Ren'Py - The Null Hypothesis [v0.7b] [Ron Chon]

Overall it's an amazing game, with such rich girls and graphs, the grind is a bit tiring, but its all worth it, i suggest more tasks and maybe more interaction with nightcrawler and the others.

Either way, i have some really high hopes for the next updates and incoming content, i really liked the way the chapters and story progress, i hope for more options and a bit of weight on the choices during the the story and combat. Of course there are things that need a polishment and all, but it's amazing and early, high hopes for the future updates!

Very Similar to the game its inspired by with better art assets and stable code.
Honestly its impressive as hell but I'll admit I am aprehensive to how it continues.
Currently the gameplay rewards are sexy outfits to dress up girls in and some sex scenes in multiple positions. At this moment the game could go two ways, expand the roster of girls ad infinity, or increase the depth of the girls and the "Quirk" system.
My hope is this game will go for quality over quantity but time will tell.

Love the graphics, nice story and great premise which look like will grow over time. Each girl has a unique story and personality.

I am looking forward to what they do next and how the bring more girls into the story.

Extremely polished visual novel, based on X-Men comics. Character visual design is very good and praise worthy. Some sex animation, does appear to be work in progress. Storytelling is engaging, nuanced, and true to the source material. Excellent entry in school harem genre.

Economy is grindy like all visual novels, but the income source does scale. Money gets you toys, outfits, and items to quickly gain points toward leveling the cast.

Giving 5 stars, but would like to see quality of life tweaks to UI navigation (main menu but costume menu in particular), tweaks to item economy pricing, added sfx audio during scenes, and many more chapters that take from other X-men storylines and characters to play with.

Tbh I'm having fun playing and loving it just because of the story and relationship we get to have with the people in the X-Men, I couldn't care less about the sex, that's just a bonus.

Add even more fan favorites members from the X-Men (Kitty, Emma Frost, Madelyn Pryor, Psylocke, Jubilee, Polaris, Mystique?!) and more autonomy sandbox, and I can see this hitting it off even better if it isn't already!

For Version: 0.4b

The visuals are great, progression feels satisfying, the quests are described very well and I doubt many people will get lost. For an earlier version it has way more content than I expected and it is very polished. The story that is set up is very little (at least for now). Most of what I would call a story is your developing relationship with the girls and Kurt/Nightcrawler. If you are looking for a big narrative this is not the game, yet.

This is the beginning of an amazing game with an immense potential and I hope it doesn't go squandered.

Great writing with excellent art and plenty of tasks without feeling too tedious to do them as the character interactions are still interesting and rewarding, especially with your favorite. Overall a very well-done game

Only play this if you really love the X-Men Evolution cartoon style, maybe some of the more recent movies. It's not like 97 or OG series, and doesn't feel or look like most of the comics I'd read, but maybe the newer comics are this style too.

Obviously this is a derivative work of the X-Men. It is the dev's interpretation but there is little change or attempt to hide it and they in fact openly disclose it as such.

Game is quite grindy, and has that annoying quest style sandbox. A lot of work has been put in on the menus and various systems, from a technical standpoint it's extremely high level and proficient. Art is inconsistent, and at times the shifts are jarring. There isn't a real overarching story, the narrative is rather weak. The characters are the main focus, so far the three you see in the banner, each with their own personality. I do not know if more characters will be added.

There is a sort of issue with progression, where the game is clearly designed progressing each character (and you have to in order to advance) but they will throw fits if you so much as talk to or study with another girl. I've had them insist they're busy, then call in another girl to study, and then one of the girls barges in angrily and is angry about it, which means a drop in points for them and they won't talk to you for several days. There is a sex mini-game too with very slow progressing bars, if you click auto advance and then try to click options, the girl might refuse consent and get mad that you asked ending the sex scene immediately, albeit only a minor stat drop. But considering how low stat gains are it's kind of annoying too. You have ability points to add to your character but you get very few of them and they don't seem to do much of anything anyway, it is another designed locked progression.

All in all I'd probably give it 3.5 stars especially if you're a fan of these chars and the grind and design decisions do not bother you. I suppose that means 4 or higher, but I'm rounding down this time. I'm surprised this has such high reviews, but I guess I can kind of see why. I hope it rounds out better with more content, it seems to have been developed for about 1.5 years now, it's a solid amount of content for that much time, but still could develop into something greater.

More than anything else, I appreciate that the devs for this game clearly took the time to make these characters feel like their source material, which is an amazing feat. I can tell that this is a game made with love for the x-men.

Rated at VER 0.4a

Criminally good. You can sense the passion the developer has for this game because of how everything is polished and fitted together. The User Interface fits the X-men theme well with it's industrial, minimalist font and coloring.

While many consider art style to be subjective, I doubt I could find even 5 people in a room of 100 who would rate the art below 3 stars. It's rendered superbly as well as being animated smoothly with minimal stutters, even on potato PC builds. (played this on a 7-year old laptop intel i7 CPU).

The plot line is genuinely captivating and intriguing, and I can tell the developer has actually thought about the story! So many devs for other RenPy games are incredibly talented with renders/art styles but fall short on story, relying on their art to carry their work - but this excels in both departments. I am looking forward to seeing the stories of the other girls develop, as well as our mysterious protagonist - something I cannot say for other "traditionally" good porn games.

TLDR: 5 stars. Great fit and finish, great art, great story.

To me this is a quintessential example of a 5 star game, because while it's not near as ambitious as many other games it achieves what it's trying to do with near perfection.

The writing and characters literally feel on the level of the source material, and feel very genuine. (The Rogue of this game is literally in contention for best girl in any game for me) And the gameplay and progression is really fun.

The level of grind feels like too much at first, but once you understand the system it isn't that bad at all. Just buy gifts and give them liberally and the progression actually happens at a very good pace. I wouldn't recommend cheating as the buildup is important and is handled very well.

Only 3 love interests so far, but more to come. Though what it lacks in numbers it makes up for in quality, and high production levels all around.

This is now very close to the top of my "waiting for updates" list.

this frikkin game is amazing
decent writing, great art, actual gameplay for the erotic scenes
only through the first chapter for now but enjoying it a lot. so far nothing seems to prevent you from following multiple paths at once but I have a hard time choosing between the girls. they are all great!

Good writing in both the characters and on the subject of consent. Lots of games will throw even the idea of plot out for the sake of banging as soon as possible but in this game you gotta work for it.

A 5 Star Game!
I'm pretty meh on superheroes, avoid school slice-of-life games like the plague, but this is fantastic enough to be a 5 out of 5 for me. It's the Titanic of romance movies, the Eminem of rap, the whatever of whatever that stands out from the genre with how good it is.

5/5 Gameplay
Sex scenes are interactive and realistic. You get a better score for including unique moves, and since this counts all the foreplay moves, you naturally want to add foreplay at the start (or between orgasms). The characters will say 'No' to advances that are uncomfortable and will realistically leave if you keep trying to annoy them about it.

Outside of the porn gameplay, it's standard VN fare, but the quality of life shortcuts take it to 5/5. You can shortcut jump to locations to reduce tedious VN travel clicking and the map will have a red alert icon when there is a special event to find. Fantastic stuff. No carpel tunnel syndrome here.

5/5 Art
I love the art style, the facial expressions, and the costumes. I love how you can slightly slutify and mix the outfits, from innocent "Why don't you unzip that slightly more?" to making them wear a bra (minus modesty points) covered by a jacket (increases modesty points). I love this realistic way to be slightly slutty without revealing too much skin. It's how girls go clubbing IRL without being called a hoe. Love the realism. The game hints at eventually having them wear vibes, fetish gear, and possibly corrupting their "hero" and "everyday" outfits rather than their "private" "sexy" and "swim" outfits, and I sure hope they do this. The more public outfits have different tolerance scores too, so even after you get them naked you can still progress slutifying their everyday outfits. Fantastic potential here.

4.5/5 Story
The overarching story seems generic X-Men Marvel fare, but the characters are written well. Some characters have accents which is slightly annoying, but they all have unique personalities and even unique texting styles. There is standard VN fare where you have to act as a therapist for them and I find myself fast forwarding some generic conversations where I know the vibe and outcome. The bar isn't high for a porn game, so it passes, even if it is generic writing for a generic plot. There's other superhero corruption games I've played with better writing and crazy plot twists, where I didn't want to fast forward key moments, so it doesn't get a perfect 5/5 here. Maybe there will be twists on the story later? Or more well written porn pervy situations the characters can find themselves in?

Overall
This game is a great girlfriend dating simulator from texting them good morning to "innocently" inviting them over to study at night. The progression is realistic and natural... except that the women will actually pay for dates and even take initiative to ask you out. I don't know if the writer is from the Netherlands or something, but giving us Americans a taste of non-do-everything-for-me-I'm-a-princess women is commendable.

My only gripe is that there is borderline too much grind and inane filler text, but this is partly my fault for attempting to clear all the optional content. I think if I focused on the main story line it'd be at a good pace. It'll take many hours before you get to a fappable spot beyond heavy petting and kissing, which the game even seems to acknowledge by making it hard for your character to orgasm until their lips are around your cock. Any who doesn't want beautiful fit women lips around a cock?

Gorgeous CG, amazing attention to detail, and an actual story. The only thing that really detracts from the experience is the amount of grinding with progression locks galore. Nothing some modding can't fix, of course

Absolutely brilliant game!

The story itself is good. Not the greatest, but good. What impressed me the most was the artwork of all the characters. Laura looks absolutely breathtaking, the ultimate "muscle mommy". Rogue is just... there's no words to describe her but "perfection". Jean is also looking quite juicy. The H-scenes are pretty good, and I overall had lots of fun playing it.

I think, when it comes to improving the game, the best points I could make are:

- The game already gave the option for us to give our character a general appeareance. What about making it visible as we're playing? Giving it a face (hopefully as well done as the girl's), a body, and clothes, so we can actually spend our money on something besides dating.

- The sex scenes are awesome, but I would like to point out that it would be way better if, by turning the option where we can see our character during the sex scenes, we can ACTUALLY see it completely. I understand the idea of keeping the main parts of the girls as visible as possible, but I, particularly, prefer the realism of the scene, and I'm sure many think the same.

- Maybe add a mission system? Naturally, the base of the game is much more of a dating-sim than anything else, but it would be really cool to add some missions that we can go to as we're progressing in the storyline.

Overall, the game is absolutely brilliant. I hope you don't take my observations as criticism in any way. These are simply some advice from someone who had an absolute great time playing this game and enjoyed it a lot!

Waiting for the next update!

Game is pretty decent with a very vanilla story but theres really not much when it comes to the main story, 90% is about progress with the girls and then 10% main story.
The girls has diffrent personalities which works great, but it is mostly a dating sim and it does have a bit of a grind to it as well.

The sex scenes becomes boring really fast since the progress bar is just to damn slow, atleast you have a 3x speed option for MC but why on earth its not an option for the girls as well i dunno..... so you really shouldent play this for a fap but to see if the story will be worth your time playing it.
Progress with girls is really slow as well, it takes like 800 or points in love and trust to finaly fuck one of them and most gains are like 12 points so keep that in mind when you try it out.

The art/girls are really nice and there are some cute facial expressions, so some things are well made.
The sandbox isent that bad, theres a little grind for money and a ton of grind for girls progress and doing the "sex" scenes a million times with each girl before moving from touching them with clothes to underware next, to kissing and so on its extremly slow.

To me the grind was to much compared to story and compared to rewards, the virgins scenes where pretty bad as well, you get an achivement first blood when fucking your first one but there arent any blood so it is very vanilla in every possible way and it dosent make it any more fun hearing "im on the pill" from every single girl its just meh.
Also once you have seen any of the girls sex scenes you have seen all, its pretty much just 3 identical scenes that you have to repeat a million times for each girl so its very repetitive which is what really makes the grind so boring.

Music is ok, standard background stuff.

Excellent art and very good story and game play. Only reason I'm not giving this 5 stars is because of the grind. It takes forever before you can actually sleep with the girls. You have to rise the stats extremely high, go past several story moments before you can do much.

Review for v0.3d

On the surface this game looks great, and I have no doubt there's a lot of effort going into this. The art is very good, the UI looks nice (and I like the comic book-esque dialogue boxes), I'm not struggling trying to read bad translations, some neat mechanics, etc etc. The game has a foundation. But as I looked past all these shiny things and got into the core gameplay loop, I realized I just do not enjoy this game.

First keep in mind I'm writing this review knowing next to nothing about X-Men and never being particularly interested in super heroes. What caught my eye was the art, as you could probably guess. So I gave this a shot. I can't speak to how accurate to the original source it is.

Now what exactly is The Null Hypothesis? Dating sim is a good label, and I'd also lump in trainer game with a heavy emphasis on being a sandbox. After a rather nonchalant intro of us awakening our powers, which happen to be the nullification of other people's powers, we are dumped into a school for "mutants." We get some brief character introductions and then it's time for the grind to start.

And damn do you have to grind. It's not as if it's hard, but just incredibly uninteresting. Each girl has a trust and love level to raise. As you might guess, you repeat events such as training and studying to raise them, along with saying the right things in dialogue. My big issue with this is that like 70%? of the games events get summarized with a couple lines of flavor text. Sometimes you get some extra dialogue with a girl, but not much before it ends and you do it again the next day. There's not even close to enough unique scenarios, causing it to feel very stale very quickly.

The MC is designed for you to be able to self insert. He has minimal background, and you never see any part of his body. Unfortunately this just means he's very forgettable. Every once in awhile he talks about his struggles adapting to this new school and having powers, but in no way does that really get portrayed. You literally don't do anything besides get friendlier with the girls. I was waiting for the game to maybe pick up with some type of action where we actually have to use our powers or implement our combat training, but in the few hours I played that didn't happen.

So the focus seems to solely be on the girls then, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The thing is my other, and probably biggest, issue with the game is how relationships are handled. Everything feels designed to be repeatable, leading to no events that actually feel unique. I focused on romancing Rogue just so I could see what the love/lewd parts of the game were like. After raising her stats enough, she eventually asks to start dating. Go on a basic date, repeat that twice, and she's your girlfriend now. You do get some cute new dialogue lines, but in essence all this is really doing is unlocking more lewd options.

What exactly do I mean by lewd options? Let me tell you. We get what I can best describe as opening up a gallery. If you've ever played any of those old mid flash games where it puts a girl in front of you and you're given a list of options such as "grope, kiss, change positions, undress, fuck, handjob" etc etc, it's exactly like that. You just pick from a list of options that progressively unlock from raising love while you get some basic sex scene lines as they happen. This does nothing for me. You see it once you've seen all of it type of thing. I think this part was probably the biggest killer for me.

Edit: Talking with one of the devs a bit clued me in on the fact that there actually is a couple fully scripted sex scenes. Namely "the first penetrative sex scene with each girl." I personally did not play long enough to get to them (I thought they didn't exist at first), but it feels disingenuous not to mention it now that I'm aware of them. Especially considering one of my entire gripes was the game seemingly not having scripted sex scenes.

I wouldn't call this bad or even average at the end of the day, but it really just isn't a game for me I suppose. It's a trainer sandbox with a lot of polish, and if that's appealing to you then I think you'd like this one. For me the lack of interesting events and the way the relationships/sex scenes are handled caused the game to simply not capture me. That all being said, it is a game very much in development and the devs have communicated that a lot of my issues are in fact being worked on. At the least, I can see myself checking in on this down the line to see if further development sways my feelings.

Needs more characters,. but other than that, what's not to like?
Great art, good story and writing.
The 3 romanceable female characters are fairly well developed and I enjoyed the interactions between them (harem/sharing, etc)