Ren'Py - The Promise [v0.99.41] [Xagrim's Gameforge]

This game seems extremely polarizing, most of which seems to be related to the 'grind' mechanic for progression.

I have chosen to review the game in its 0.88 state and I am pleased to report that I absolutely love it. The scope of the project is sprawling and I have limited hope on the entire 'trilogy' ever being finished, but I am along for the ride either way.

The grind is satisfying to me, often resulting in a very slow buildup but with moments of great payoff. The dev has attempted to mitigate the repetitiveness inherent in grinding state games by providing enough varying elements that the grinds have cycles rather than all being identical.

Love the renders. I am over the moon about the fact that most of the women in the game are not 'perfect 10s' or even close. They range from 'plain' to 'cute' with very realistic modeling unafraid to show features like striations, skin blemishes, razor burn, body hair, moles, freckles, etc. This creates a very 'lived in feel' to the cast and world that I find highly enjoyable.

Double plus points and high marks for a wide range of pubic hair styles, with an unabashed willingness to make some women extremely hairy, from bush to asshole. I really wish we saw this in more games, but it is excellently depicted here.

I find the writing to be extremely clever in most instances. It can be in turns plain, hilarious, and extremely erotic. The story itself is futuristic, but grounded and of perfectly acceptable quality for adult game fare.

I feel that there is an abundance of story to see here, as well as side-story content, most of which is gated by stats/grinding, but very little of which is gated by time. You have ample opportunity to accomplish your goals and waste time comfortably without feeling pressured. Most paths are not exclusive, so you can experience what content you wish once you meet the gated requirements.

Really looking forward to seeing this series progress with time.

Great game so far! A sandbox game with enough content to warrant for being a sandbox unlike so many (empty) others.
There's a fair amount of variety in the characters and it's nice to see a dev not use the same bombshell body type with some generic model face all the time. The quests and goals in terms of progression do take some time and increase in rather small increments, but still felt worth the effort for me.
Choices and the level of control you have over certain scenes felt great and the decision-making impactful.
Altogether a great game in the making, especially considering that this project is a solo-dev one! Looking very much forward to upcoming updates!

I tried on many occasions to play this game, because of the tags and couple of good looking models.
Yet the grind is insane and at the end of it you'll get to see a tit. Wow! Fucking wow!
I finally had enough. The good looking daughter is there just for teasing. The fugly wife is an eyesore - I am not interested to fuck that even with the neighbor's dick. Fap time is precious. There is absolutely no point to suffer through that with so many better alternatives out there.

Daughter keeps teasing you she wants sex in the end you end up with a you can watch but no touch rule
Story is bad
Mc needs to be the man earning money for him family

So many woman most of the you can't even have sex with i think
I did not finish everything because i was so bored
No idea what hidden stats are
Wife is to annoying
Renders are good
Will keeping a eye out on this game hoping it gets better and we finally get some scenes with the steph daughter

I went through 3 phases with this game, and I'm guessing many others were the same:

1) skepticism/doubt - relatively low popularity/reviewed/downloaded game, looks kinda meh but what the hell Ill give it a try

2) Engagement/enthusiasm - hey this is a pretty cool sandbox, and unlike many games, half the locations arent closed for 80% of the day! neat! and its got a fun kinda sci-fi ish story, and slow burn relationships.

3) the realization of grind and impending blue balls - surely if I just do ONE more jack pool scene theyll have a sharing bang right? NOPE! -surely if I just do one more scene with Jenny, itll be an actually non-softcore hbo sex scene right? NOPE! -Surely if I do one more run to the shady area of the park, itll turn into a fuckfest right? NOPE!

Look im all for slow burn games, makes the payoff all the much better, but the pacing is just AWFUL in this - id call it a logarithmic curve but thats not accurate because its fairly constant and linear up to a point, then it just never delivers - its more like a piecewise function with a linear slope up, then boom! horizontal asymptote.

If the stories actually had both sexual and emotional conclusions and arc completions this could easily be 4-5 stars, and it wouldnt be hard, the groundwork is already laid, I was shocked actually that the natural 'good' ending wouldnt consist of the wife getting plastic surgery if you chose all the "pro govt" lines, or her turning even uglier into a used trailer park tramp if you did corruption stuff, but NOPE, neither happens, just tapers off to day in- day out boredom.

review based on 0.75 and 0.45e version
PRO:
-animations presents
- some hints presents
- no critical bugs
CONS:
- unreasonable grindy gameplay, i mean not only relationship/corruption, i mean "hidden stats" (go on, check this and try to say- "there no grind")
- some content branches dsnt have good progression since 0.45, like lisas content, but well developed story nonrelated content like ninas
- looks like dev r from germany (variables, remarks), but there no deutsche lang!! dev, why do that?!! many games hvnt our lang, cuz devs dnt speak our lang, its ok, but u... minus 1 star for that

By the standards of this site this is easily a top 10 sandbox explorer. Very hot themes and slow burn.

Stalls out at the end of the update, needs a proper guide bad and to tighten up a bit or you'll end up skipping through weeks trying to find scraps of content for hours and hours blindly.

Still, even as is the content is expansive, gorgeous and well paced on the whole. Keep it up dev, awesome talent you are.

First of all sorry for my bad english, well this game is underrated as fuck because is a grind game, the early game scenes the characters look soo ugly but change after a few hours become more pretty, i like the daughter scenes a lot, the side characters is beautiful, worth to play, this game have a lot of content, serious a lot, i dont give soo much reviews but this one need because of many haters.

This game is so unique in what it tries to accomplish. People are complaining about the grind but for me it was necessary. The progress is rewarding. The story and the world building. Fantastic read. The events popping up randomly. They make playing the game exciting. I loved it, one of my all time favourites. I mean in a fictional world, coming up with so many fictional characters and making them distinctive and interesting. Just great.
Renders are not the best but I don´t care even if they are in pixels as long as I feel like I am playing a "game" not a VN. I admire the imagination of the people who came up with this.

My only criticism would be the golden shower kink. It is way too much used. Like it becomes dull when it comes up with almost every character.

I sincerely hope you guys turn this game into a series, like moving to another city, maybe a new family and so on. Amazing.

You all at one point played those grinding and repetitive games, right? I am talking about the ones that force you to play the same scene again and again. Dialogues that repeat themselves so much that your mouse clicks with automated reflexes as you think what you would eat at the dinner...

Forget them all.

This game cannot be compared to anything else. It is a new level. A new genre of its own. Nothing can and will come close to this one in terms of being repetitive and grindy. Seriously. You can make up with a girl faster in real life, with any girl, a total stranger within the same time you would spend for those girls in that game.

It is so repetitive that just to get a new dialogue in a conversation, you have to repeat the same conversation three times in a week for three months with the same girl, at the same place.

And some encounters are so random that it feels like even the dev forgot some of these events while upgrading to the new versions.

And the wife is among the terrible characters I've ever seen in Ren'Py games. She is terrible. Modelling, terrible. Character, terrible. Dialogues, terrible. Charm? Terrible. She is so terrible that even as a huge No-NTR guy myself, I tried to set her with Marcus (MC's best friend) just to get rid of her.

If you want to question the life and the existence, or if you are willing to experience the deepest corners of the ultimate boredom, that is the game for you.

Edit: Fixed some grammar errors.

+ relative good setting and story
+ the models are good

- the story path is hard to follow, because there is no help
- some events are hard to finde, even with the help menu
---- very grindy, annoyingly grindy

with a savegame editor and so infinite money it is playable, anyway you need a lot of time for the grind.

The graphics are not bad. The variety in characters is great. You have options in the game. The UI is ok. But this game is too grindy. It does not provide any in-game clear walkthrough. In fact, even with an external walkthrough, you will have trouble finding your way in this game. It's so poorly made. It's basically a collage. It follows no logic whatsoever, you just have to try everything out and hope some event will be triggered.

Highly underrated game and I recommend you play it. Although it can be hard to figure out what to do, as this game is very much so a sandbox game, there's a ton of quality content to be discovered. I also really enjoy how the creator(s) plan on following up the game in the future.

Great story, good interface,
I don't like bushes but it's acceptable.
Looking,waiting for more sharing
Maybe some morphing - changing f.ex. by surgery?
Wife could be more vulgar pretending some scenes.
Anyway i'm waiting for m ore

The game is "all right" and I have liked it to an extent, but requires the use of its walkthrough to get the full benefit of its features. There is a hint/reminder feature, but I don't find it as useful as it could be. MC stats are stated in general terms and the only way to find out if you've maxed out some of them is to skip forward with a test save, buy another training book and try to use it.

The official walkthrough is not only not up to date, but also full of trash details that the game's editor wasted time with that the reader doesn't need, and barebones on the reasons to do certain actions. Is there a reason to choose whiskey or coke at the bar instead of beer? Are we unlocking something at the bar by visiting it?

The bar is open and we need a drink. But a strong one after the tragedy at the public pool. Poor us.
• We fill ourselves up with Whiskey until the curfew kicks in amongst with the alcohol.

Click to expand...

• Mc's arousal is the opposite of his hygiene which has hit rock bottom. Time to do something about it in the bathroom.

Click to expand...

How much of that was unnecessary? "Have 'this much' whiskey at the bar to unlock a 'kink' scene later." (I'm only assuming these details as an example.) "Take a shower./Take a bath [and masturbate/don't masturbate.]" There. That's what you need in a walkthrough.

Speaking of dialogue, the English is understandable but needs work. Not sure why girls would say 'HelloHelloHello' when they laugh.

I find the visuals to be pretty good, now the rest of the game design needs to catch up to it. I think it's a solid 3, maybe a 3.5, but definitely not a 4.

The story looks like it can be interesting and it's nice to see stuff like the wife's mood improving but, even though I usually don't mind some grinding, this felt too grindy/repetitive even for me. In the end I gave up on it (at least for now) even before I got up to the second relationship level with the wife (those numbers are too high) or took her jogging in the park or found out what was up with the newstand guy's offer of working for someone. It feels like there is a lot of interesting stuff and characters to discover in the game, but you spend day after day and week after week just working on your job and trying to fit in time to shower, buy gifts, grind relationship with your wife SLOWLY and reading books and jogging to improve your stats SLOWLY, it feels too much like actual work to be much fun. If in a future version things improve about twice as fast (or if at least you can read or jog or do more stat improving activities more than just once a day) I might give this another look, because it did look promissing.

Great game with lots of content. Slow but steady development. This is how Sandbox works. You have many goals and possibilities.

The appearance of the wife is part of the story. She, the ugly duckling, will become a beautiful swan again.

Great sandbox gameplay! It really feels like a game where you make your own experience instead of a reading a visual novel. Still I think the creator should focus on wife and daughter instead of working on secondary characters.

A combination of okay but somewhat generic models and grind that's still present keep this game from rising up into a higher category. It's not necessarily a 'bad' game, it's fap'able (some of the models are cute), it's just that 'average' combined with 'excessive grind' becomes 'below average'. Could benefit from better in game guidance as well, grind plus hidden stats plus lack of guidance, unless wasted time is your turn on it still feels excessive even after some changes it's gone through.

Excellent game! I like the renders and girls bodies are perfectly proportional and so sexy, especially the poses, when you peek on them. The story is also interesting and I didn't mind the grinding, because it is executed very nice and on point. I am absolutelly watching how this will go!

Big thanks to the creator and good luck ahead!