Ren'Py - The Stallion [v0.15] [Horny Saint]

The Stallion [v0.3] review

What it is:
Linear sandbox stat grinder real porn VN.

Allright you guys, I see some dunces complaining about the writing here and let me just tell you that they are so very wrong. You see, the mistake they did was taking things seriously and then of course the humor flew right over their heads.

This game is absolutely not perfect, but what's wrong with it is most definitely not the writing.

So as an advice to you, dear reader: Don't take this game too seriously. Instead, just relax and enjoy the sublime humor commenting on the many absurdities of our modern society. And of course the dirty sex being shoved in your face every other minute.

This is a porn comedy, simple as that. And as a porn comedy it does a great job! The humor is rather dry and sarcastic.
I guess sometimes you need to be a native English speaker or it may pass over your head a little. I'd describe the type of humor as British kind of dry intellectual humor. It's mostly a commentary on relationships, dating, feminism, litterature and working in an office.
To me, it's fucking fantastic and a nice break from the rest of the goofy kind of slapstick comedy that's so common among porn comedies. But your mileage may vary, it probably isn't for everyone.

Ok so far it sounds like this game would be a 5/5 right? Well it's not.

This game is guilty of all four of the Popabear's four deadly sins of game design:
1. Linear sandbox.
2. Fetch quests.
3. Skip time to advance.
4. No meaningful choices.

This atrocious game design really baffles me because the rest of the game is rather intelligent.

Sure, there's some random sex scenes and "reward pictures" you can get by exploring, but most of the world is completely empty and exploring it isn't fun.
There's just nothing interesting happening outside of the main storylines. Location X will only have a quest trigger there if you've advanced through the main storyline to the point where the quest log tells you to go there. There's really no point in going anywhere unless the quest log tells you to.
The game isn't 100 % linear, you can do some sub-quests like the stat grind in a different order, but in the end it doesn't matter because the story will play out the same.
Most of the time I'm just going through the quest log in a linear fashion, going to location X, speaking to Character A, who sends me to buy item B at location Y and then returning again. I'm just following instructions, nothing else.
It's just dumb and pointless. I'd much rather have enjoyed this by just clicking left mouse through all of it instead.
There are choices, but these are of the "guess which combo of these 3-option answers will win this minigame?"-variety. The only consequence for getting it wrong is being forced to do it again tomorrow, or maybe you'll miss a sex scene.
And at the end of the sex scenes there's often a cum outside/inside option, but if you pick the one that doesn't happen in the recorded porn scene, you'll just get a still image from the scene showing nothing in particular. While the other choice shows the rest of the recorded scene. This really makes me wonder why the choice is there in the first place.
And then lastly, sleep to progress. To advance the story, sometimes you're waiting for a phone call you didn't know you were going to get, and to get it you'll need to go to bed so that the person can call you the next morning. Just, why?

So all in all, it's a great porn comedy with some rather annoying hoops to jump through. I still recommend it though, especially if you like some smart dry humor and competent writing in your porn games.

This is the deal. If you want a good game to jerk it to and prefer smaller breasted woman over fake tit bimbos you're going to love this game. If you are looking for a well done game, good story line or big titted bimbos you should probably go somewhere else.

The story is not great. The game has some minor issues and frustrations in how it's done. This is true for almost all "real porn" games.

With that said it's to me one of the better real porn games out there. Hot scenes and lots of them the story being good enough to string them along for me.

Man, I hate to do this but this game is pretty bad, mostly due to the writing. The whole premise is that you're literally the most worthless man on the earth. A family-less, friendless, money-less, skill-less, sorry ass son of a bitch. BUT WAIT. NO. YOU WERE THE BASTARD CHILD OF THE WEALTHIEST MAN EVER. AND HE DIED AND MADE YOU HIS HEIR. Now you get to inherit all his money and assets, and make his bitchy widow your sla... ah, what's that? You... don't do that? Okay, there must have been some clause or something in the w... What? The main character just... declines? For literally no fucking reason?...............................................

Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't have the ability to suspend my disbelief that much. It makes no goddamn sense and every dialog sequence in the game is built on this. And you might say, MAYBE it's just a bs way to introduce the story and MC quickly accepts the money after brief hesitation? That could be somewhat logical right??? Psh, maybe that's the case, but it sure doesn't seem like it. After clicking around for a couple in game days while MC repeatedly monologued about not wanting anything to do with billions of dollars, I had to close this game up. The writing has turned this game into a video/image gallery with a grind.

And, I said I hate to do this, and that's because it's not all bad (although there is some other minor bad stuff), there are some decent and good pieces to this game too, but they're just overwhelmingly buried in the most massive pile of shit you can imagine courtesy of this ridiculous plot. I just can't overlook it.

I just want to say that this game definately deserves five stars. The game I really enjoyed to play. Everything is really great. Idea, Arts, Gameplay are very good. I wish that development of this project will continue.

For a v0.1, there's a fair amount of content here. What stands out is that it is unique in form. Ren'Py + real porn is rarely done well, but it fits here. The Stallion doesn't take itself too seriously. It's fun enough without being too easy, but never gets so hard that it gets frustrating. The scenes flow naturally. Usually when "real porn" games try and do video it doesn't work. Here, it works really well, in terms of structure at least.
The scenes can be a bit low quality at times so if that's a red flag it may be best to skip this game. Furthermore, some scenes are locked behind a paywall. While people can share the passwords needed for the scenes, it's rare for games that do that to do well. It's hard to justify paying for a couple of scenes only. If someone chooses to support the game, it'll be because they like it overall. As for v0.1, it's a minor hiccup.
Despite its goofy form and the occasional typo, The Stallion could end up being a fun and unique experience. At the very least, it's worth keeping an eye on.

This game took me by surprise; for 0.1 with a lot of jank that's obvious as soon as you boot it up, this turned out to actually be one of the more entertaining maledom games I've played here.

Now, that jank can't be ignored; the open world is a little too big and kind of annoying to trigger events in, although there's never an penalty, or chance of missing something. I had the progress tracker telling me to do things I'd already done, I had Ren'py errors that needed rolling back, nothing game breaking, but enough that it was a hassle to deal with. The writing is also... a mixed bag; there are very strong points, which I'll get to later, but most of the general dialouge is extremely boilerplate, without much character or flare, especially the long plot dump sequence at the start. It's also very clearly a 0.1, with characters directing you into dead-ends, which will presumably be filled in later, which is at least better than having every new version feel unnaturally stapled onto the last, but when it can already be frustrating to trigger some things, the red herrings don't help. Finally, one thing I strongly object to is making plot-critical scenes Patreon exclusive; the climactic scene of the main story in version 0.1 requires a password from Patreon to access, now you can still continue the story, skipping the scene, but the fact that even the main story is being paywalled off, in this game made up of other people's porn clips, it was almost enough to make me quit on the spot. But, after I calmed down, I found thepassword, and I'm very happy I did, because once you get past all that, this game does really have something special.

After all that bitching, you know this game has to be doing something right to still get 4 stars, and the truth is it pulls through where it counts. The one area this game absolutely nails are the sex scenes. Now, I'm a fan of realporn games, but generally I prefer the Sugarcube style of being suggestive with pictures and short gifs; this game uses full video clips, which I generally like a lot less. However, The Stalion may have won me over; for one thing, the videos tend to be on the shorter side, and, well. they have audio, but it's not the actual audio from the videos (or at least, it's not synced up). That might sound bad, and it's a little uncanny at first, but once you get into the game, it actually works really well; compared to a game like The Agency, where it feels like you're just spending most of your time watching normal porn, here the shorter videos and asynchronous sound make it so the porn is creating an atmosphere, rather than taking over the spotlight, it keeps the focus on the writing. And oh boy, the writing.

First off, yes, the writing is stupid, the MC fucking all these women he barely knows, most of whom have good reasons not to fuck him, is stupid on its face, but it's an honest kind of stupid. It's the kind of horny, teenaged stupid we've all known at some point in our lives, and where this game shines is in digging into that feeling and running with it. The sex scenes almost all have extensive dialouge in them, which always comes back to re-afirming the MC as the biggest, baddest alpha-male in the world, who can turn any woman into his drooling sex-slave with just a few strokes of his cock, and it just works. Where so many porn games will drag things out for update after update, milking their audience on the vauge promise of sex, here we have a male power fantasy that delivers exactly what it promises; even as a 0.1, there's a whole buffet of hot bimbos to be conquered and inferior cucks to be emasculate, and the dev nails that presentation. Without spoiling, some of the scenes in 0.1, particularly the finale of the "Work" subplot, are such perverted genius that they can't be ignored, they just sell the fantasy so damn well. So, if you're a fan of maledom power fantasy games, you absolutely owe it to yourself to wade through the bullshit on this one; trust me, it's worth it.