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

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.

muy buena VN , no tanto como la anterior pero realmente entretenida, buenas animaciones como buenos modelos, una escritura fácil de leer y seguir, si que es cierto que esperaba una evolución en cuanto al apartado visual y dar el salto a hony select 2, pero tampoco es que sea un problemas, tus historias son muy interesantes, espero con muchas ganas tu nuevo trabajo

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

Version reviewed: v0.31.0 (Completed)

I played this game since I loved the author's earlier game 'Now & Then'.

The author develops another game in the very old Honey Select 1 rendering tool. The character models are terrible and barely serviceable even by Honey Select 1 standards. Honey Select 2 would have been a much better choice.

I expected to have a good experience with this game also but I just couldn't get immersed in the story. There is slow burn, extreme burn, and epic burn. This game is an epically slow burn. No attempt is made to get to the point or summarize anything. The author loves to write but I have no desire to read a 500 page slow burn novel.

Pros

• Good writing (way too verbose however)
• Good characters
• Unique game world
• Unique story

Cons

• Poor quality renders
• Poor quality character models (really bad, especially in 2022-2024)
• Poor character development
• Slow burn to the extreme
• Never could get invested/immersed in the story
• Poor balance between the story and lewd content (99% story)
• Terrible game pace

The bottom line is that the game and story were boring to me. The story premise is unique and interesting at first but the pages of endless boring text/story/dialog ruined the game for me. Perhaps if you love to read and don't care about anything else then this would be a good game for you.

Loved 'Now & Then' but couldn't enjoy this game no matter how hard I tried, sorry... I wanted to like this game, I really did but it ended up being a big disappointment.

I haven't finished this yet, but I'm compelled to write this. Just like with Now & Then, I care about these characters. I made the mistake of balancing all the storylines at the same pace. So at the end here, I'm just doing an onion cutting marathon of completing these stories one after another. It's all so bittersweet. The best possible outcome for these girls, but it's so heartbreaking at the same time. The moments of realization, the initial denial and then acceptance but with sorrowful heartache. And then they do these flashback montages of where you started with them, fuck. Just REALLY hits you in the feels and, like an idiot, I paced all of these to finish at the same time.

It's a very interesting concept. Very well done Honey Select renders. And, as I mentioned, just skillful writing. This is top tier VN that is a NOVEL to it's core. You won't find many kinks getting their back scratched here. I couldn't care less. It is so refreshing to play a game with writing at this level that has adult themes all done so well.

Alright I'm not going to go on a huge rant about the intricacies of this game. I will say this is well written and deals with a lot of deep personal things. This is worth trying. Now and Then was great. The Interim Domain is amazing. Both have their faults but are great games none the less. This one is unique. I look forward to the next outing with ILS.

5 out of 5 stars.

It's got more than a few typos at this point. The quality of the models varies. I've never really liked the bush and tanlines approach that ILS uses, nor the sound effects of the women. And there are probably a few too many love interests, which spreads things a little thin.

And fuck it, it's getting a 5 anyway.

There's actual writing here. The setting is a big departure from Now & Then and represents a sincere attempt at doing something different. The people largely act like people and there are arcs and personalities and themes. This is even more impressive considering the fact that, as I said, there are probably a few too many love interests: a slightly narrower focus could have fleshed the characters out even more. Overall, it's a bit of a slow burn, but I found the overall theme of dealing with loss and moving on to be surprisingly compelling. It's somehow underrated at only a 4-star average as I write this. Personally, I think it's even better than Now & Then, which was a great story in its own right.

If you like slow burns and/or even remotely liked Now & Then, I highly recommend this.

I broke my lurking rules for this game.

It is, at its core, the best written game you're going to find on this website (or in this genre). Its main themes deal with loss and moving on. It shares the same settings and setup as the May I Help You? and Hotel del Luna K-dramas in that you serve as the conduit for helping the lost souls to move on to their afterlife. Of course since this is R material, a lot of sexual shenanigans ensue. If you take away all the R-rated stuff, and tighten up the storytelling a little bit, this can be a very compelling move or web-series. My recommendation for the gamers is this, if you are dealing with losses in your own personal life as well, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME; your headspace may not be able to handle the extra gut punch. But, at the same time, this may just be what you need to finally be able to move on as well.

The main criticism of the game I have is there's a huge noticeable downgrade in terms of graphics quality compared to the previous entry (Now & Then). The video clips seem to be rendered at an acceptable 1080p, but the static images seem to have been rendered at 720p. They can look very blocky and take away from the experience. If the production team can come back and re-render everything at a higher resolution for the director's cut (same treatment as Now & Then), I wouldn't mind replaying the experience again.

My secondary criticism is there may be possibly too many characters and as a result to many character arcs to keep track. I believe the recommendation is you want to spread and balance your activities across the characters, but this episodic type of storytelling can introduce a lot of disconnects. At the same time, I appreciate being able to pick and choose my own pace; I don't a simple guided VN where my path is already picked out. I think an indication of how many "episodes" remain for a character may help, or may be some sort of quick recap for each character arc could do wonders.

This dev is crazy! A complete game in 2 years, with multiple REAL choices and REAL endings? If nobody appreciates the effort, let me congratulate them and watch out for future games. Gameplay itself is simple, keep clicking an LI and make a few choices.

What's not easy is the story; damn some hit HARD. Family, unrequited love, abuse, religion are just some themes the subplots touch on. TBH, I would suggest half the number of LIs just so we can go deeper into each backstory. TL;DR version - came for the porn, stayed for the game.

This game involves good character writing and generally well done sex scenes. However, one thing that really annoys me is how all the character models are redone for the endings. We grow so attached to them throughout the game, but now they're nearly unrecognizable, which leaves a sour taste on an otherwise good game.

I found the game quite good (albeit the now and then VN its half tier above it in my opinion)
Mc was quite good and the stories of different LIs where interesting ,some where extremely good , some other where very good and some ok.
I loved Mira though and in end i chose her.
but i also run few more endings with other Lis.
2nd favorite ending was with Apollyon (my 2nd choice)
Marissa was my 3d favorite ending
and Allison was the 4 favorite.
I run few other ending too but they where far away than the top 4.
The thing is that This Vn gave some some bittersweet feelings especially with the LIs i liked because i knew that they where dead and i have to let them go in the end of their stories , although i was expecting something will happen in the end while MC create the new world.
Even so in the end we had to choose one LI so the bittersweet feeling remained especially because this VN its not like other VN,
in this VN we had to play the stories of all Lis so in a sense we learned about them and become closer with them but in the end we could only choose one and this made it harder to make a choice and not think about other LIs.
Moreover except 3 lis the rest didnt have memories of MC .. so even though MC started the world again and turn the time back most of lis had other lovers before meet MC again... (personally i didn't like that but thats my personal taste in this matter)
While Mira and Apollyon had memories and remained loyal while searching for MC. ( i liked that fact)
and i loved their stories though i didnt like the fact that they both met MC after college so their where around 24 years old and basically they met again after 7-8 years ... thats too much time skip in my opinion they could have met after high school around 18 that would be much better (in my opinion)
i wish we had a throuple option with Mira and Apollyon ... it would be a perfect choice lol and i believe its the only Throuple option possible with how the story ended after all both Mira and Apollyon had their memories remained and had a threesome scene with MC too..
One last thing i loved Marisa ending and that she subconsciously was waiting for MC
and Allison ending was quite good too.
Nonetheless i believe its a very good VN and one of better ones in this site and surely worth playing.
4,5 /5 stars (i gave it 5 because i cant give it 4.5 and the 3.90 it currently have its too low for this VN)

I played v0.30.0 through to one of its endings over a period of a couple weeks, at two or three hours an evening. There is a lot of material.

The game caters heavily to the White Knights among us: the MC rides to the rescue of a whole series of fair maidens in distress, solving their problems and graciously accepting the sex they offer in return.

At its heart this is an extremely mundane game. Every morning the player chooses which girl the MC will focus on for the day. He then tracks the selectee down and solves some little problem of theirs: gives them a ride, buys them a meal, takes them shopping, offers some advice, etc. After a number of such encounters the girl will start to put out. After considerably more she will fall in love with the MC: at which point it is time for him to dump her and move on.

To liven up this dull parade, the devs have given the story a post-eschatological setting. I rather liked this: it kept my interest enough to endure what would otherwise have been a fairly tedious slog.

As might be expected in a sandbox of this scope—where the player can choose the order in which the girls are pursued—there are occasional continuity errors. I think I only once had a character make a cameo appearance after exiting the world, so it isn’t a big problem.

Pros: Lots of material provides many hours of play. Numerous hot LIs and sex scenes (of middling quality). Entertaining setting.

Cons: Its a long, slow, and mostly-mundane burn; enlivened occasionally by some Interim Domain magic.

Recommended for White Knights and those looking for a game that will provide a great many hours of play.

Genuinely amazed by how hard some of the story beats in this hit me. Not ashamed to say I teared up at multiple moments throughout: Marissa, Tina Nat. So many unique well written subplots. For me the moment where it all culminated is when Poly absolutely blazes and for spoiler reasons I won't say more. The story is well written and thought out. The villain is cartoony at times but also chilling when needed.

The victory was a gorgeous pay off I felt. I will say the inability to choose Selene made me a little mad, I really cared/liked her arc (or maybe I messed up?). I loved all the little references dropped, my favourites being Calvin & Hobbes and the Tenacious D diet soda one. Final thing I'll say is that I really enjoyed how the MC was written. There's a tendency for these games to be domineering wish fulfillment so it was nice to have caring loving wish fulfillment instead. Also fitted the games theme.

For negatives, I think there was several moments where continuity broke down, possibly because I blitzed Marissa's route until realising there was overlap with other characters and started going down a loop top to bottom. Graphics in these games are never really huge selling points for me but I'd be lying if I said the art was amazing. I do find it a little funny you never see the MC's face. I come out of this hoping whoever wrote it has more stuff for me to consume. Easy recommend.

(not so much of a spoiler just a little heads up if you struggle with afterlife/loss, any of that nature or hell even self-insert, you might wanna steer clear of this. probably will hit alot worse for those types than others.)

Would give this a full 5 (more like a 4.5) but theres alot of tedium at times and things going all over the place, some character interactions kind of break theme/personality and its pretty obvious. Sequence breaks due to order of events. Theres a few bits of tropes that are like "well im super MC and can do what I want" which is atleast covered by the story.

Aside from that, this may be the only title I can admittedly say made me a bit misty-eyed haha. Reminds me of the movie wristcutters which was an absolute blast back in the day but it hit me with a bit of "fear" with the afterlife that I hate to admit personally, but this story takes a bit of a trip into a similar realm where you're basically living inbetween, inside purgatory, before ending up wherever you go. I was dying for the reference of the mustang eating a pair of sunglasses or something but it never came .

But yeah connecting with someone so deeply throughout the entire story only to be like "its time" and thats all that happens, its a tough battle. You come to love the cast and what each of them represents and its a scary thought when you put it into logic haha. Not an ideal way to spend the last of your days. I struggled with the most probably, was a bit of a gutwrencher not gonna lie. Admittedly I do like to form a little attachment to characters, always have, its a bit more immersive that way. Not too big on the self-inserting part. Putting the person in a position to say goodbye has that effect though haha.

Animations are solid, the voicing on the scenes is actually pretty solid since it just kinda fits universally which is rare in these types of things. The characters each have a strong representation of an issue holding them back though sometimes they break their own character with a little bit of over the top way of dealing with things (looking at you mainly Anita, sometimes I hated her haha) stories written good, not broken english,not many typos, the idea is pretty original. Love the hell outta Mira even with the rocky start and the other Entende are each endearing in their own way. The villain is pretty solid, I like how he ties into everything and yeah.

Would say like a 4.5/5 for sure. Solid title, just some minor things that kind of steer it off perfection. Along with the tedium and sequence breaking that comes in part due to the tedium of how you go about going through the story (ie: one i ran into is a character left already, but there was an event with a trip, which the character was still attending and happened AFTER she left already. Trying to avoid some spoilers with a bit of coded language). Not gonna cheat it a 5 star since I cant rate halves though

I'm a big fan of VNs which go deep into character details, and ILS Productions has a proven record of just that (Now and Then still contains one of my favorite heroine to this day, Carol).
Even if The Interim Domain didn't provide a heroine as awesome as Carol, the world building and many different and interesting characters in it more than make up for it.
Looking forward to being able to read Mira's ending. Keep up the good work and thank you for providing us with such great VNs to read!