Ren'Py - The Null Hypothesis [v0.8c] [Ron Chon]

This game will never be able to get more than 3/5 in my eyes because of how tedious it is. It is like a hard cap.
You will probably find the word 'grindy' in other reviews. But I think some context need to be given. Being grindy is not necessarily an issue. Many grindy games find success, and some people even actively look for grindy games.
But the grind needs to be fun and pleasant. Not so tedious you think jumping through the windows would be funner than continuing 'playing'.
Okay, where to start?

• Everything is slow. Loading times are slow. Characters constantly changing clothes is slow. You have to constantly go to shower and see the showering thingy. You have to constantly go through the same repeated text. When phone buzzz, you need to click three times instead of one. Etc. It's like at every stage of the game, the dev asked: how to make the experience slower?
• Little variety. Overall there isn't much variety in the grind, making the loop quickly very repetitive.
• Unclear target/reward. You know you have to grind to X/Y number, but it is rarely clear what you get at those points. You just know something will happen. Well, once you start figuring out the way the game is structured you start guessing, but most of the time you will grind without knowing what you really get out of it.
• Ridiculous grind loop. I'm not sure how to best explain this, so let me give you an example of how my playthrough went.
  • There are three girls, and with how little content there is, clearly you are supposed to go to all the three at the same time.
  • Rogue rise very fast, relatively quickly become girlfriend (only kissed though)
  • I talk to Laura. Rogue literally appear out of nowhere and gets into a jealous frenzy. Ok, so can't talk to other girls even when she is not here.
  • Look at requirement to make her more accepting - 600 trust. What, 600 trust? That's a ridiculous number! So I can't do anything with the other girls until then?
  • (an infinite grind later, with a lot of time skipping since there isn't much to do)
  • Ok, she is 600 trust. Ah nice, she is more accepting of Laura now, but...Not Jean? Wait, she needs to be Jean's friend first? Oh no.
  • (an infinite grind later, with almost entirely time skip since there isn't much to do)
  • Ok, this isn't working. Can't get her to friendship status, this is taking too long. I give up.
  • Install cheat mode.
• I guess I should add there is a bit too much randomness to the grinding, but at this point it hardly matters.

I think the most important problem ultimately is it is too hard to properly level the three girls at the same time because of the jealousy mechanics, but there really isn't enough content to warrant focusing on only one of them.
Not even getting into the other parts of the game, there would be a lot to say, but the tedious grinding alone kinda kills the game.

Overall: 4.5/5
Summary:
I'm giving it this review because this parody game is great for what it is, and I hope it continues since the world building has so much potential to expand upon. The story is relatively easy to follow, and it was easy to empathize with the characters (especially Rogue) in a world full of fiction and superpowers. It's a parody of a beloved franchise so the characters are easy to recognize.

However, my main gripe I have with this game are the sandbox elements. Like most games that adopt this model they get REPETITIVE pretty fast.
You’re essentially stuck in a loop: go to class, study, hit the gym, talk to your love interest, repeat. Sure, you get stat boosts and unlock new scenes, but after a while it starts to feel like you’re just checking boxes. It’s the kind of system that works best in short bursts—play for an hour, enjoy the story, then take a break. If you try to marathon it, the grind really starts to show....
Also, the random events can be hit or miss. Sometimes you’ll have a meaningful moment with a character one night, and the next day they act like it never happened. No reference, no continuity. Still, if you’re here for the characters, the parody, and the emotional moments, it’s absolutely worth playing. Just don’t expect the sandbox mechanics to evolve much.

Pros:
- Character Design (Live2D) and Background Art
- Customized UI and Accessibility features
- Customizable Character(s)
- Animated Scenes
- Compelling storytelling and Empathetic Characters
Cons:
- Repetitive Sandbox gameplay elements leads to grindy gameplay
- Lack of continuity with events
- Lack of SFX in sex scenes
- Repetitive background music
- Minor issues with clothes not fitting properly when overlapped with another (Rogue's overcoat over her yellow dress)

TLDR: The Null Hypothesis has frustrating and tedious gameplay, a lackluster sex "minigame", mediocre art, bugs, and lack of content. The current version seems focused on mechanics instead of story. So when the mechanics are boring and the sex unstimulating, the overall game suffers a lot.

Positives:

• The girls are quite beautiful (within the limitations of 2d cartoon art), with well-proportioned bodies. Still, don't expect some gorgeous girls that are in leading 3dcg games.
• Take the girls anal virginity before her vaginal virginity!
• Anal scenes. Nice anal training. After hesitance, training, the girls eventually get enthusiastic and love it.
• a2m. Too rare in adult games. But I wish the dialogue would comment about it.
• Some hot actions like making the girls wear cum when they leave after sex.
• Superpowers. Always a nice power fantasy. Would be better if you could mindcontrol (like in some games) but devs don't want to.
• All sex acts are animated. The quality is OK, not great.
• The dialogue from the girls is mostly well written (despite some significant flaws mentioned below).
• Some of the girls have attractive personalities (Rogue).
• Dressing room. You can change the girls outfits depending on their lewdness. Making them gradually dress more and more slutty in public is hot.
• You can to an extent influence how the girls personalities evolve. You're offered a binary choice. But I'd prefer if you could make girls such as Jean more submissive (player preference) over time.
• The "flirt" interactions are quite nice. I'm hoping these escalate to where you can make the girl do more exhibitionism, putting on a show in front of classmates etc.
• You can tell the girls to get nipple and labia piercings. It looks hot.
• School setting.
• Choice of how the girls should address you (e.g. "daddy") and you her.
• Hotkey for several common actions.
• The MC is not an idiot (worth mentioning given how many devs make their MC stupid and riddled with self-doubt.)
• Jean's big sis roleplay is really nice and well written.

Negatives:

• Story is kinetic. Only one path.
• Grind.
• Randomized events. I want to be in control of my progression.
• Other then the grind there's little content. Too little story.
• After just a couple of times the sex minigame becomes tedious. This is the most important aspect of this porn game, so... yeah, this is really a bad sign. There's so much clicking back and forth, trying to scroll (but the UI doesn't want to scroll), absolutely terrible UI.
• During sex scenes there's a lot of text to read. Not from the girl, just a description of what is supposedly happening.
• Text during sex doesn't match the actual scene. Text claims "you bottom out in her ass" and the actual animation is just the dick going back and forth 3-4 cm inside her. Disappointing.
• There's far too much clicking. Clicking constantly. Especially during sex scenes you have to mouse-click maybe 200 times to get the best score.
• Anal penetration is only shallow, doesn't go deep even on the second mode.
• The game mixes up protectiveness with domineering. I liked the idea of Laura being protective but then it switched to the MC saying things like "I like when you tell me what to do". No not at all, that's nothing to do with protectiveness.
• No info about how to train the girls. I gave them the buttplugs but the game is so convoluted it's difficult to understand how to continue the process. I randomly discovered how to insert the plugs but how long does it take before I can "upgrade" it? And so on.
• No options for sharing. There are a lot of missed opportunities for this, whether sharing the girl with Kurt, Logan or several guys. Imagine DPing Rogue or Jean in the classroom. It would be so hot (and optional!).
• 2 of the 3 available girls are dominant and it's too much even though I always discourage it when possible. We should have the option to move them to submissive, not just slightly reduce their domination.
• The gameplay in general is confusing. It's really not easy to understand what activities to do, when to do them, how to play efficiently, etc. The quest journal doesn't help much. Many other sandbox games do this better.
• What actions consume time? How do we know? It's not clear.
• Can't have sex for a long time despite having super high love and trust. This isn't explained in game, you have to search for forums for info about it.
• Bug: Moving to a location where a girl is sometimes moves the girl away. E.g. Jean is in her room. Knock on her door and she's gone.
• Typical limitations of 2dcg. Even knowing the game is of this type I think it's worth mentioning. 2dcg in The Null Hypothesis is IMO simply not as engaging as 3dcg in other games.
• Loading a save doesn't actually load the same situation as when you saved! I saved in the classroom with both Laura and Rogue in the forefront and before starting to interact with them. This is visible on the save thumbnail. When loading that save, Laura is gone.
• I find Laura's body is too masculine with her muscles.
• It's required to do vaginal. It would be better if you could do only anal with a girl.
• Daily loop of tedious activities such showering, going to class, training, texting the girls, etc. Gets boring.
• The girl says "I'll let you decide where to finish" (hot!). But then she gets annoyed and you lose love points when you want the wrong thing. Frustrating.
• Hairy pussies. It's a turn off and unrealistic. What teenage girl these days has a full bush?!
• When the girls agree to wear cum on their body this should persist when going to other rooms. I mean, that's the entire point.
• The main story is clichéd, repetitive and lacks player agency. Choices have seemingly no impact.
• Events happen out of order. I've already agreed several times to call Jean "Big Sis" etc. but then that's brought up as a surprise and new thing for the MC during the main story later.

(Version played: 0.8b1)

Im confused about this one,

- I really appreciate what game tries to do, a high quality dating sim with many options like clothing, character stats, dialogue options, locations and so on

- however there are issues, for example when characters change clothes its very annoying how you have to either wait for them to do it or spam left click (animations just takes so long). That doesnt sound so bad but when you grind love/trust or xp you end up doing those things a lot, and its not a fun time. Game is very grindy, i dont mind that, but dont make it tedious for the player. Maneuvering around the map also isnt very comfortable, it feels so ass to grind stats while fighting with game ui

- h scenes sucks, some of them are better but overall i dont like how many elements are barely visible like kissing, or they look anemic and just boring.
Maybe it gets better later on, but feels like whole system should get reworked or just improved.

- too much things to abuse, for example you can come to Jean room and spam study with her, spending pretty much days in that room not moving anywhere, or you can text msg a girl how shes feeling while standing next to her, or some of dialogue options that are very silly

- same boring ost in a long ass grind game, if you try to make a good game with decent quality, give more audio tracks so player wont go crazy

- story and dialogues are decent, overall idea is very fun. I dont even like dating sims and i somewhat got hooked, although im annoyed by all the things i mentioned

EDIT: Ok after giving it another try i change my mind a bit, H scenes are not that bad. There is big potential if dev adds more small details or more complex change in behavior during H scenes, some animations also really would be nice to be improved. I definitely liked more blowjob scenes than normal sex ones, especially when girls look at MC.

Guess i gonna follow this game updates and hope for improvements.

The art is pretty good even though if a bit uncanny.
The game is buggy as hell and it ranges through characters' clothes coming in and out of the existence randomly to crashes(mostly when you click fast)
The music is ok nothing bad nothing good, sound effects too.
Lack of sex sound effects is bad though.
the game is grindy as hell both in terms of characters and xp systems, probably cause it is already balanced for future content.
No idea if characters are accurate, they seem likable enough though, including kurtz.
Sex scenes are of the "characters is on the bed and you have many options what to do" not the predetermined scenes(i mean arguably there are some like characters taing off their clothes in a shower).

If you like those characters you might want to play, if not, i dont think you should spend the time.

The game is very high quality, but falls short in terms of gameplay, story and romance, unfortunately.
Gameplay is a typical renpy cat n mouse type - all you need to do is visit specific rooms at a specific time to progress the story. Repeat ad nauseam. Considering how little of a story there is, it gets boring real fast. You get a 5 minute scene every 3 or 4 hours of gameplay before you're forced to repeat the same shit again. You spend another several hours - and here's another 5 minute cutscene.
I couldn't get past the summer in game time, I wish there was an option to skip the grind of catching girls at random places to progress the story more quickly, but unfortunately there is no such option.
As for girls themselves - they're alright. Never been fan of Jean, but her in-game version is probably the best one I've seen yet. Rogue is Rogue, and X-23 is probably the most interesting one.
What I dislike in the romance part is the writing - while it's competent on a technical level, it feels not like a porn game, but like a 21st century school guide for 12 year old boys about "how to talk to girls properly".
What I mean is that there is too much talks about how to not hurt your partner's feelings, respect the girl's privacy, knowing the boundaries, respecting rules of consent, etc. Who the fuck wrote the romance scenes, Professor Xavier himself? It's my only explanation on why the writing feels so mundane and purposefully anti-fun. Maybe I want to be a little creep and peek on some girls changing clothes in their room? Too bad, that would be INAPROPPRIATE for our porn game. Like, c'mon dude. I know X-men is woke as shit, doesn't mean the porn fanfic game has to be.
What also disappoints is amount of bugs and optimization. While the game looks beautiful and it's obvious it has a very high production quality, it's possible to encounter bugs that can even prevent the story progression, forcing you to reload. Also sometimes the game lags like hell (despite the fact that I play it on a decent gaming PC), and there's some minor glitches like flickering clothes on the sprites.
Oh, and I also don't like how the protag turns out to be a damn Mary Sue with the bestest mutant powers ever the further the story goes. Nullification was more than enough, why did the writer decide to grant him the powers of Wolverine and Rogue on top is beyond me. Later he will also get telepathy most likely, but I didn't manage to grind to that part yet.
tl;dr - game is decent, but the writing is very anti-fun and kinda preachy ("porn" game), there's too little story and QA is not the best.

The script of this game is quite decent .Chracter has distinctive personality and beautiful unique body(kind like ai painting through lol),and basically adapted faithfully to the comic book prototype.There are two things that make me feel lacking,the point system in this game is great ,give ppl more immersion feeling but its too grinding ,and the sex system kind limited by that game which inspired the devs.I feel like with this great art can do more creative and nasty things . Above all this game surely a great x men fantasy date sim games ,and even u dont familiar with xmen its still entertaining.

Well written characters, great art style, and some good looking content in the future. A must play if you like dating sim style games. I would love to see more content in the future with the girls overlapping in content

review of v0.8b1

It's hard for me to definitively say that this is a good game. There are quite a few things about it that just rub me the wrong way, and there are a few quality of life features that would be very nice to have before it becomes truly amazing. So before we talk about why I still give it a high score, I want to mention things that I don't like about it.

First of all, your choices barely matter, if at all. The story is linear, so is the character progression. And the worst offender is the quirk system. You keep telling the girl to stop behaving a certain way, but month after month she still ignores you and keeps doing it. And those quirks are REALLY hard to ignore, they are not subtle, they are incredibly on the nose, and they may straight up make or break the girl for hours. I think by the end of the year they actually finally stop, but going through three seasons of telling Jean to stop calling you "little bro" is infuriating.

Second is the wardrobe. There are a lot of issues with it.
Girls ignore the rules you say in the setting about no talking, so get used to Laura asking if you like her boobs every time you take off a piece that hides them, having to interrupt what you're doing to answer her, and then proceed.
There is no proper zoom. You either turn off any kind of zoom completely or have the game zoom on the part you're editing. You can't have a middle ground, and it's insanely frustrating.
Finally, their stats are capped, and the clothes values make almost no sense. You can buy a lot of sexy things in the shops, only for the girl to completely refuse to wear them when maxed out. Jean may refuse to wear a dress that covers her whole body without panties, but be perfectly fine with walking around in just her underwear. This system needs a lot of tweaking, right now it causes nothing but confusion and frustration.

The art may be a hit or miss too. The style is obviously a matter of preference, and I think it's, for the most part, pretty great, but there are a few things that stick out, like feet in the wardrobe, for example, look small and chubby, and it's not like the artist can't draw them, in sex scenes I have no questions, I don't know what happened in the wardrobe... must be an early draft or something.

Finally, the game is both grindy and a little random. The stats you need are... well... a lot... and the stats you gain aren't. Just as an example, you may need about 650 trust in the first season, and you're gaining... 5-10 per interaction. Do your math for 3 girls. It's plain stupid.
The randomness comes in when you need to trigger the events, but they just don't happen until they want to. Meh. Generally you don't have to wait too long, but it's still pointless waiting, just let me trigger the events when I want to.

Anyway, with all that said...

What this game does best is giving you the feeling of those good old X-Men. The ones from the 90s cartoon or even earlier comics. And don't get me wrong, I love the more modern stuff too, I loved Evolution cartoon, I loved the 2003 New X-Men run or alternative stuff like Exiles, but nothing can ever replace that warm feeling of nostalgia, and this game tugs on its strings very well. The writing isn't bad, the story is good, the characters are... well... they would be more tolerable if, like I said, they didn't focus on their quirks so much. But it's still its own game with its own unique feeling, and I can't help but appreciate it. Appreciate it enough to look past all the shortcomings, of which there are plenty, and say that I'm very much looking forward to this game's growth.

I think it's also worth mentioning that I haven't been following the development of this too intimately, but from what I've seen, I really appreciate that the dev seems to be pretty transparent with what and when to expect. There isn't much prominent overpromising, underdelivering and stretching the deadlines. They may straight up say "hey, the next update isn't coming for a while", but I'll take it over a dozen of "next week" posts other devs tend to make. But again, like I said, I wasn't following the development too closely, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong and this actually happened, it's just what I personally seemed to notice.

Very good game. Promising development.

The story is interesting, not only because it uses good X-Men references, but also because it leaves you curious as to what will happen next. The artwork is beautiful and fluid, the features are very intuitive, and the sandbox is very satisfying. Lots of customization options, plenty of detail.

I don't usually like not having impactful choices, but as the game offers a lot of customization and interaction options, it doesn't feel like the choices need to be so impactful. The writing is good, only sometimes the mannerisms of the characters' speech get in the way of reading dialogues, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Looking forward to the next updates.

(played v0.8b1)

Animations, art style, and wardrobe system are all fantastic, and the game actually has good writing and great dialogue. There are plans for certain characters in the future so I'll be following this game for the long haul.

My only gripe with this game is that the characters are automatically undressed during sex scenes. I'd like to be able to keep shirts on, have upskirt sex, have stockings, rip or lower pantyhose etc.

Other than that the game is pretty much perfect.

This would be a five star without any of the erotic content - it just so happens that's five stars too.

Not just some of the best character driven romance on this website, but on any website, period. I think the most important idea in written romance is 'What do two characters give each other that they can't get from anyone else', and all three relationships have an intense and specific answer to that question.

I almost threw my laptop out a window when I ran out of content.

Imma quickly leave another one of those "I usually never review" comments (which experienced users should know is always a great sign for a game). This one is obviously no exception, whilst it looks very plain on the surface (not to mention another game but there is one shouted out in the opening credits) it is a very enticing game with excellent (and I really mean A-plus) writing and the best gameplay loop I've ever seen in a trainer, I've finished all Akabur games and tried playing a game similar to this but it was SOOOO tedious and grindy with almost no progress in the first hour, this game isn't like that at all and if you're into a good trainer game with customisable outfits you will absolutely LOVE The Null Hypothesis, there's also extremely granular control of said outfits which I personally adore and lotsa people will deffo appreciate, too.

I would gladly give this lil game more than 5 stars fr. Deffo play this, after only 3hrs in it is already one of the best trainer games I've ever played! Kudos to the Devteam!

Also as you can deffo already tell from the pics the girls are absolutely gorgeous!

Been sleeping on this one for awhile, finally gave it a shot and its easily gets a 5/5.
The story is great, the charcters really grow on you honestly just great writng, the art is phenomenal I really can't wait to see where they go with this.

EDIT End of 0.8: After playing through all the content currently in game i don't feel I gave this game enough credit. This game has spectacular promise. Not even a complete chapter 1 and I'm already fixing for another update, the story just gets better, the interactions with the girls from the lovely relationship parts to the more explicit are just superb. Parts as subtle as texting kurt give TNH life and i think that's whats hooked me.

I genuinely hope TNH continues to thrive and the devs pump out as much of this quality content as possible.

Easy 5/5, and it's becoming one of my favorites. It's impressive to see how far the game has come, I've no complaint whatsoever.

- Amazing Live 2D, and it's getting better with newer updates
- Unique positions for each LI
- Each LI has a unique personality / kinky
- The game has a storyline

I would like to see more unique animations for each girl, plus some content like public sex.
New LI would be interesting (and confirmed), but I like the style of polishing the ones we already have. It gives the impression of a complete (or nearly) game. Best to have a few working mechanics than a lot of unfinished ideas.

This game is a blast, one of few games on this site that I think deserve a full star rating. There is a sandbox style gameplay, which is slow but enjoyable, because characters are interesting and dialogues are well writen and fun. Three main female characters, all with different personalities and all very hot I'd play this game even if it didn't have any H content, because its just a good videogame (noo, I probably wouldn't, but you get my point).

+ amazing art and I'm not even a fan of these comics
+ LIs are sexy as hell
+ clean UI and navigation
+ dialogues
+ original music (I think)
+ outfit system

- I can't think of any negatives, except that the game is unfinished

Great goones

Game is a more polished version of rogue like and i love it

Pros
-great content you can crack the three mains characters and shi gets steamy almost as good as jimmys bunz
- readable story and likable characters
-gives you a nice free roam and sandboxy feel

Cons
-still bugy like why is rogue hair still wet -_-
- not finished
-crashes

overall would recommend to all

Wak Wak! Ugh ugh bon qui qui.

Translation:
"Color me impressed, I was skeptical of the artwork having that "A.I." look to it but it really shut me up afterwards. I like the pace and story driven narrative it has compared to another X-Men centered game, and that it has some kind of grind to it.

- Gameplay
It's fairly standard, all the bells and whistles and more you may have seen around. What I really want to point out is the amount of personalization on how you play. Even the settings are tailored to what YOU want to see. It surprised me of how user friendly it all was.

- Artwork
Again I was on the fence about the way it looked, was worried it would extremely inconsistent or very clearly cobbled together. But I was really happy to see it wasn't. I think what really sold me was the backgrounds and the attention to detail on character design. The backgrounds in erotic games aren't a major focus unless it's used for the environment/ visual storytelling. So for it to be given attention like this is a plus to me. And with the characters they clearly wanted to show who the character was comic wise but also give it their own spin. I guess what it boils down to is the amount of effort put into this is phenomenal.

- Character interactions
Like I said it's got some grind to it, but not an overwhelming amount. In fact I felt the pace was just right given the story. I even liked the dialogue too as with Rogue they tried to emulate her southern twang through text or with Nightcrawler and his heavy accent.

- Favorite character?
Gotta go with Rogue, goth girl and comic crush aside, her part in the story is literally a chefs kiss and really drives the dating sim portion of this game.

- Any dislikes or bugs?
Overall most everything seemed taken care of, only bugs I saw was some slight lagging or skipping during dialogue or with the character art but that's nothing to write home about. As far as any dislikes I can't really think of anything I was annoyed with. Most everything that did or was I could handle with changing settings so in all fairness I'd say none for the moment.

- Anything I would like to see or add?
More outfits/ clothing options. Maybe a little more in the player customization.

One if my favorite games on this site.

It actually has a decent story, it has beautiful art, the girls are superb. The sex scenes are interactive and have nice variety. There is a lot of content, the game itself is decently long (especially if you try to pursue more than one girl at once), there are lots of different costumes for girls, all nicely drawn.

The actual gameplay consists of trying to max "Love" and "Trust" scores for the girls, which you do by performing activities with them (including sex, once they are ready). You also gain XP and levels, which allow you to take perks with various effects.

All of this is within the framework of the main story, each chapter of which progresses after you complete the girls' quests (mostly consisting of story sequences). The main story is rather interesting and developed, with nice cutscenes etc.

All in all, I can highly recommend this game, and can't wait to see what further content the developers will add to it.