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

While the game itself is pretty entertaining the rating I give is much more reflective of the comparison between The Null Hypothesis and Rogue-like: Evolution.

My first experience with Null is 0.3b so I don't know what it was like in its earlier iterations, but comparing to what Rogue-like is now I have to say that Null feels quite a bit more polished.

I'm sure a lot of that is lessons learned from Oni's development progression over time, but I just find Null's aesthetics to be more pleasing.

The UI looks crisp, though I do wish we'll eventually get more slots for quick travel locations. The smartphone messages also leave some aspects to be desired such as being able to scroll to older messages, and there are times when new messages don't appear on the screen until you back out of texting and then opening it again for the contacts. It usually means blindly moving the dialogue forward and then coming back to it to see what was actually said.

The real important differences--to me anyway--between Null and Rogue-like is the art and the story/dialogue.

Going back to the UI being more aesthetically pleasing to me, I found the overall art direction and quality to be more attractive in comparison to Rogue-like. I understand the charm of the art Oni chose, especially for those of us who grew up watching X-Men Evolution and its related/similar X-Men shows, and this is not to say that the art in Rogue-like is bad or unattractive. This is more of just a personal opinion.

The colors, tone, animation and backgrounds just seem more smooth and attractive to me. I particularly like the Jean Grey art/model used in Null.

The story also is a bit more engaging. There's a real honest attempt at replicating the experience and discussion of bigotry and discrimination from the comics. There's a weight to decisions and to events that is not present in Oni's work. The heaviness of some of the material (such as the mob scene) mirrors recent events around the world over the past few years as well as the stories in the comics lending a certain amount of seriousness in the game. This seriousness also made me feel more invested in the characters. There's a feeling of real stakes and a need to progress and become stronger for the sake of something bigger than just getting tail (which, I know, ironic cause I'm comparing two NSFW sex games in a forum that caters to games of that genre).

Speaking of the characters, I really like the decision to take them more seriously. In Rogue-like there's no attempt at hiding the parody; the dialogue and characterization are all meant to be cheesy, goofy and lewd. It definitely succeeds in evoking a sense of raunchiness in seeing characters we grew up being unabashedly debauched, much like Something Unlimited. But in doing so the characters end up becoming much less familiar than the cartoons or comics.

With Null, the stated effort to steer closer to source material is clearly seen. While I'm not up to date with current comics over the past decade and a half, I can see and appreciate how the characters are portrayed as something more than potential/actual sex partners. There's a bit more depth to them: their history, their behavior, and their decisions; things that engage or even arouse them; and things that make them uncomfortable.

Not that Oni's game does not have a similar mechanic, but Null is a bit more nuanced about it and makes you want to pay more attention to the dialogue.

The characters are also much more distinct compared to each other, at least that's how I felt. And, again, the depth and variance to how each character feels is a welcome touch as opposed to the 'sex addicted' mechanic used in Rogue-like.

All in all, I applaud the direction Ron Chon is going in with the story and the relationships of the characters. I feel more invested in the plot and drama than I ever was with Rogue-like. And while it's obvious (and upfront) about lifting a lot of the mechanics/ideas from Oni's work I do feel there's just enough of a difference between the two that both can stand on their own as proper parodies of the X-Men universe.

Can't wait to continue my adventures in this version of Xavier's School for the Gifted!

A game with the potential to become one of the best. At the time of its release, I saw this as simply an upgraded visual version of the Rogue-like game. But in a later update, it was rebuilt with a much better quality, especially in terms of images. The female characters are all very beautiful, and I especially love the appearance building, from hair to costumes, if expanded in the future it will be even better. Kurt's appearance is also noteworthy, it could open up a few ideas like the appearance of Wolverine, Scott. And cuckold them while we make love to Jean and Laura. And there are many other beautiful female characters. If refined and invested in time, it is not surprising that this will become the most unique game. Great job, Dev, Keep up the good work.

Great game, a good break from the lacklustre releases of Rogue-like Evolution. It's a fun game with nice mechanics, fleshed out characters, good events and an actual story among other things, it's a little bit of a grind at times and working out how to get the optional events can be somewhat confusing but easy enough to figure out eventually, overall a great game and I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses in the future.

So after a thorough playthrough, I feel like i compiled enough info to make a fair review of this game. First of all I would like to put in here that if you are looking for a quick fap, this is not the game for you. However, if you are looking for quality, beautiful graphics with intriguing story, then I recommend you check this out, you will not be dissapointed. On to the review.

First of all, the graphics are stunning. The attention to detail is impressive and I love it, 10/10.

Story is around a 7/10 simply because through all the available content, it seems as if there is not really any character growth with your heroines. They all have the same problems they started with, and regardless of your help, they dont seem to get any closer to solving them. They just keep repeating their frustration at not being able to figure out how they tick and that's pretty much the running theme. (except for Laura who knows exactly who she is and has a 100% grasp on her own powers).

Interface and UI are professional and nice looking. The map is not too clunky and it offers the ability to register up to 3 locaions as "quickspots" where you can go directly there without opening the maps at all.

The Heroines all have their own unique characters and back stories and its done well.

The only drawback that i can see at all is the BALANCE of the mechanics system. For every interaction or choice that you make you recieve "love" and/or "trust" points. These points are required to "level up" your relationship with the heroines, and while the game does not punish you for dating more than one at a time, (in fact you can establish a polyamorous relationship in the beggining), The grind gets exponentially larger as the game goes on. For example, part 1 is fairly quick to max gir's stats, part 2 is double that, and part 3 is just... painful. This definitely needs to be addressed by the developers to make it a more comfortable and playable game.

The other Complaint i had off the bat is that if the stat grind wasnt tedious enough, the actual "sexy time" interaction mechanics are clunky and also unbalanced. Also confusing. As you progess your relationships with the girls, they will open up more sexual options to you, but the positions and actions combinations as well as the tedius "next" click... It might be better if it was simplified quite a lot. Also, you if you are wondering when you actually get any serious action its not gonna be until around the 2nd half of the current content so expect maybe 4-5 hours before anything really interesting.

My advice would be to use the console to edit the stats to minimize the current grind.

Overall i would definitely recommend this game, I absolutely love it and hope the dev comes out with frequent updates. Its rare to find a game this good, especially on this site.

I've been playing various offerings here for like 3 years?

This is the first time I've felt compelled to rate a game.

I understand the inspiration from RE but this game is distinct and more my style in all ways.

Positives:
-Cool setting
-Cool plot
-Cool characters (including the protag)
-Great art
-Great UI
-Great scenes
-Great interactivity
-Great character progression
-Great writing

Negatives:
-Could do with being less grindy and being able to get around to events with less clicking through menus.

Things I hope to see as the game develops:
-Expand on the character progression options of the player
-Complete the story
-Expand the side quests and ability to interact with non-LI's or friend-zoneable LI's outside of the hot content
-Expanded stable of LI's (even if that means some become mutually exclusive or if some characters are more like flings that can only develop so much)
-Expand on the dialogues and interactions available

Already a great game, interested to see what actually comes of it by the end of development!

Tedious game (as of 0.3b) with little to offer other than excellent graphics.

• Graphics are pretty good. There is no point to argue about it. It is the only reason it is getting the second star.
• Gameplay is boring. There is not much to do other than train, go to class, and try to shag a girl after some progression in the story. Even the shagging is pretty boring. This game needs a QoL improvement over anything else.
• Story is well.... Unoriginal? What can you say when at the start of the game the development team says that "it is heavily inspired by..." . I am not gonna enter in the discussion of which one is better, but it has been done before. Even the original story the game has borrowed is not such a great premise, so all in all there is not much to go on storywise.

If you want some Xmen porn, there are better places to look for it. When I play porn games I like the game part WITH the porn... if the Game is painful, I have better ways to find the "fun" part

Only rating 4 stars as I know this game is going to get better, so gotta leave room for improving the rating.

I've tried Rogue Like so many times, and it just never clicked, but this game, despite being almost a copy paste but with (imo) better art, is just so much better.

Rogue Like walked, so this game could run.

The one down side I would say is that the customization is a bit lacking for some of the girls. Jean's only "sexy" outfit is wearing her underwear, which is... fine, but ya know.

Truly a fantastic game. The story you are telling is interesting and evocative. The art is great and the premise if fantastic. You even made me care about a non-sexual relationship. Nightcrawler is my brudder from another mutter. lol

Keep the story tight.. Have a ending planed. And this will stay and be a 10/10 experience.

Game is incredibly tedious. Navigating the mansion and the menus feels like it takes several steps more than it should. The art and the music are absolutely incredible but I don't want to actually play the game bc it isn't fluid.

Solve the navigation issues and make the user experience better and this game is unbeatable, until then it will just frustrate you quickly

as a huge fan of rogue-like this is right up my alley, amazing art style and a good amount of content for an early release, highly recommend trying this out. excited to see where this game goes as it evolves

Really enjoyed the atmosphere and having a Rogue Like based game that focus on the lore of X-Men and, possibly, the Marvel universe is way better. The images are to my liking and I enjoyed the relationship progression. Although I still have to test if actually developing a relationship with the heroines is optional or not and how that would affect the storyline.

8/8, bretty good.

I really don't understand all the 5 star reviews for this game... Including from people who manage to list more cons than pros in their reviews but will still give it a perfect score...

I used to play RLE for a while but eventually stopped because it just became so repetitive with no real meaningful content added to it. I am fully aware this is not meant to be a remake of RLE but a completely separate game, but the basic premise and so much of the base gameplay are so similar at this point that the devs cannot blame the players for wanting to compare the two.

There's no discussion that the strongest point of the game is it's art, characters are beautiful and I really appreciate the variety of pubic hair that can be selected even if it doesn't seem completely implemented into the sex scenes at this stage. I just wish we had a little bit more variety in the character's body shapes.
The art also works a lot better in the sex minigame than in RLE.

But the gameplay quickly becomes extremely painful after a while. The menus and the map are horrible to navigate, we end up spending most of our time clicking several times to get to a different location, or to trigger an action or a dialogue, including in the sex minigame.
And of course you have to endlessly rince and repeat just in order to get a handful of points or cash. Even using the console to cheat the stats and money it feels like the game takes ages to make any meaningful progress.

The story pacing feels excruciatingly slow, this update added more character events in order to flesh out the character stories but they seem to trigger completely randomly (some took several days to appear for me and I did keep an eye for them on the map) but in the end they just add to the grind and are not that interesting to me... If at least they included some degree of lewd events to show some kind of progression in the relationships. I'm all for slow burn games, many VNs execute it well but here it's just a drag.

The outfit system has a lot of potential, but at the moment it's just terribly implemented, hard to understand how to properly save outfits, half the time the shame stat doesn't appear (EDIT : finally figured it shows on the top left corner...), and there's a lot of nonsense with the different clothes stat values. I know they had to remove some of the outfits for this particular update, hopefully once they are re implemented the outfit system will also get a rework to make it easier to use and understand).

It seems that the characters won't be as keen for nudity or lewd activities in public, compared to RLE. While I appreciate that the devs wanted to be a bit more realistic and didn't want to turn the LIs into addicted sex slaves, I also find it slightly disappointing because I think a middle ground could be found in that aspect that would not be as extreme as in RLE, but still have a degree of exhibitionism which was still one aspect I appreciated from the original game.

At the end of the day this game is no better or worse than RLE, it does have more story than the original but most of it doesn't really add much to the game and feels like a way to artificially boost the game content and it just ends up adding a lot of grind. It still gets super repetitive and the sex content ends up being just the same scene we have to replay over and over again with the same characters.

I had only played the previous version of this game and I feel like I had enjoyed it more, probably because it was my first time playing it. Now that I had to replay it all from the start it just felt like a massive pain and a massive grind to complete this update and it just became as repetitive and boring as the original...

It seems there is a lot of potential here and the devs seem to be quite ambitious judging from their posts on the thread, but I also fear they might just be over promising features and future content, especially if they already had to go back and "flesh out" the game and having to temporarily remove some content and features...
I'll be curious about the next update but I really hope we won't have to replay the whole thing from the start again because I don't think I'll want to bother.

Surprisingly feature rich given how early in developement it is, you can get a good couple hours out of it.

Unlike others, I don't mind the sandbox aspect. I find it's done better than most games; being able to pinpoint the location of all npc's on my map helps immensely, as some games have you mindlessly wandering trying to find the npc's.

The art is really nice, the characters look great and the locations are gorgeous. My only gripe is that during the sex minigame, the characters faces don't really match, in looks or quality, to the standing art.

The story is serviceable, but obviously its the interactions with the girls that are the main draw. I like that they all have distinct personalities and speaking styles, and for the most part it does feel like I'm wooing different girls, but I'd definitely like to see the personality gaps be even larger, i think it would make the dating sim aspect much more interesting. The main focus now should be adding more content, more unique interactions, more things we can do with the girls and other characters, etc, because as soon as the unique content dries up there's really nothing else to do.

I think the outfit system needs a bit of work, it seems that no matter what I do the girls won't wear any custom outfits beyond the scene they are currently in, even modest outfits. I could just be doing it wrong though. It's also a little weird that even though public sex isn't a feature atm, the girls will still undress in the outfit screen no matter where they are. I'd chock that up to just being a game system, but the girls do speak and comment on what you are dressing them in, implying it's happening in the real world and not just the outfit screen.

Overall this is a great start, and within a few updates I think could easily make rogue-like obsolete.

Version: [v0.3a]

Beautiful art that suffers greatly from a not great sandbox execution.
This is gonna be short as there's not much to delve too deep into.

The art is really really nice, 2d art that is done well is a pretty rare find and it was the reason I lasted as long as I did with this one.
The writing is okay, nothing special if I'm being honest but definitely servicable.

As a game it is pretty bad.
The game is very laggy, the menus are honestly annoying and moving around the mansion takes too long and feels too bad (a way to move to a specific character instead of a location, 1 click move from the maps instead of changing floors etc, would be really nice), the phone should not exist as it does right now.
The text appearing in the corner of the screen as it does in comics is pretty pleasing thematically and visually, but is kind of uncomfortable in practice.

The gameplay is, as usual with sandbox games, bad. you spam boring interactions to build up stats and wait for events to trigger, even if they wouldn't take an eternity to trigger (randomly, of course), the mansion feels too empty, large, and pointless to justify the sandbox aspects.
Changing the cloths the LI's wear, as is often the case with 'Null Hypothesis', unintuitive, cumbersome and finicky. I gave up on it after a few minutes.
Well, after a couple of hours I saved and closed the game. when I came back I found out I lost around 20 minutes of gameplay, which consists of befriending X-23, and other seemingly random events proccing, and at that point I had to wonder, why do I even bother? so I closed the game and deleted it.

To sum it up - great art, serviceable writing, awful sandbox execution.
I'll be honest and say that my experience felt more like a 2/5 than a 3/5, but as I dropped the game without finishing all the available content, I'll round up.
Might check back in the future as it seems from the change log there are plenty of things that are changing and the dev is still figuring things out, but as of right now there's a lot of work that needs to be done.

I went into this game with low expectations, but it truly took me by surprise, exceeding what I had anticipated. The overall quality of the game is remarkable, especially considering its early development stage. The comic-book theme, the captivating setting, and the impressive environmental artwork contribute to a refreshing gaming experience.

Despite being in its early stages, the storyline remains engaging, and each heroine possesses distinct and charming qualities. The developers have introduced a character progression system involving classes, training, and studying, which I find particularly enjoyable. Although the mutant power system is still evolving, I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing its development.

There is a lot of potential here, and the game seems to be heading in an exciting direction. If you're hesitant about trying it out, I highly recommend giving it a chance. There's much to look forward to, and the game already demonstrates promising elements that make it worth exploring.

There are some bugs...and some issues with repetitiveness and grinding so far but it's not intolerable.

If you've played Oni's rogue like evolution, this is that but with a meaningful story and fleshed out characters. Yes at the end of the day there are still grindy mechanics, but that takes second place to a very interesting story that makes you invested in the characters. Unlike Oni's game, each of the girls feel unique and have their own specific "fetishes". The art style is very unique and the whole comics aesthetic is something you don't really see. The rate at which content is released is very fast and the devs are responsive. My only gripe is that some of the models look kinda janky especially in the sex poses. Wardrobes and the story aren't all that fleshed out yet, but that is to be expected.

*As of V0.3a
Pros:

• Great animated 2D art, which is a pretty rare find outside Japanese games iMO
• Not much story yet, but the characters are written pretty well, and they do feel pretty alive, which helps cut the grindiness that some players have an issue with
• Sex minigame is decent imo, reminds me of the 2000-2015 Japanese trainer games.
• Enough mechanics and flavor to not feel like a copy paste VN
• Some people say it gets laggy, but I've reached the end of the content for this version, and never got any while running on a M1 macbook air.

Cons:

• Quite a few bugs as of this version, at least in the Mac download, but nothing game breaking.
• Can get repetitive, especially since the story isn't far along yet.
• Can be grindy to some players, but not as bad as many Twine games
• Some optional goals/events are hard to trigger.
• Can use more body movements, especially in standing art and facial expressions (makeout and orgasm reaction, etc)

Additional Notes
The game has great potential, and hopefully production runs well, since that is a bane of many of these games, and please don't resort to AI art...

This is to me the peak of what Adult Games can be. It blends the story of a typical Visual Novel with more interactive features, its characterisation of fan favourites from its chosen franchise work perfectly and the art is beautiful. One of the few games I've played that truly feels like a passion project.

A skip button would be nice and obviously the content is far from complete (albeit plentiful in its current state) but it's the only true 10/10 I've ever found on this site. Amazing job guys I can't wait to see more.

Basically, a remake of Rogue-like.
The better: The girls have actual personalities to them, and they are different and fun, unlike Oni's paper thin ones, There's a semblance of plot and it's not a glorified gallery
Now the worse. Visually, it's not as good. Girls have the same body type, and the art style has something really uncanny about it, and it shows especially in the sex scenes.
It's somehow laggier than rogue-like, and that's an achievement.
The menus are cumbersome and annoying to navigate, especially bad in the sex scenes and clothing.
Grindy, both the visible stats and the "hidden" ones require a lot of dull repetition of the same events with no variation.
The sex scenes became over complicated, with a multitude of redundant options and menus, generally poorly planned.

And having the third update of the game remove content while adding fluff is not a good indicator for the project's health. Cautiously optimistic, but I'd keep hopes down.

Half a year later, this has become worse, with a terrible drip feed of microscopic updates, uncanny art and new bugs of previously working things.

This game is way too good for how early it is in development. There's plenty of hot scenes, and the story and writing is really in-depth. It's also fun to change-up the characters outfits. Also, the art is excellent too. Lots of inspiration here from Rouge-Like evolution. Really looking forward to seeing more characters and more art/poses. Well done.