Ren'Py - The Hard Way [v0.37.0] [Muffin Maker]

It's been a while since I played this, I thought I would give it another chance but what I found is one of the most boring games I've played in the while, grinding for sex is a slog and there are too many girls which wouldn't be a problem if the grinding wasn't such a tedious task, the plot gets into schizo conspiracy theories which I wouldn't have a problem with after all who plays these games for plot but the sex is so goddamn boring which is the worst thing in a porn game, outside of a few scripted scenes most sex scenes are about the same with different models and even the dialogue is the same, the animation is stiff and lifeless and by the time I was able to impregnate the girls I lost interest, real disappointing because there could've been a good game in there.

It's an experience, some positives, some negatives, some very ehs.

Pros
* Lots of content
* Game is actually fairly stable, I think I only crashed it once or twice, which is impressive for something this long
* If your kinks fall in line of pregnancy and breeding, well, you're in the right place.
* The underlying story is pretty good (see cons)

Cons
* While the game rarely crashed, there are still plenty of bugs, and unfortunately, the dev has not provided a real good place to share them to be fixed.
* There is an animation tag, but at best, it's stop-motion, no actual animation.
* All the sex scenes are (almost all) identical. There are around 50+ women, but really, once you've been with one you've been with them all. (variety is the spice of life, remember this dev)
* "wooing" the girls, so to speak, consists of cycling through 3 actions, at most 3 times. For each of them, it pulls from a small pool of the absolute worst one liners in existence (the girls call you out on it...all of them...in the exact same way)
* Speaking of the same line for all the girls, telling Shakria that you like what she's wearing? (if you know, you know) and even more, she responds with how she wishes it was true or something I don't know...I gave up writing down suggestions, typos, bugs, and other issues after the dev didn't respond IMMEDIATELY on patreon /eyeroll.
* The underlying story is pretty good, and it was enjoyable at first, but then someone hit the dev with a book titled, "Every Conspiracy Theory Ever 4chan Edition" and...my god...it was somewhat sane at first but then quickly took a turn for crazy town, all aboard the opium fueled train.
* If your kinks fall in line with pregnancy and breeding, well, you may be in the right place but you'll probably regret it when you see your first nightmare spawn, courtesy of a night out with the bride of Chucky and a vat of acid. Can we get a cheat code to erase children? I've decided I'm all for retroactive abortion now, kthx.

lots of different girls, but all same positions, good story line, no real stats to grind, but need to move from one place to another all the time.

Dev - different positions and animations would be nice

This is someone's personal god complex where they want every woman in town to fawn over them like horny rabbits. The game has an IMMENSE grind, the story is randomly shat out, and there are just way too many women. It's not even done in a "Well each woman appeals to a certain fetish" way either because every sex scene with every woman is the same. The story itself seems to trip over it's own feet as it's just constantly belaboring the point that the MC is special, the MC's dad is special, "oh you're just so special please fuck us." type shit that gets tired very fast. This is also a conspiracy theorists wet dream as basically every one you meet will explain how one thing or another in REAL LIFE isn't how it actually seems.

Every single sex scene is the exact same, just with a different girl and a slightly different body. Even the dialogue for each sex scene is identical. Speaking of dialogue, the author really needs to get an editor, or even just run the text through spellcheck. But one of the biggest issues is the plot. This seems to be nothing more than a vehicle for the author to push the most ridiculous conspiracy theories. It wouldn't be so bad if it were treated as a parody, but it's fairly obvious that the author actually believes them.

Overall this game should either be redone or abandoned. The graphics are outdated, the "animations" are some of most basic and horrible I've ever seen, and the conspiracy and history crap needs to go. I don't play adult VN's to read about conspiracy theories. The MC is one of the worst looking models I've ever seen in a game that I've played. The models for the rest aren't that better either. Plus there's no background music or any type of sound effects for the sex scenes. Considering how short they go it wouldn't really work. There's also a ton of spelling errors and the grammar and dialogue need a major overhaul from the start. Maybe one day the game might be worth a 3 star or above rating, but considering how long's it's been in development I wouldn't count on it.

Dev's coding skills make this game unplayable, and their paranoia about someone stealing their work makes modding impossible. The art doesn't help, either. The writing is like something out of QAnon or /pol/, but with none of the "humor". the concept had so much potential, too.

Repetitive animations and boring grind combined with a good amount of content would have made this a solid three out of five, but then the game forces you into reading a series of essays dripping with bizarre Q-Anon nonsense.

That's not a joke, or an exaggeration. In this porn game, the developer decided a good idea would be to force you to talk to the in-game teachers so they can spout dreck about dinosaurs not existing and vaccines being lies. It's mind boggling.

Short version, don't bother with this game.

Too many characters!

It's a sandbox so half the time you're scratching your head wondering what the heck to do next.

Far too many characters!

Most of the females are quite nice looking and each of them seems to have a bit of a story to differentiate them from the other 'fuckables' at your mercy, even the non humans have an odd sexy look to them. There's a long drawn out process (grind) of getting them to a state where they become a fuckable rather than an ornament though and some of them never seem to respond.

Has a ridiculous number of characters!

The interface, in spite of being unique as far as I can see, actually works quite well. Didn't have any issues at all getting things to work as expected.

Did I mention that there are rather a lot of npc's?

The game has an ok story, other than that the sex scenes and the animations, are all the same low quality uninspired stuff.
I think it would have been a lot better investing in creating more original H content rather than creating so many different models but with the same H scenes

i liked it playing through. for its genre it was made really good. only one big bug (magic) but thats alright. it have potential for much more content. so no need for a following game. in other words, put "a long way" into this game .

Great story.

Could have use a better way to do the sex with the women but hey it still has a great story.
Would like to see more ways to have sex with the girls.

Its a little hard and takes time to build up but once you get there you don't have any more problems with money.
Most of the women you have interactions with are in the schools, or you can get to them through the schools.

All in all its a great story just wish there was better sex actions.

After multiple hours in this game there's 2 sex scenes total - one set of generic animations with the girl model swapped out, and one unique with one of the generic interchangable milfs and no I don't remember their names there's a dozen of them with slightly different hairstyles.

There's only a few characters in this game: 4 girls (teenager who wants to jump your dick, milf who wants to jump your dick, alien who wants to jump your dick, and possessed who want to jump your dick). It's just that there's dozens and dozens of models and names for each of them for some reason. Not that it matters because they all share the same sex scene.

The only characters that exist on their own and have distinct personalities are the men: MC, the mayor, the not-corrupt cop and the rapist. All the girls have the exact same dialogue unless they're currently the mouthpiece for whatever exposition needs to happen. Does it matter if yvette or xena is the one who tells you something? Nope!

The gameplay is an enormous grindfest where you earn a quarter point of stats at a time while managing constantly decreasing money, hunger, sleep and hygeine. The time is managed down to the minute "for realism" and you have to walk everywhere which can take over an hour cross-town.

All the characters teleport from place to place every hour. Good luck getting to where you need to be before they move, maybe off-map so wait until tomorrow (or 3 game-days if it's the weekend!)

Even fixing up your "house" is a grindfest, 16 full days of work doing nothing but walking there, doing construction, walking back to your hovel and sleeping/showering/eating.

To fuck a girl you talk to her, complement her, come back the next day and you can get to flirting, come back a few more times of giving them a hug then their panties spontaneously combust and they jump on your dick. All the dialogue is identical across the board.

tl;dr: play something else.

This game idea offers a wide-ranging and expansive universe! Such a detailed structure of the game can provide players with a rich and personalized experience. The fact that the characters and developments take place in private gives players a chance to participate and interact.

review for [v0.29.4 Free]
I had my fun with it. It is grindy but not impossible. The sex scenes are repetetive but i don't care. The only bug i encountered was the "Meet the girls behind the cottage between 5 and 6 pm", which was resolved by saving and loading that save file at the given place and time. I also encountered some errors caused by manually changing the girls' age and pregnancy but nothing game breaking.

A boring game with terrible porn whose dev is more concerned with implementing DRM than he is with improving his game.
Seriously, the screenshot in the OP where it's mostly man ass is probably the sex scene with the highest effort put into it. It's just a nonstop slew of bad writing and terrible scenes. The dev's numerous other issues could be overlooked if the porn was at least good, but that's not the case.

Somehow this game has become more buggy as it is developed... nearly every time you try to interact with a character you get an error message. I actually liked the game, despite the grind when I played it back several updates, but I'm not willing to spend half of my game time clicking ignore or rollback on error messages just to try to flirt with a character. I hope it gets fixed, but I'm out for at least the next few updates.

I like sandbox games, the grind and the reward for it.

This game is a grinding sandbox game without any good reward. There may be dozenzs of girls to peruade, and you can chase the one you like, but the Dev thought it would be okay to implement the same handful positions for every girl.

Blowjob from a blonde? It it the same animation from the redhead. Doggy with the brunette milf the same doggy with the furry girl.

The story is serviceable. The graphics and visuals are underwhelming.

Well the story had a real potential, but gets ruined by the lack of animations and quality, lack of music, lack of good personalities with the LIs and belive it or not just to many LIs and very very poor dialogs in sex scenes.
The story also has waaay to much political stuff and virus crap that gets soo boring and there is so much useless text that should never be in the game, i mean who the fuck would care about how the power works on the portal system.....its a constant thing in the game trying to explain useless things.

MCs role is pretty much just to be a manwhore/sexdoll for all females in town, and already at day 1 everyone is in-love with MC which kinda ruins the idea and point of building a relationship with anyone, but your still forced to do that to get anywhere by visiting each girl to just say hi then it adds more to it like hi and compliment and kiss and makeout you get the idea its a shitload of clicking and boring since text are the same and animations are re-used for every girl so there is never anything new to see.

I am not 100% sure yet but i do think you have the option to not fuck someone if you dont want to, which is very much needed since not all are into milfs or big tits or lolies and this game has pretty much everything.

The game really gets confuseing from the very start due to the shitload of LIs trown in your face, i normaly wouldent think there could ever be to many but this went over the top, not just all the girls but also adding aliens, fantasy creatures and so on as well is just to much, and it will absolutly be impossible to build anything meningfull to make you feel anything for a LI.
The LIs should have been cut to half the numbers or less, them maybe there would have been more time to focus on animations and music.

Also think they aim way to big, and you see that by things not being done even after 3 years there is still alot that arent implimented or in devolopment, like private lessons, phone calls, map parts and so on, at this rate game will not just play out over 50 years, but also wont be done for the next 50 years IRL.

The sandbox is a grind to make money and raise stats, its boring and slow.

The worst part is dialogs and quality of animations its without question some of the worst you will find.

Heres a few facts:
All girls are virgins
All girls has a hymen
Dialog in sex scene "MC just a little deeper""Girl: Oh yes deep inside Mmm Hmm""Girl we have to do that again soon" thats it.

0 girls has any pain fucking the first time and no blood, i dont mind missing blood but i do mind 0 pain and how they fuck like a 10 year old hooker.

Dialogs doing the virgin scenes are piss poor as well which also shows 0 pain and 0 talk about it being the first time, you truely wont find a worse virgin scene or sex scene.

All animations are the same for every single girl, only change is the background nothing else, even dialogs are the same, they simply just made to many LIs to be able to make a decent game and dialog for each of them.

Its made so simple that you just go into the class room click a button "have sex with" and you fuck em right there and then, i really doubt this will satify anyone in any way.

Hole story is just kinetic story, you cant make anyone pregnant untill story allows it, no matter how many or how much you fuck someone nothing happens, even after you got daycare center and hospital all set to go there is just nothing.
Same for the weird point system with LIs it dosent matter if you have 20% or 200% its again kinetic to story so you cant fuck anyone untill you reach that point untill story gets to the point where you can, so hole system feels useless and pointless and should just be ignored alltogether.

Its also weird when a pregnant girl calls you and tells you shes in the hospital, then you go visit and no one is there, even after giving birth your told you can see the girls in the ward in a few mins but nope still empty.

Developer cares more about DRM and stopping you from touching any of the game's code than about implementing good gameplay or story or fixing any of the multiple bugs the game has. They went so far as to say it was a war against modders and they will never allow it with their game. Like bruh, I'm just trying to enjoy this shit, not have to grind all my free time away on boring stat grind. I would never see this from any other kind of game other than the ones trying to hide away the content, just to say there's hours and hours of content, when it's all just grinding stats.