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

It's a pretty normal sim game, move around the map, do jobs to get money, talk to girls to get laid and advance the plot, manage time, the usual.

The good:
-Put in some grind and you'll get to a point where you can basically cruise around town and fuck every girl you see right in the street
-Good hint system so you'll never be confused about what to do next

The mediocre:
-3d models are kinda meh and the animations are jank

The bad:
Oh god, where do I begin.
-The game has dozens of characters and they're all the same character in a different suit; sex scenes and dialogue are identical across all of them
-Plot and gameplay are totally disconnected; you'll be told (in boring infodumps) about a conflict between the Illuminati and secret communities of supernatural beings and then you go right back to the normal routine like nothing unusual is happening
-Plot swerves into ranting about how 5G causes COVID and germ theory is fake without warning, cause, or the slightest hint of irony
-Description says the game is meant to have 1000 characters and span 50 years when complete, which is both nigh impossible and actively undesirable (who the hell is going to play 50 years of a one-day-at-a-time time management game?)

tl;dr I came numerous times so it doesn't get a one-star but I cannot in good conscience actually recommend this to anyone.

Is this an attempt to red-pill the porno VN audience?

I'm a sucker for sandboxes that let you just roll around free-using the love interests, so I got further into this than I should've. It's initially a goofy time-waster with a cast that's maybe 4 times as big as it should be.

Then I started pursuing the events, and holy shit. The plot of the game, such as it is, is a festival of far-right conspiracy theories, delivered in all seeming seriousness by characters that are supposed to be on our side.

The antagonist is plotting to wipe out the non-human population of the city with a deliberately designed virus that totally isn't COVID-19, friendly "scientists" deny germ theory, your scientific contact is an anti-vaxxer, all the characters take it as read that the government is entirely tyrannical, one of your side quests is an attempt to prove that the world isn't flat that your character is failing to do (and this is a universe with manned space flight), and someone recommends you sign up for Rumble because YouTube is "full of censorship."

The MC is one unreadable 30-page speech away from being John Galt, and it honestly wouldn't surprise me if that's what the author is actually building towards.

There are a couple of other games and VNs on this site that can get weird with their politics (i.e. Solvalley School occasionally taking time out to shit on feminism), but The Hard Way is a fucking soapbox for crazy shit in a way that comes off as a series of author tracts. If that's not what the author intends, then he needs to take a very long look at what he's doing.

Point and click teenage wet dreams simulator, not for the foolhardy. Artwork is good however. Just a lot locked behind a patreon wall which is not cool. Storyline worth pursuing if your into that kink, the characters are not all accessible and some of them which you want to fuck are not available. Making it very frustrating to play as a game. Author needs to work a lot on this to make fun to play.

[Review written after playing v0.16.3 public.]

Story, Originality, Renders, Sound, Playability, Performance, Bugs, Animations, Voice Acting, Grammar, Amount of content

Click to expand...

The Hard Way is a story about the seach for a missing father, some weird science and lots of female characters (duh). I like the 'alien' species factor which has not been overdone.

I have to admit that i do not focus that much on the story and i use the money cheat to progress faster because i do feel a grind if i do not use the money cheat.

That said, the renders are decent, but i feel the animations could be better. The developer has promissed some more 'sexuall' scenes in a future update which would take the game to a higher level IMHO.

With this version the navigation has been made easier within the game / story but it is still a game that requires a lot of clicking

In its current stage i think this is a good game (hence the 4 stars) and am curious how it will progress.

Disclaimer: English is not my native, so i apologise for spelling mistakes.

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Tons of character that are sometimes introduced at a good pace. Girl renders are a ok, but too small to be able to be anything but meh. Animations are mostly a few frames cycled. The story is a "How/Who-dunnit" in a world where all imaginable conspiracy theories are true, which would be a real cool premise, if the author didn't insist on technobabbling in a way that makes it seem as if he actually subscribe to the premise (Lacks whink in the eye). The characters are ALL variations of "May I suck your cock please!", including the characters that have had a radical personality change. Or males. The males don't want to suck your cock...yet at least.
And with all animations being reskinned variations of 9 animation snippets: "Blowjob" "Pussylick" "Doggy", "Makeout", "Makeout from behind with Nippletwisting", Makeout from behind with Pussyrubbing" "Carry", "Reverse Carry Vaginal or Anal", It gets a bit repetitive. Sex dialogue is sparse and same for all, and while many characters "Love anal" "Hate anal" etc, I have never seen it make one iota of difference.

Interesting concept, but only goes so far, without soul.

First time i didnt enjoy this game but after playing it again i started to love it and always wait for updates sometimes it is a little grindy but i love it anway. its an interesting story about the main characters back story

review based on 0.16.3 version
PRO:
- great coding level. my respect and +2 star for that
- not worst cg
- not bad story
- buildin hint system
- ui a bit ugly, but acceptable
CONS:
- too many girls. srsly, every time when i see girl name my first thing- "who the *** r u?!". and every time u go to phone, then "friend list" and then u search 1 girl from dozens others and only then u ll understand- "ah, that was **** in night shift in local shop"...
- game have socalled "protection"- rpa file have custom header "madmufin". for what reason "protection" here?! no1 need ur cg, no1 ll mod ur great code, 99.999% players ll not able to read and inderstand ur code. minus 2 stars for that
- grinding. im ok with that, but ordinary players dnt like such big dose. to avoid some grind type in console mcstats.Credits+=100000
- game have tag "animated", but 2-3 cycled pics isnt "animation"
- each girl have only 3-5 sexual interaction and there no connection to story. just reach some parameters and u SUDDENLY can all: oral/vaginal/anal. ridiculous...
- game have almost no bugs... i encounted only 1 bug, but that was FATAL bug- after loading save all preg girls disapeared from ward. lucky to me main story was already ended and i stopped play.

this game not for ordinary player. read reviews and only then decide- play or not

This game needs to be retitled to "The Long Way" because it's a ton of grindy content that doesn't result in a sex scene. Seriously, no joke. You can grind out each girl to get a copy paste simple sex scene set and that's mostly it.

As of 16.3 Public you can grind all the girls to get the same copy paste sex animations that are meh at best.

Story: 2* for originality and the author is pursing what they want. Grammer and spelling needs to be improved and theres a few options that lead to errors. The guidance is good but doesn't lead to meaningful scenes. A town full of virgins and not one.... NOT ONE... meaningful deflowering scene.

Art: 2* Not the worst but not great either. Most girls look okay.. Not a lot of wow factor and there's so damn many they're forgettable.

Content: 2* Lots of throwaway content. That's it.

There is one unique sex scene in the beginning which is a blow job. Finishing quests results in a few blowjob scenes that are the copy paste ones from the grinding. Not even unique.

Sorry but this open world game is annoying and has virtually no point in playing since the gameplay doesn't result in sex scenes or much else. The story is forgettable and painfully long. The plot is dragging on for now apparent reason.

Oh and all the girls, I mean all of them have huge hips/glutes. There is painfully minimal variety.

It doesn't deserve the loli tag. Better luck next time dev.

Love the game, very well done. It has come a long way development wise.
For those that have issue with the textual content I would encourage you to keep an open mind. Life is rarely what it seems and the story line touches on a lot of truths that go against 60% of peoples belief system. I applaud the textual.
Looking forward to the next updates.

Thank you for making this.

I have waited until 16.2 to actually try playing The Hard Way. An hour in and I am done. The idea is interesting, but the characters are not.
I don't know where this is being developed, but maybe Wisconsin? That is the only place in the world I have been that has young girls with below the waist being 3 times the size of the upper body. In an hour, that's almost every main character presented. This seems to be an "ideal" among Crowdfunding adult game developers.
It's the exact opposite for me.
Having now read the reviews, I'd say it's a good thing the turn-off hit now. The dialogue/story to this point have been amusing. Conspiracy would have to play a part, as that's the premise. That it is 'Q' theories...
Hard Pass.

v0.16.2 Normally I avoid "sandbox" tags like the plague (when I'm in AVN mood I just want to read an AVN, not click places on a map and grind stats via doing the same shit over and over, that's what killing bosses in RPG's are for). What got my attention and made me try it was 50+ LI's. I dunno why I was expecting decent sex animation quality with that many, but they are all basically the same options reskinned 50 different ways (BJ, Eat Pussy, Doggy sex, doggy anal, standing sex, optional impregnation on a select few). I'm not sure if those get expanded if you go into Groundhog Day mode and grind their affection stats up but wasn't about to repeat that monotony for 50+ girls (got Yvette to 150% on everything and nothing new happened beyond the first BJ scene in the sauna). The story is , well, strange and unusual, but I guess it had to be to avoid NTR and have it mostly just the MC and a city full of only women (besides the mayor, his asshole son, a farmer, and a cop that are simply uninteresting to every other girl). The incest, well, doesn't really feel like incest as the MC is basically genetically engineered with multiple "moms" and is certainly not what most readers think of when looking for an incest AVN (another tag that got me to try this). At least you are not left guessing on what to do or who to talk to next, the clues are perfectly clear, so at least there's that.

This is the VN equivalent of having Tucker Carlson "ask questions" while flipping through a bad porn mag on air. Just sat through a half-assed explanation of germ theory and the debunked terrain theory, which literally claimed that your own body made pathogens in response to broken legs and cold mornings. Terrain theory never had enough to stand on by itself, and the few concepts that were useful always fit fine within the boundaries of germ theory. Anyone who brings up this trash (a theory debunked over 200 years ago with clear defects) is literally not worth listening to about anything involving science ever. It's basically used by people who claim that you don't need to go to doctors - all you need to worry about is diet and nutrition and an endless supply of unproven superfoods and supplements. Ugh. It just started an attempt to tie radio waves to pandemics, and the blatant "5G caused covid" premise almost made me throw up in my mouth.

I was hoping the conspiracy bullshit was entirely fun fantasy (I mean, goblins, cowgirls, invisible elf, genetic engineered superpeople, etc), but no. The author clearly believes this kind of idiocy that's literally caused deaths. And he's using this as a vehicle to push it.

If it was good porn I could maybe ignore it a bit longer like the racist cousin ranting at a family dinner, but it's not. It's like a flip book of a few dozen women naked in the exact same poses of "ecstasy" being boned by a 14-year-old with a mullet. The dialogue and characters are forgettable, which is how I made it several updates without it pushing my buttons enough to actually drop it until now.

I've tried a couple of times to get into this but it's just so low effort it's a struggle.

I say low effort because sex scene posing is shit and copy pasta'd to death. character models just stand around on a screen when talking with no effort at all put into posing.

Renders have no depth to them.

It's all designed for quick releases but doesn't really offer a great deal.

One of the main selling points is how it will have over a thousand characters. I'm sure that sounds great in the devs mind but we're already at a point where names just fade away because of severe character bloat. Most of the characters don't really serve a purpose.

The roster is just big for the sake of being big not for any actual reason.

I wanted to like it becase the ambition is there but it's lacking in nearly every single way. Plot is shallow, characters are forgetable, sex scenes are bland and renders are basic.

Even the games banner, the very thing designed to draw your eyes to their product, is an overcrowded mess.

The game has potential to be good, but it leans way too much into conspiracy theories and present them as if they were facts in the mind of the dev. That makes it very hard to keep the suspension of disbelief going for me.

If it stuck to more fantasy tropes instead, it would deserve (imo) a better score.

The story and overall concept are good, but there's WAY too many characters. It genuinely becomes comical how each character introduces you to 2-5 more characters. Why is this a bad thing?

1. With that many characters you either get low quality content, low quantities of content, or both. Unfortunately in this case it is both; each character's animations just being a re-skin of all the others and they're below average quality animations to begin with.

2. I'm skeptical of developers who keep introducing more and more and more characters because a lot of the time it feels like an excuse to never end development so they can continue milking their monetary backers for as long as possible without having to actually finish a project.

this game has way too much mechanics going on in it ; v0.18 and still only 4 females can have babies ; i like the idea of the game ; entertaining but there is a lot of room for improvements ; programing especially ; maybe dev is trying to work on too many projects at once -- dont know ??? ; if dev is ; would much like to see a lot more time spent on this game so updates dont take so long to come around and the updates have a lot more meaningful content

Started playing this yesterday, and got dissapointed.

The story is good, and could work better, but in my opinion, there are way too much caracters involved.

The sex scenes are bad. All the girls in same positions, even if the circumstances are perfect for other scenarios. Why not cover Summer with paint wile fucking her, or fuck Dianne and Gloria on their desks?
No close-ups, no three-ways, exebition or public sex, even the caracter states they like it. No sperm, so it is hard to imagine how they will get pregnant.

So overall, I can only give it two stars.

The game works. For its current state, it does in general terms do what it says that it aims for. The few repeating sex scenes in there are ok. There is some polish visible in the game but it can not distract you from the amount of cut corners everywhere.

Game is quite grindy. Probably not too much, but since the game does not really give you any relevant feedback from your actions, you will end up grinding excesively without knowing if what you are doing is helping or if you are just wasting time.

Prime example is the core gameplay mechanic of this game where you repeatedly compliment and flirt with girls. I talked up all 3 girls in the shoping district about 30 times without any of them ever offering to have sex or that following into any quest or anything else.
Then I met new character, talk her up twice and she is more then ready and willing to go at it. And you have absolutely no clue about why it worked here and not with the others.
(Note that the flirting and complimenting etc. are just copy pasted phrases that you repeat to all the characters in the game. )

After I started save editing I figured that it is related to your charisma stat. Girls have some charisma treshold. If you charisma stat is below that, it does not matter if she is madly in love with you, but the moment I edited that stat just 6 points up, bunch of girls suddnely had option for sex. Game does not tell you that. And game does not tell you what exactly contributes to raising your charisma stat. Does talking a lot and repeating for 1000th time that the girl look like supermodel help? Or does it raises with your story progression? Or something else? You will never know.

Which ties to repetition - There are very few sex scenes that are just repeated with every single character in the game. Not every character has even acess to all of them. And they all look identical, except with different girl body.

And the ammount of characters is also ridiculous. Too many of them, which on its own would not be bad. But most of them are irrelevant. Too many are just so forgetable that when story tells you to go to some of them, you have to look up who exactly is that person that is supposedly so extremely important to you.
I can apreciate the option to chat up every single store clerk. But the value of this option goes into drain when interaction and sex scenes with every single store clerk is just as bland and repeptitive as with characters that should feel more important.

Has a lot of pontential. So it loses points in a few area for me. Sex with every woman is exactly the same. Like some of the offer the standing sex option, but I still feel like the variety is lacking. It doesn't even need to be a different position entirely. The game has no audio, not even basic sounds. Some background noises and definitely some basic sex sounds would make it much better.
But it has great potential, there are so many ladies and reach into the fantasy varieties! Goblins, cat girls, bovine ladies, and elves. Looking forward to seeing what else might come out. Pregnancy gets points from me. There is money and time management which keeps it from being too easy. And it has a stat system that will efffect portions of the game.

tl;dr charming but flawed game is a vehicle for a foolish writer to preach about contemporary world issues and nutjob conspiracies.

I want to like this game. I really do. There's a lot that ticks my boxes - easy sex on demand any time or place with virtually everyone you interact with, a huge cast of characters, some really good and interesting world building and a neat little mystery tied into it that works well enough to pull you through the world.

Navigation and the gameplay loop are just as engaging as they need to be - it's man of the house with simpler options and goals are generally obvious, clearly defined, and seem to trigger appropriately and quickly. dealing with the large cast can be annoying because everyone barely looks different and there's like 50+ names to keep track of, but the phone having a directory and location for all the characters makes that easy enough to deal with.

I really enjoyed the first 70% of the game. The story was engaging, winning over the ladies was fun, and constantly unlocking new areas/characters is a good pull. except...

the sex system, which apparently has been rebuilt recently, is extremely limited. This is understandable for such a large cast, but it's a little disappointing when the majority of characters have 2 options which both have near identical animation loops to each other, and every character has identical sex animations. There's a fair amount that have 3 options, and maybe 10 have 4! as far as i can tell, only 4 have 5 options. Again, with the scope of the game, I get that this isn't where the creator wants to invest time, but when you finally get tired of the same tiny animation on every character of every shape and size, you realize something else.

the pacing and economy kinda sucks. The game has you running around to chat with 2-3 characters at a given point in time (which is great), but there's little thought given to which characters are where and when. Critical characters will disappear for an entire weekend with no way to access them. Ok, well there's a time/money dump to build up and that's neat and engaging, except there's nowhere to work on weekends. the job givers at the town hall don't show up and the school, in spite of literally sucking your dick to have you work there, won't let you in to grind work/money after hours. The amount of money you get made sense at the beginning of the game, but when you've passed that point and you're only really dealing with the money dump (building your own house), your earning potential is extremely small in comparison. A typical workday, maximized, will still yield less than $100, with individual purchases for the house averaging $800. You do get $1000/wk to help with the time sink, but there's no reasonable way to earn the necessary amount for 4-5 purchases for 5 rooms with a rather large time and stat cost built into each instance.

My point with that is when you tire of the sexytimes, you're left with the storyline and the gameplay. The gameplay is frustrating because you're gated with money to do one thing per week, and on weekends it's often the only thing to do. So what about the storyline?

The main storyline and mystery is intresting and engaging. the characters are kinda flat, but the worldbuilding is really cool and everything that got revealed made me want to learn more. and then...

then the creator decided that a porn game was a great place to soapbox about conspiracy theories. the last 20% of the game is supposed to be an intense race between mobilizing a rebel faction vs. a powerful established order of enemies, but what actually ends up happening is you run around back and forth between doctors and teachers while the creator rants about how lockdowns and masks shouldn't be used, and copy-pasting in a shitload of medical and biological terminology and concepts that he clearly doesn't have the overall context in the field to understand.

The dialogue was always poorly written, but when the poorly written dialogue is a mary-sue preach session about public health in a pandemic, i just cringe until i quit the game. I guess the saving grace is that, because it's a porn game with demonstrated shitty dialogue, people will likely skip over most of the writing.

and that's it. A charming game that needed a few tweaks to be quite good, and some investment into the sex to be legitimately great is instead ruined by an insane creator ranting about having to wear a mask to keep immunocompromised people safe in a pandemic. If I stopped halfway through my run, I'd recommend to all my degenerate friends.