VN - Ren'Py - Completed - The Interim Domain [v0.31.0] [ILSProductions]

I could understand people not liking this game, it isn’t for everyone, but I absolutely loved it.

The story premise is pretty unique and sets the scene well for an otherworldly place where our hero MC can ‘save’ pretty girls while getting to know them and understand why they are ‘stuck’ in the Interim.

Great world and character building with each LI being a distinct persona. The writing is very good throughout. I can understand some thinking it is sometimes slow and unnecessarily long winded, but I enjoy a well written, immersive story and am happy to spin a good game over weeks when I am enjoying the ride. I think it took me 3 weeks to finish this and a bit more to explore the various endings.

A very decent game and massive bonus points for being completed.

This game offers a really interesting plot — unique, and unlike most adult VNs I’ve played. That said, it’s long. At times it feels heavy with exposition, and the pacing can test your patience before the real action arrives. Structurally, it isn’t a sandbox, but the way you can pick which girl to visit next sometimes makes timelines feel out of sync. You’ll jump from one storyline to another without warning, which can be jarring.
Still, the heart of this game lies in its individual stories. Each love interest is fleshed out with a believable, emotional, and often heartwarming backstory. This makes them feel alive, and by the end you can’t help but feel attached. The writing isn’t flawless — a few grammar issues and some overly drawn-out arcs could have been trimmed down. But overall, the emotional depth of the characters carries the experience.

With so many love interests, you’re given a good amount of choices throughout. Most of them are easy to navigate once you know the girls’ personalities — the “right” options become instinctive. All choices matter, since they feed into whether you unlock the good ending and the individual character epilogues. The “bad ending” feels a bit underwhelming, but reaching the good one is rewarding. Replayability, however, is low. Once you’ve seen the good ending, you’ll naturally unlock most of the individual stories, so there’s little incentive to run through again unless you’re hunting for every exclusive scene.

Visually, it carries over the style of the developer’s earlier game Now & Then, but with a slight downgrade early on. The darker tone of the opening chapters might put some people off, though quality improves noticeably as the story progresses. Backgrounds fit the narrative well, even if repetition is unavoidable, and the character renders capture each girl’s personality nicely. The sex scenes and animations start off a bit muted by the dark aesthetic but become more enjoyable as the visuals improve. They’re not particularly varied in terms of acts, but the emotional context of the relationships makes them satisfying.

This isn’t a game for everyone. The slow pacing, dark visuals, and heavy exposition might push some players away. But if you’re into well-written stories, character-driven plots, and emotional arcs that feel unique compared to most adult VNs, this one is worth the time. Fans of the developer’s first title will definitely want to check it out.

Based on everything:

• Story & Characters → Long, sometimes overly drawn out, but with rich, emotional, and unique character-driven narratives. 8,3/10.
• Player Choices → Important and meaningful, but often predictable and with limited replayability once you’ve reached the good ending. 7,7/10.
• Visuals & Animations → Slightly downgraded early on, but improves into a solid presentation with detailed characters and enjoyable scenes. 8,0/10.
  

I played for a couple hours, this one isn't for me. I can see the appeal, but it just doesn't hook me in like the dev's other game. And if you don't like the story than you won't like the game at all.

1. This is a therapy game, and every single person you talk to has trauma that's keeping them here. Not a bad premise for a couple girls but having like 10 girls trauma dumping on you is just too much.
2. Pacing. I don't know what's the intended way to play this game, but it is such a chore to keep up with all the girls stories at the same time. An hour in you have like 6 girls to choose from to start your therapy lessons, if you focus on 1 girl or do them equally, the story still continues, giving (me at least) the feeling of not progressing fast enough
3. Art style. The resolution for the renders look worse than the dev's older game. I don't care about the looks, but the lighting is definitely still too harsh, and flash bangs you multiple times.

Overall, you have to play the game yourself to know if you'll like it

This is a VN with great world building and character writing. Most stories have one or the other, but it is rare to have both.

It is very long and there are a few too many girls, but you dont have to follow all their paths to reach the ending. The plot is just okay, but the airtight world building and the interesting characters make up for it. Don't expect too much sex either.

I decided to give it a shot because I really like the dev's new VN, Toxicity. I'm glad I came back to it after bouncing off of it some time ago.

The Interim Domain [v0.31.0]

What a letdown to anyone who played "Now and then" , this is absolute garbo. Utterly disappointing.
Story/premise are super dumb and all over the place (if you just think for a second), pretty insipid too, characters are just boring and shit, or too flat to care about (tho, even calling them "characters' is way too much), models themselves are good (HS, ffs), rest... don't care.
Don't want to touch it ever again.

Story - ~1-1,7/5. Pass.
Characters - 1.1/5. Who cares. 1D or 2D. Boring is the best description I have for them.
Models/animations - 3/5. Pretty good
Grammar - 3/5. Eh, whatever.

Enjoyable game with great sex scenes.

The story is great for a one time playthrough but the game runs into an issue where it's too many girls. Not all the girls routes were written to the same quality so there were a few that you just skip through.

If the game was condensed more and focused on the better routes, then the game could've been a 5/5

I don't mind too many words between each sex encounter, but i don't really like when things don't move foward, be it short or long text based.

I also don't mind characters models being a little below avg, but it needs some sustenance from the writing, being a unique character. If all of them act the same when fucking, you are left with a reskin meh model as reward each time you complete a long segment that didn't really do anything.

I would probably rate this lower if i finished it, but since i knew it wasn't for me, i droped. If you don't read too much, this game will be more enjoyable then if you had some experience with these themes.

A real slow burn that can sometimes feel a little long winded, but god damn I love it. The premise is interesting, the girls lovely and unique and the endings mostly satisfying (Saaya's was really weird imho). Every single one of the scenes where you had to send a girl made me choke up and teary-eyed. I'm going to miss the characters, especially Mira <3

I really liked the story in general but I feel that some stories were very short compared to the others (Allison's route and Mina's route) and I would have liked to see other endings (DeBeers Women, Nat & Selene, Mira & Polly, Roe & Sammy) but it's ok, very good game, I hope they release a Director's Cut like the previous one.

Ever since I started and finished Now & Then, the concept of MC stuck in a specific place with other girls really hooked me on, and The Interim Domain is no doubt, still maintain that concept but with more unique stuffs.


Pros:

• Good story/concept: Even though the start may a bit tedious and boring, but if you manage to pass that part. Then the real fun begins when you slowly meet and get to know the characters and the overall concept of the game.
• Unique way of how the game progress: Since we know that the characters we met have issues/reasons that made them linger and can't move on properly. That part really hooked me into the game, always want to see what's next in their story just to find out what's the real issue behind.
• Great characters: Everyone has their own charm, their pros and cons, the "part" that made them unique among others. Including the MC, he's really down to earth and know how to crack a joke and be serious at the right time/situation.
• Side characters: Even though they don't have as much influence as main characters of the story, they still have a specific impact to the MC as well as other main characters, even when their role in the story is no longer needed. (Polly is bae btw)
• The visual/graphic and character models are quite good, could've improve a little bit but since I'm more of a story fan, that's not much an issue for me.

Cons:

• The story can be somewhat long winded in a lot of part of the game.
• Kinda disappointing about the "final boss" of the game: He showed as a serious threat to MC at the start of the game and continue to be like that until middle of the story, I was expecting an epic fight or something like that with him at the end. But it's went downhill real fast at the final point of the game.
• The sex animations are quite repetitive.

Overall, I think it's a great game, even though it may not be suited for anyone who doesn't fond of story-focus (and somewhat long winded) AVN game. It still worth a try.

"Archons. Full of power but damned to be the ones turning off the lights at the end of the night".

This is definitely a 5-star game, the plot, the girls, everything works well, that being said, my first dip into this game was after it was completed, so there are some order of operations things that come up. On an update to update level, I'm sure it made sense that everyone explored everything in that update so everyone was caught up on all the paths, but I was playing the Anita storyline and Marisa shows up friendly, when I only had met her once and she was not friendly, so the timeline gets out of whack if you don't know the correct order to play the game in, in the future, I'd recommend everyone to rotate each girl's event one at a time so it makes more sense in the future.

(edit) - The relationships in this game are unbelievable, the characterization is amazing and I have no clue which girl is my favorite, Anita, Robin, Marisa and Tina all stand out, but the other girls aren't slouches.

I totally love the origionality of the storyline! It's my main motivation to give out a rare 5 stars rating!,

(I only give 1 star ratings when I'm really salty, can't be bothered to give 2 stars, 3 stars is the majority of the medicre stuff. 4 is really good and 5 is exceptional in my book) ;-)

I don't think that some of the lower ratings for this game are being very fair. I enjoyed the game, particularly the ending where you can choose which LI to end up with. Brilliant.

The storyline was intense, well structured and well thought out. I was intrigued as I explored the unknown world of the interim, searching for those stragglers that needed my help. The visuals were great (although I feel they are a little dated) but were wonderful at representing this unknown world.

My only complaint (and it's a minor one) is that the story did drag on a little longer than necessary. After a while, playing the therapist to the LIs got a little tedious and I found myself skipping through some of the drama in their lives because it sometimes felt a little repetitive. I wish there had been more time for conflict (with the bad guys, not going into detail for the sake of spoilers) and battle rather than sitting for hours listening to the LIs ranting about their lives. The end boss fight is what I was supposed to be building up for and it was sort of a letdown when that great battle never came to fruition.

Overall, I still think the game is a triumph. I can tell the Dev spent a lot of time and work on this game and I, for one, applaud the outcome. I look forward to any other games from this Dev in the future. Good job! 4.5/5

A 10/10 game recommendation to those who want a great and slow story to enjoy that is a unique from the rest of the AVN you see out there. It is a story that progressively gets better and filled with learning or healing from regrets, finding a way to move on and look past your shadows.

Gameplay : Most choices do matter to a certain degree, and affects the ending (Path of characters), which will all turn out good, but just minor differences (how scenes play out). I highly recommend checking out the MOD which highlights the proper choices to get the best ending with most scenes to get what points with what characters and important choices.

Story : *SPOILER* The MC is in a world somewhere between the after life and the living; where souls stay before moving on to the afterlife essentially. He along side 3 other people are chosen as Archons, who's tasks is to collect enough Qi by resolving remnants (Souls of people with some form of regret preventing them to move on to the afterlife). In competition with one another, each Archon is affiliated with different factions of entedes (Admins who facilitate the between afterlife and the living) depending on their character. Collecting enough Qi over the others will allow a new world or cycle of living to be born, based of the character or personality of the Archon that has collected enough Qi. Our MC goes through a trial of resolving these souls (with regrets) to collect their Qi before they (souls) turn into remnants, and building a romantic relationship with them at the same time.

Visuals : Very very good visuals that could have been way better in my opinion. The characters and the environment from just a look is much more detailed compared to Now & Then, however the quality is worse. What I mean as in quality is comparing a 720p YT video with one that is 1080HD. But it gets progressively better as the game progresses, just a shame that a good portion of the story is rendered not as good as it should have been.

Scenes : Scenes are pretty great, with a lot of animations. When I mean a lot, I mean like every single scene is an animation. You can see each body part moving, like in real life, so superb animations! Obviously, there are even close ups that can be selected as well, for those who are into that I guess. The only thing I would change is the voice effects, they are repetitive since its the same exact voice line for all characters, that is also used in their previous game Now & Then.

Customer Support : N/A

Overall, a great game that is worth the try, and the story + its content that honestly lasted me weeks. Though, I can see why some reviews for this game is bad sometimes, because the story and scenes can get repetitive. But I genuinely believe that everyone should give this game a shot. The story is repetitive as in you get to know characters and getting to know them. You try to resolve their regrets and it blossoms romantically while you do so. However, each character's storyline or plot is different from the rest, which makes things interesting.

The story of The Interim Domain is a very interesting premise: the whole world ends suddenly and now the main character is randomly selected to be one of the few people to help usher in a new world. He is basically in the author's made up purgatory governed by other worldly beings. The reason the whole premise falls apart is due to the poor writing excuse of "We don't know" or "your human mind can't comprehend this" or you're not ready to hear this." Many times, the MC wants to know more knowledge and his handler simply refuses to tell him or simply does not have an answer.

It makes no sense that this world rebuilding process have happened countless times and the Entede still have very little understanding of how humans work despite interacting with them a lot. In fact, they will remark how certain humans act which shows some intelligence. It's nonsensical that these higher beings have no ability to learn when it's clear that they do. The more the plotlines go forth, the more you see of "This is new and have no idea how it works." It just comes off as a poor plot excuse. For beings of such high intelligence, it also makes no sense that they choose some of the worst people as candidates to reshape the world.

What is also great about this is the wide variety of women each having their own lingering problems. That part is done well. The part that isn't done well are the sex scenes. Despite every woman having their own unique personalities, they all talk almost the same when having sex which makes the adult portion rather stale. Also, the render quality is not that good. Oddly enough, I saved screenshots of this game when it was in early development and those renders are better than the completed product. In fact, you can actually see the old render quality in every single animation scene as that's when the render quality is actually good.

A final infuriating part in story telling is that some of your choices are just straight off meaningless. For instance, there was this person named Anya who I always chose to avoid having sex with. However, the game forces you to have sex with her anywhere and it creates unavoidable drama between you, her, and Kaitlin. This is just horrible storytelling. Overall, the author took a huge swing and missed with this game. The game might have been better without the sex scenes.

Great game. I was honestly skipping some of the adult scenes just to get back to the plot. There were a few minor discontinuity issues but not surprising considering how open ended the order of events can be. I did almost all the send-offs near the end, which was a little overwhelming. I kind of laughed at how much bathroom sex there was. I went for the Selene ending first, it was great. Will have to check out the other endings later.

This game is 'okay'. Some good aspects, but there's a lot of disappointing aspects to it, too. Before that, though, let's start with the good.

The dev knows their way around HoneySelect, the environments were well made, lighting pretty well done and character models were beautiful. Sex scenes were pretty well done too. Their usage of RenPy was straight forward, no complicated bits to the UI, etc. Despite my issues with the story, it is well written.

Now, onto the bad. The story premise is good, but I don't think it works for an AVN. The basic premise of a in-between place before the next universe is created is a cool concept, but the entirety of the game basically sees MC playing a therapist with sex occasionally thrown in and a small handful of 'action', too. Frankly, it's tiring seeing the MC or one of the LI's talking about their problems for the umpteeth time. Basically it's non-stop trauma dumps or drama, usually you don't have this many characters be the source of drama in an AVN. I think the premise could actually be cleaned up and made into a non-adult episodic show, and it would probably work, but for an AVN it's just tiring.

Further, while playing therapist, MC has to learn about these characters and even more the dev has to introduce them to the audience as well. The problem is that there's a lot of characters. At the least, most of the characters are pretty memorable, but given how heavy the narrative is, the dev should have focused on a smaller set of LI's, or maybe finished with a bunch before moving on. Lastly, even if they're memorable, probably because all of the LI's have problems to deal with, there were points in the story where I was annoyed with pretty much every LI. Basically, the dev managed to make a story where I had some dislike for every LI, that would be impressive if it was on purpose.

Next, while the sex scenes were well done, they're pretty repetitive. It's a couple of basic animations used across all characters and the content mostly vanilla. The dev could have branched out more with some characters. E.g., Kara trying out BDSM looked promising, but that was quickly shut down.

Lastly most of the endings throw all 'progress' out the window. I only played through two endings, Anita and Selene. But, in general, the notion that the world was basically remade mostly as it was, but everyone MC helped has forgotten about him. Even his chosen partner, just seems to have feelings, I guess, lingering in them. So, all those hours of sitting through therapy sessions and all of their problems never actually mattered? Wtf. Selene's ending was slightly better since she remembered everything but to nitpick, she wakes up as a young teenager, remembers everything including the MC and him choosing her over literally anything in the world (which is what she says) and apparently couldn't keep her legs closed. Like, c'mon she basically says this was life-altering for her. Something to re-evaluate everything and she can't just wait for the MC? Imo, any chosen LI should have kept their memories of the interim and MC and LI could have actually sought each other out. Also, if you get thrown back in time by like 5-10 years, how the fuck are you not buying stock in companies and getting rich. Hell mine some bitcoin or something

Good plot, characters and dialogue. Not really much 'gameplay' so to speak, but it's not that kind of game, so it gets a pass from me in that aspect. 4.5/5, only wish that Polly and Mina had more content.

Simply one of the most impressive stories I've read on here, with a metaphysical exploration of a reincarnation system that smoothly turns from cute to profound and back again.

While there are occasionally typos, the wrong character might be speaking in a scene or two, and (minor) continuity errors can occur if the sandbox is explored in specific pathological fashions, the only real negative is the amount of save-scumming this game can tempt; though most conversations have their effects on scores immediately displayed in the Characters screen, some decisions affect a character not yet unlocked, or set invisible counters which will have knock-on effects.

Add to the above that some scenes can have bonuses depending on the relative sequencing of other characters' stories, and the elusive (and missable) threesome possibilities, and a walkthrough starts to look awfully tempting!

Still, the variety of both character types and sexual scenes, and the fully realized endings for any permutation of all the major (and minor!) love interests, make this an easy 5-star recommendation in my book.

Beautiful game, this game is totaly unique from other games on this forum it has an amazing worldbuilding that you wounl't expect in this site and heartwarming routes, I've played the dev's previous game Now & Then I'd say that the previous game was better but this game doesn't fall far behind it has great characters and good storyplot and it makes you want to see the end of almost all the characters in this game very good game I'd reccomend it to at least try and see it for yourself