an hour and I just don't care to continue. Story didn't grab me, dialogue is pretty straight-forward, same as all the characters. You meet someone and they immediately act like you were friends for years, inviting you to all sorts of activities, trusting you with things they shouldn't... Also, in an hour I talked with more women, than I did in 5 years in real life. They just keep coming and many look similar. I completely forgot most of who is who and what their names are.

The Grey Dream EP5

Good
+Models are nice and girls are attractive (if a bit too similar with some of their looks and proportions).
+Renders are nice when most of what you're looking at isn't too blurry due to ridiculously overused shallow depth of field.

Neutral
=Animations vary in quality from pretty decent to pretty poor - almost all are brief loops. Some are nice to look at but the scenes they're in just are brief and not particularly hot the majority of the time even when the girls and animations are.
=Music and some basic sounds exist but don't add much most of the time.

Bad
-Otherwise great renders and animations are marred by overuse of very shallow depth of field making way too much of them just completely blurry. Shallow DoF effects are good for making the characters stand out from the background and to draw attention to specific parts of a shot selectively but when you're just slapping it on every render and it's so shallow that when it's focused on the face the chest is completely blurry (and vice versa), you've gone way too far. So many renders/anims of beautiful women are completely ruined by blur from the DoF here. Some may find it pleasingly artistic somehow but I find it unbearable to rarely be able to see more than one small part of a woman's body clearly at the same time (let alone anything even slightly in the background/foreground). I'd take lesser quality renders that I can actually see the details of over these any day. Other problems are issues with the images having overdone lighting effects, being too dark, too washed out, or occasionally appearing grainy even with all the blur. Some issues are worse earlier in the game but a lot frustratingly persist throughout.

-MC and many other characters lack changes of facial expression especially during dialogue in most of the scenes - it just alternates between mouth open and mouth shut if it bothers to do that. This makes the game feel lifeless and the characters too static with expressions that don't match up to the dialogue most of the time. Visual story telling overall just isn't something the game does well.

-Timings used when transitioning automatically between a few sequential renders can be way too fast and aren't usually necessary (would be better in most of the cases to move between them manually).

-The story is boring and soulless - nothing is really interesting, exciting, or entertaining. Even the lewd content isn't particularly interesting or sexy - it's mostly just things that happen with little to no buildup and then are quickly over. The pacing is also awful. It feels like almost every single thing in the game is rushed through with little of substance ever really being said followed by a black screen with "X amount of time later" displayed and then it's just on to the next scene often in jarring manner that doesn't necessarily connect well. Tone also suffers as you hop between scenes - one minute you'll be smack dab in the middle of what's supposed to be serious intrigue and the next you're just having a lighthearted slice of life scene hanging with your gal pals. Logic and explanation as to how people frequently know exactly what to do next and how one part of the story leads to the next is often either extremely lacking or frustrating due to needless ambiguity and characters not realizing the obvious things they should be questioning. It's a game that wants you to think it's telling an interesting story of intrigue without putting in any of the effort so you end up feeling like you just need to turn your brain off and not question anything to avoid being confused or annoyed by the issues which is the opposite of what should be happening. Dialogue is also pretty terrible and frequent humor attempts are generally awful.

-I liked some of the LIs based on their looks alone but even though some routes are starting to take shape I found I have no real investment in any of them and still feel like I barely know them. The routes themselves seem to be starting in earnest in EP 4 and 5 (and likely beyond) but they're already a bit too restrictive for choices with girls you have no commitment to and have barely gotten involved with most of yet. Assuming these are actual routes being formed at this point it's already off to a bad start with some of them being too unclear (not at all intuitive) or restrictive. I won't even get into how badly they blundered what seems to be the beginning of Kelly's route in EP5 or I'll go on a tirade. At this point it also seems like there's at least as much if not more lewd content with random girls than there is with any of the primary characters or LIs. All LIs except for Anna are basically a slow burn or no burn so far, but not in a good way - barely any real romantic or sexual tension build up. If there's any anticipation we have for these characters, it has nothing to do with the story but rather what's in our heads after seeing them looking hot in renders throughout the AVN.

-Lots of cumshots that don't show the results - there's a render of it shooting out towards the girl's body and then it cuts away. Even when the girl asks the MC to cum on her and he seemingly obliges we still don't see the results on her body. The exceptions are three facials (two with random girls) and one body shot which we do get to see the results of so I'm not sure why the renders are used in these scenes but not the others - it's strangely inconsistent (even within the same scene in one case finishing on the face shows the facial but finishing on the body just shows it shooting out over the body and then just ends the scene there).

-The whole Alpha/Sigma points system is pretty dumb and so far only really affects part of what you see in two of the early lewd scenes and a handful of dialogue differences in EP 5. The whole system should just be dropped in favor of letting the player just decide what they want to do in a given scene/situation.

Overall, it's clear whoever is doing the renders has some of talent when it comes to making renders of attractive women (when not ruining them with improperly used shallow DoF effects) but the writer lacks the competency to write intrigue that works at all, dialogue that isn't awful, scenes that are interesting, characters with any depth, relationships that are compelling, or lewd content that's actually sexy. Almost everything feels like you know what the author is trying to do but they just don't know how to effectively. There's so much wasted potential here that it's frustrating. I'd normally consider revisiting a game like this once it's done but I don't feel like this one can be salvaged, likely don't care about any of the girls enough to be invested in progressing their routes (which is a shame given how hot they are), and don't have faith that there will be anything that's in any way satisfying enough to play more for. I'd be happy to wrong about these things though if they do manage to turn things around... either way I'm sure it'll do fine as there's a large demographic of people that will buy in for pretty renders alone.

I'm enjoying it so far.

I've seen people complaining about the story, which i think is somewhat unfair given that there are implied (as yet unrevealed) reasons for things happening as they are. I'm happy to suspend disbelief until such a time as those plotlines are revealed.

My one real complaint is that as an obvious non-native speaker, the dev could do with having some of the dialogue re-written or polished as it's a bit jarring or offputting at times. The best example of this would be the sex scene with Kelly. The prior character development is all there for the scene to be tender and emotional, but then the dialogue just comes out of nowhere and doesn't really fit what could be a fantastic scene.

the gameplay itself is very good and it's nice to read the musical component is a very pleasant atmosphere of music and plot wonderfully made characters in general very atmospheric and pleasant emotions the game evokes in you that the game further wants to play it

I have liked this AVN from the beginning. There are not too many LIs and there is a decent story running throughout. Plus the graphics are good, the scene blocking, pacing, etc... are all pretty good. The problem, IMO, is the writing.

I am pretty sure English is not the devs first language as the dialogue is not good. Dialogue is hard to write, even as a native speaker but more so when it's not your first language. Needless to say, this gets in the way of the actual story. While you can get a feel for what is going on, the details are a bit sketchy and some of the MC's plans/schemes while they sort of sound good, they don't really play well. I think this is more to do with the grasp of English than the actual story and ideas.

Regardless, the awkward storytelling and dialogue do cause problems when it comes to staying immersed in the story. Also, there are some scenes that could use a little more meat on them but instead end up lacking and falling short of the intended concept.

I will say the h scenes are pretty darn good, but again, there are some gaps in the language in those scenes as well. Still, they work a whole lot better than the rest of the story.

Despite the obvious talent of the dev, their skills are not enough to make up for the language defects. If they can right that ship and get the story on track, they will have a great little AVN. Until then, it is hard for me to rate this higher than just average.

On a totally different note, I have no idea why this AVN has a sandbox tag. There is no sandbox. There is one segment of point and click/free roam but thankfully, that's it. There are no silly maps. No senseless clicking places hoping you trigger something. None of that, so not sure why it is listed.