Ren'Py - The Hard Way [v0.41.0] [Muffin Maker]

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.

Interesting enough story. Quite apt. I see too many remarks knocking this game. It is a game and it works. Yes I've had a few crashes. But so what? Load the nearest autosave and you're on your way again. No big deal. It's not like no other game ever crashes. The guide tips are very clear so you can move along nicely. Cash isn't that difficult to get so no need for a cheat there. All in all I've been enjoying this
To those who see fit to lay into the developer - Stop moaning or produce something better yourself. There's plenty of awful games out there. This isn't one of them.

Lots of girls, and a story to follow, too easy to have sex with all the girls, it's ok for some of them but it repeats for each and every girl, some effort to get maybe 4 o 5 girls will be apreciated. A lot of potencial with science fiction, magic and different species. I was really surprised for the ton of characters and each one with specific content, but too easy to access. Had to play all story and liked it.

This is a very mixed experience.
Lots to do, yes. But a lot of it is just running around, finding a person at a given place a t a given time (because they only exist in school, for example)
Lots of ladies you can woo and fuck. But the wooing and fucking are always the same few sentences and animations, not very good ones, at that.
Lots of story. Most of it is a conglomerat of most-stupid-conspiration-theories of our and past times. Mixed in are some libertarian nonsenses and antiscientific positions. Oh, and masks are bad for you, too.
Lots of concepts, that are unused or of questionable worth. You can renovate the cabin. Why? All the girls have some flavour text what the like or don't. Not that you could act on it.

I also find it hard to see me as a bigheaded 16 yr old redneck.

Technically the game run fine. But it looks very unpolished.

It gets 3 stars because of the work that has been put in it. I could easily justify 2 stars.

The game is ambitious and big, thats a plus. I believe it'll be a lot better in the future but for now i get the feeling that its still missing something vital to be truly phenomenal. The plot feels way too broad, global conspiracy against a small town? Sometimes i feel like many of the characters have no true purpose and the quests forces the player to speak with them to make them relevant rather than they being relevant to begin with. The sex scenes aren't bad or anything, they just feel like theyre roboticized after a while, maybe with some dialogue that can be reverted, but again, not the same dialogue for every character.
Hope the devs push this game to completion and finalize it with the vision they had in the beginning.

Quite a good game. Alot of interactable characters and alot of sex and nudity (with all of them).
Its lacking in certain stuff, like more positions and more interactions - however it seems that the author is working on that towards the next few updates.

I would recommend this.

I check latest updates and find this game
Very enjoying product so far.
real good girls models and awesome graphics
nice and very funny story
also a lot interactions and places to visit

if you want good game check this, you dont regrent!

Good game, i love the story and the varied girls but, the sex scenes are generic and aquiring enough money is a bit of a grind.
If you could introduce more positions/scenes and maybe a banking system where you could get low interest loans or intrest on savings. otherwise an exellelent game

Not bad overall giving a four now but may drop it or increase it in future.

Good points:
-Large cast of diverse individuals
-Decent story overall tho can get confusing at times
-I do like the hunger, hygiene, and energy system

Bad points:
-Generic sex scenes- with all these girls different positions for different girls would be nice. Especially sense it say in the bio that some girls hate doggy and that's all there is.
-Grind money grind is horrible, even more so on the weekends.
- Animations just seem to stiff for certain scenes (make-out and sex scenes)

Ideas:
- Two ways to fix grind are either increase how much at jobs or add bank with interest on saved money. Doing this could also add option to borrow. Being as its mention that your dad's boat/ship is in dire need of repair, which wont be cheap to fix, and its costly to fix house (weekly payments from sisterhood do help), bank just makes more since.
-notification when you use that last of your food would be ideal
-Add in bio who birthed who (tho I'm guessing this will be added later)
-buying/ changing clothes for girls or at the very lease there default option)
-Add spending the night at one of the girls houses
-Some MILF impregnation
-Adding in bio who can get pregnant currently(unless it is and i missed it because already got those girls knocked up)

There are more things i saw that need to get addressed or I think should be added.

It's a pretty good game overall. Wayyy too many characters creates tons of sex but I also kind of forget who's who every second lol. The storyline's neat but too much talk about science turns me off like damn this is supposed to be porn man. Though I gotta hand it to dev for putting in so much effort into creating so many characters and content (for free too). Godspeed Muffin Maker!

Played the 0.12.2 through, and I must say, this game is rather well put together. I didn't find the small grind difficult for funding, the storyline kept a wonderful pace and the characters MC encounters were decently fleshed out. Animation could be worked on, but that wasn't a deal breaker for me as I'm more story oriented. 5/5 from me. Thank you for this and I can't wait to see more.

I'll admit this is not a 5 start game in it's current form, but is shaping up to be awesome and getting a 5 start review for several reasons.

1. I find edge science fascinating and felt the dev had done some research.
2. Loved the variety of characters and the flow between characters, it feels a lot more natural that having to complete one girl at a time to prevent soft locks.
3. Seemed well coded, I had no glitches or lockups.
4. The bravery of the Dev. Going against the mainstream twitter crown can get a person cancelled. Kudos for that

Hopefully this moves forward, stay tuned.

nice game and exciting with the sandbox mode and the aging modifier. the variety is nice. though the story plot is not very interesting bc of the enhuman thing. thats because its just four stars in the rating

Love the game, het mysteries and secrets make it more interesting.
Can't wait for the further development of the characters. Also girls really follow the pregnancy so that is certainly great. Although I guess some sex scenes should be unavailable is a girl is pregnant.

I love the game! I have to admit it is bit too grindy t first though. I would also like to see some higher quality longer sex scenes at important points with important girls. Other than that I found it very ambitious and very good.

One of the most intelligent games I've seen so far. Excellent casting and scripts. I like how the help option is available for trigger events and the girls come in a lot of variety. The ever expanding universe of locations is also very fun.

I am sure it will improve in the future, but the recurrent and reused animations just encourage me to skip ahead. And the goblins are too tall, especially during the recycled sex scenes. If you like grinder harms with lots of casual sex, this game is for you.

Story:
The story is nonsensical, seems to be an attempt of "only boy in city" with some conspiracy theories thrown on top.
The girls all love the protagonist right from the start and are all cock hungry.
Dialogue:
2000 girls, everyone talks exactly the same way. Found myself skipping pretty much all dialogue and text in general.
Sex Scenes/Renders:
The renders are of poor quality and not very appealing. The sex scenes I have seen are all very boring and there is no build up.