VN - Ren'Py - Abandoned - The Heir of Shadows [v0.2.2] [SpaceBird Studios]

Short, but really promising. No red flags or anything. It improves where many AVNs fail. The most obvious one is the MC's appearance. They're almost always goofy-looking or just outright ugly. When they're supposed to be good looking, they usually just have that default gigachad face, but this one managed a good-looking MC without any of that.

The characters act like actual human beings, which I do appreciate and there are plenty of choices despite the lack of content. As long as this continues to feel like we have agency and the plot is unraveled a little more, this will turn out a great AVN.

I guess the only negative are the renders. The models of the girls and even the guys are good, but they're rendered at 720p, plus they're grainy. My guess is the dev's rig is not powerful enough for anything better than that. Hopefully his patreon picks up.

I like it so far. I would give it a 3.5 or 7 out of 10. The writing is okay, decent nothing special but its coherent and I can follow what's going on.

Drawback is there's not much content out so far and updates are really short, but I can accept that if we have maybe regular updates every 1-3 months.

Visuals could improve, but aren't bad, the writing also could improve somewhat, an example I felt it pretty weird gf felt like she needed to go somewhere after her bf just woke up from a 3 day coma. Everyone in that situation, even friends would likely cancel plans and make sure their companion is okay.

Regardless decent start and wishing the dev the best

Story is not bad so far. Though since it's in early stages it's still hard to evaluate properly because it is pretty short. Models also look nice.

"BUT" the main con for me are RENDERS. They are awful. In technical meaning of this word. They are low-res, grainy and overshadowed. Sometimes I had to screenshot and use several filters, denoisers/rescalers to see at least something fappable. A couple results what I mean by that I put in the discussion thread. If the renders were up to date it could be among top tier games on this site, but they look like they were made not even 5 years ago, but about 10 or more. Maybe I somehow got "compressed' version and somewhere exist another one, but I haven't seen it so far.

Still it was interesting to read (but VERY hard to fap, had to use a lot of imagination) - that's why I rate it "good". I hope the dev could get a better rig. Coz there is no need to change anything - neither models, not frame compositings, just the rendering quality of images.

Good character design, interesting plot. Overall its nicely done. The story is actually pretty interesting, I didnt feel the need to immediately start skipping. The MC's dick though.. come on did you forget to add the textures to it or something? Lol come on. Anyway I see good potential here.

Really nice game with good looking characters and a nice setting. I love games with magic/mysterie/fantasy plot and by what i can tell so far this is a game fitting that genre and it seemes to bee well made aswell. This is very early of course but so far the renders are looking good, the characters are beautiful so overall the game is looking good.
The plot seems very interesting aswell with the MC having some magic power which is not really awakened yet, some magical community and enemies who want to get rid of the MC. So far its ticking all the right boxes and it will be interesting to see where this is going. The dialogue is well written so far and enjoyable to read. I normally dislike games where you start with beeing in a ralationship but that doesnt bother me ofcourse if the girlfriend is a bombshell like in this game.
The sounds and music are nice and fitting but the phone-mechanic is a bit bad i think. It was kinda buggy for me, with the story not progressing when getting a message and the phone looks kinda weird aswell. But apart from that this game is really good and it looks like you have also quite the impact on the story with the choices you make. We will have to wait and see if the stat system will be complicated and obnoxious so you always have to choose the right choices to max certain stats to get what you want or if it will be intuitive and easy going.
Overall id say definetly a game woth checking out if you like the fantasy setting.

Pretty decent start of a game. A first version that wasn't 5 minutes long and holding a hand out at the end of it. The writing/dialog was great.. the renders were good and the story got me interested.. not much else one could hope for in a initial release. Looking forward to see where this one takes us.

For a 0.1 version it's pretty solid.
For now the MC and the characters don't seem to be stupid (BIG plus)
The dialogues are not unlikely, the story has great potential and the renders are good.
5 stars of encouragement (ready to reduce the rating if needed)