Ren'Py - The Promise [v0.99B] [Xagrim's Gameforge]

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!

Dude, what a bad game with so many likes.

Version: v0.50b

Review:
I was confused by the rates and the reviews, as they are balanced. Half said the game was bad and the other half said the game was good. I looking at this, so I went to test it. The game has a sandbox mechanism with rng and rpg, where you need to increase your stats, earn points with the characters and reach your objectives. The focus of the game is to corrupt your family, especially your wife, since you need to save the relationship with her. You can also corrupt your daughter and can relate to other women.
The game works well on the issue of corruption, the more you earn points and earn levels, they change their clothes. However the maximum level is 3, and you still can't fuck your daughter (I couldn't).
The game has a lot of grind, making you waste your time, and one thing that irritated me a lot was that when you increased your wife's level for some reason she would get upset and go back to level 1. That's annoying. For you to earn money in this game you will waste hours of your time and things in the store are expensive. In addition to having to keep giving gifts to the characters to then earn points of level progression.
Another thing is also the fact that the RPG is present, you need to bathe (not very necessary), you need to masturbate to decrease the arousal (not very necessary) and need to earn charm and fitness points. Games like this are common but have a high level of grind.
Going back to talking about your home, the game should work better with your daughter, Lisa, it's the only interesting and best thing around. In addition, there are two or three women you can meet and have a small relationship in the game, do all that grinding again and in that you have already lost hours so you end up getting tired and deleting the game.

PROS:
The game works well in its visual of the models of the characters, its renderings are nothing like other games, where a 40 year old woman looks like a 20 year old girl. The corruption system is a little good, what caught my attention was that they change their clothes constantly.

CONS:
There are many things, the first of which is the grinding which is quite. The gameplay is very tiring and makes you waste your time. There are very few scenes and the animations are terrible, that is, in this requirement everything is bad (scenes, animations, etc). The game doesn’t have a walkthrough and it also has no cheats. This is pretty bad, because without a walkthrough you are stuck in the game.

So, why I gave 1 star?
The game is bad to play. Even if it has positive characteristics that portray the reality of the characters, it is not worth playing. For reasons of having grinding and also reasons for not having a walkthrough. The game has a hint system but at a certain point it is flawed. An example of this is shown that X hours you should go to the clothing store with your daughter or wife, but when you complete these tasks this hint / objective still remains shown.
Anyway, I do not recommend, maybe in the future the game will have a transformation that makes it much better, until then it is a bad game that you will waste your time. It doesn't have interesting scenes, the animations are terrible, and there's not much content, just a lot of grinding.

Version reviewed - .49.5a

This game holds a special place in my heart because it is the first porn game I ever played and I have just replayed it for the first time in about 6 months. Looking back, I recognize now that it's not in the top tier of games on here in terms of gameplay and story, but it's solid. The wife is objectively not 'hot' but I wouldn't call her ugly like other reviewers. It is part of the story and I'm excited to see where the story goes. On the flip side, the side characters are all very hot so you do get a variety of looks.

Play this game if:
-You enjoy teasing and slow progression with grinding,. You will have to work for more lewd content. I prefer this approach although it's certainly not for everyone.

-You like bushes. That is my #1 reason for playing this game. Note to Dev - please, if you give the option to trim/shave the wife in the future, please let there be an option to keep the bush as well.



I've given this 4 instead of 5 stars because some of the writing and grammar is just rough. And while I do enjoy the grind, there are many hours of each day where you have to repeat the same content over and over to progress to the next level. Seeing the same text and scenes 20 different times does start to wear thin, although the payoff is usually good in the end.

i would give this game 5 stars, because it is a dirty game with an option to corrupt your ugly bushy wife and ugly adopted daughter. the story is nice and its always nice to work hard enough for family gather money and corrupt them enough to make them do whatever you want.

all the other models in other games aside and the ugly bushy filthy wife in this game what makes it unique i guess.

I grew attached to this game lately [v0.48.5a]. Love the story setting and that you have to slowly get reaquainted with your wife, bring her back to previous beauty and kinkiness and find some lewd action along left and right. I'm also happy to see The Promise featuring naturally grown pubic hair for a change. Tired of bald chicks all the time. Furthermore you can choose whether you want to engage in sharing fantasies or not. Last but not least I'm curious where the plot is headed and when the resistance shows up.