VN - Ren'Py - The Roommate [v0.11.04] [togs]

This VN was a much better experience than I thought it would be.

Initially I was worried there would be grinding and pointless stat checks, but this was not the case at all. The stats are only there to give you a better idea of your means without having to insert contrivances into the story. Your choices matter, the renders are good, and the animations are decent.

The sex scenes could use some more work in the sense that they don't exactly capture the essence of sexiness: the characters have their general needs, wants, and preferences, but it's generally communicated like they're reading an encyclopedia entry.
There are many writing techniques that can help with this issue, such as having a more ordinary person react to the extraordinary things happening, even a throwaway "Holy shit, I can't believe this" would help.

That being said, I can't speak for the romance path's writing, as I was kind of playing like Tony Stark: fuck everything, but never fuck someone over. Maybe the romance path is better written, and character arcs/changes are better laid out.
The game is a solid 4/5, definitely good, and if this issue is fixed, it will be great!

This review is for version 0.6.1..... a very good story so far. Not the same old tired cliche' stuff really. the renders are great... the women are varied in looks and personalities. That's a great thing in games like this. I look forward to future updates.

Played through the game for the first time and I am really enjoying the story. Often times during games I have to use the skip unread text feature because some authors drone. But this one kept the wording at an appropriate pace for the story. The renders are great however the animation is choppy, but you get the gist. Storylines and arcs are fantastic. It's a lot of fun and hooks you in.

Played through it, for me its a like, but overall the game cant compete with the best around here. For several reasons.

The Models are really nice, especially Kari and Lois are really nice and hot, like them very much, and cant recall to have ever seen models in other games like those two... love them.

But for the "looks" of the game thats kind of the only good thing... The expressions are really bad, especially considering the body, most of the times they are standing like dolls in a shopping center round. Especially Kari before going to work... really strange. The animations are between bad and "ok" overall... maybe you should stop doing them, OR improve them very much, i think youre capable of doing good animations, there are some scenes where you show that you can do better, like kari is riding the MC, the bouncing boobs are nice and such, but these are short loops aswell, best animation and maybe the only good is the one where louis is going to the plane over the vent... thats really nice, if you could keep up THAT qualitiy the whole game the animations would really be a plus, otherwise, the really short loops are more annoying than a plus to the game.

Now the writing, its ok, nothing special, but there is nothing to complain either i would say.

Lets talk about the characters. Another reason why this game cant compete with top games. They are all very boring... with one exception, Louis is the only girl thats at least a little bit interesting, the dialogues with her are the only entertaining so far. And overall she is the one that stood out of every other girl in the game... all the others, including the maingirl Kari are really boring, with no exclusive attributes whatssoever. she is nice... like nearly every girl in the game... and yeah, thats about it. At the start she should act like a naive girl i think, but its coming over like the dumbest girl i have seen in a long time... This is getting better after a while, but other than that, she still is boring in the end... even the sex with her is boring.

But i cant tell exactly why, iam a little bit fond of her regardless what i said of being boring... she is kinda "sweet", looks incedible good. And of course... to be there for the naive innocent girl is always something that works for me. Especially if the girl is a red head too...

So yeah, Kari (despite the fact that she is overall boring so far) and Louis make it worth to play. But thats it...

The story started fine and gets very ridiculous (come on, milk-farms for drugged woman, really?) should have stayed the way it started... become unexptected CEO of a company (with some shady business too of course, but why not staying half-way relasitc in that department?) and now has to run it and search for new employees and maybe get "company-affair" problems that are kinda realistic, not this strange milking thing... i dont judge the "milking" fetish here... iam not into that, but i know others are, so i dont have a problem with that (and you can avoid the scene, so no problem) but the whole story is just so ridiculous... there are other ways to implement that kind of fetish without destroying every seriousness in the whole game.

No Sound or music either, not a big issue for me, i disable the ingame music of the most VNs anyway and play my own. But the good games has good sound and background music thats worth it to listen too.

The game mechanics are pointless too, i figured you decided to implement them and get a real meaning to them later on, but for know, the lust, energy and money meters are complete useless.

You have some good things in this games... the models of Kari and Louis, the dialogues between MC and louis, some animationsa re good too, overall i think they were improving throughout the game... but overall its not enough to get above average i think.

The whole game is not that good, but not bad either. Yeah 3 stars for me. Will watch it, and come back another time, but it wont be a favorite in my book.

The story starts somewhat semi-believable but then drifts off completely into pure ridiculousness.

In the beginning you are a very young exec at a company and living with an intern of the same company. You strut around doing basically nothing all day and then become CEO. It then devolves into random spy cybertech and completely unbelievable goofy tit milking experiments on a corporal level... the story is just so unfathomably bad.

Choices seem to have an immediate effect, but are not remembered or reused within the game. Example: You sleep with office slut. Later when you call her in as CEO everything plays out identically whether you fucked her earlier or not, very disappointing. Another example is making a deal with a sugarbaby that the game then completely forgets about it and never mentions again. Just makes choices seem kinda pointless and the entire experience is rather kinetic.

Gameplay is simply reading and occasionally clicking on choices. No mini games or anything else. There is a money counter displayed but since MC literally becomes CEO of a multi billion dollar company within a few minutes I found there to be no need to pay attention to it ever. I always choose the biggest money spending options and never ran out. Energy and Lust meter are completely pointless too. For Lust simply jerk off when game offers it, otherwise you get to hospital with a game over screen.. The Energy bar changes nothing from what I could tell in 2 playthroughs.

There is no sound in the game at all. No background music, no sound effects, no moans or any other sound.
Scenes are mediocre, pretty vanilla with slight animations, nothing to write home about but I've seen worse.
Models are pretty good. Writing is average. Story becomes ridiculous.

Overall:
+ models
Ø scenes
Ø writing
- gameplay
- choices/consequences
-- no sound
-- story

There's unfortunately not a lot going on in this one, unless you like scenes of the mc reading paperwork on their sofa and rote mystery box style writing. A conspiracy involving breastmilk and super-advanced magical AI is doled out in tiny teasers, and the romances with vulnerable, big-breasted orphans move at an even slower pace.

Choices don't seem to have much impact. Early on it seems like you might be able to mould your character a little with how you act (stern vs kind) but in the end you're just the same helpful niceguy regardless, and the choices turn out to be pass/fail for more exposition/mystery box clues.

Crude animations. Limited sexual content. Story that isn't half as clever or original as it thinks it is. Disappointing as early updates showed promise.

It's strange why i like this game. Compared to many other games with really great renders and young girls, harems, incest and so on this is just a straight forward love story with an interesting main story line.

The renders aren't the best let's be honest, but you can see time and thought were put into setting them up. Lighting can use work, so camera angles but still things are clear and the women are beautiful. Nothing over the top just straight forward sexiness.

Why do I like it so much? The feel good factor and a MC that is a straight up good guy yet doesn't allow people to walk over him. Out of the box good MC. Kari of course and Lois are just super hot and deserves the play time. Also Mallory... just yummy.

So if you after as i said feel good, good story and some love options then definitely give this game a go.

Reviewing v0.4.7
This is one of perhaps half a dozen adult VNs that I would rate as elite. Some have complex game mechanics, others stunning graphics and animation, others glorious word-smithing.

While The Roommate is no slouch in any of these areas, it is the story that sets it apart from the pack. There are so many elements to it, and the plot is revealed in such a masterful way that I actually gasped "Aha!" out loud more than once.

A good story needs great characters, and the interview scene shows off this facet, both in terms of model design and character. Just as I was beginning to think a character was a bit of a stereotype, she would make it clear that there was a lot more depth to her. More generally, I continually found myself on edge about who to trust - I would not be surprised if any of the characters is involved in the conspiracy.

Ratings at a glance:
Graphics: **** (vary from passable to brilliant)
Models: ***** (something for just about any taste)
Animations: **** (decent but rare)
Mechanics: ***** (always tricky for a largely linear story, but it is possible to make meaningful changes)
Story: *********** (like Nigel's amp - this one goes up to 11)

Congratulations and thanks to the dev(s??) for this.

Great start to the game. It looks good and has a cool story with some customization of the MC's personality which I really like. I can't wait to see where it goes in the future. I strongly recommend it as it is a game that definitely deserves some more publicity.

This story is a great one...and thankfully, the babes are hot as well. The mystery surrounding the MC's inherited company are playing out nice and slowly, as is his conquest of some of the hot babes. For me, if a VN has not got an interesting story, I am not that inclined to keep following it. So for me, this is worth following.
The Dev's pace of showing us both mystery and hot babes is just about perfect. That is why I rated this five stars.

So far it's a strong 4*. The plot isn't the common one, no yoga scenes as an example, and I like it. Not much sex yet, I had one scene and skipped the other (not interested in that LI). I like the girls, they are different in both looks and behaviour. I like Kari a lot . Waiting for next update and
As some has mentioned earlier is the graphics getting better, so keep that up Dev!

Playing "The Roommate" was an entertaining experience. The story is interesting. The writing is pretty good. There is some remarkable craziness sometimes, especially in the helping the widow episode.

So the scenario is good. Not perfectly polished, and I thought sometimes that some opportunities could be developed further... But I guess that shows how engaged it made me.

The renders and models are mostly of "OK, but nothing special" class. I'd like to see more of Cassie though (and I guess she would be there in future updates).

For now, there are not many sex scenes, and they aren't very exciting (unless maybe you are a fan of cow-sized boobs and lactation).

So it's solid 4 stars. Not perfect, but interesting to play.

Quite a bit better than I thought it'd be. It has a bit of a rough start. Writing is a bit uneven at first and as mentioned the poses early on are a bit wooden (esp. Kari) but it picks up fairly fast. I really like the pacing (it's not too fast, so don't expect a lot of sex scenes early on).

I like the MC's tone. He's adequately arrogant when appropriate. Also Lois is a character I can really identify with, so that probably clouds my judgement a bit.

All in all, a very worthwhile game off to a promising start.

I really enjoyed this opener. It was cute, but not cuuuute. It was light but happy and, although one has the usual option at times to peek, it made a pleasant change not to have "perverting", conflict or heavy intrigue imposed from the get-go.

I do have to say though that I did find it very difficult to settle in with Kari's personality, because her exquisitely crafted, full-figured, almost mature, appearance gave no indication of the depths of her naive, almost childlike personality. I do not mean stupid, but just jarringly unworldly.

However, this by no means spoiled my enjoyment of the tale as a whole and I feel optimistic that now both characters have acknowledged the emotional connection that was obviously going to be, at some point, made, there will hopefully be significant character and relationship development in the stars for them both.

So I'm looking forward to the next segment or perhaps two, at which point I think I'll know whether or not I'm going to buy a ticket on the Patreon train.

This is an early review and based on v0.1 Preview

Overall I am liking the feel of the game. The interactions and story are fairly basic but not too basic and good. There is enough context to make it believable. The graphics are good and like the look and feel overall. It is obviously still just a preview, so cannot go in-depth yet on story, but I am looking forward to future releases.

The only complaint I have is the routine is a bit too routine, but that is something that could be due to it being so early in the story development.

Keep it up XDR! Solid start for a first VN.

First thoughts on this:

English was good! Overall story was ok too.

Graphics very basic, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The posing of Kari was a bit weird though - like she was a doll rather than a person. Would be better if you can make a more natural pose, especially if you are going to repeat the same one over and over.

Money mechanics was interesting but not really explained. Feels like you will always have lots of it, so why bother?

Overall, I thought it was ok. Nothing revolutionary, but as this is a preview, that's perhaps expected.

Good luck!