Ren'Py - Time Loop Hunter [v0.71.10] [Hydrahenker]

I'm a fan of anything time manipulation related. Time stop, timeline change, etc.
So this concept is really interesting to me.

At first I liked it. Replaying and doing different routes while not actually replaying was cool.
...then I did it like 10 more times with only the smallest changes.
It became super tedious after a while.

I opened a guide to see how to do things right away... and I finished about 1/5 or less of the total guide before I was just done. It felt like work.

Story: 4/5
Character: 4/5 (they didn't get too in depth)
Art: 4/5
H stuff: 3/5 (not that hot for the most part, and rare. Added a whole star for all the sister stuff cuz I'm a degenerate)

Overall 3/5
I would not recommend this to someone looking for H stuff, a story to read, or easy to play games. This game takes some effort.

I think it's really cool though. Really well done for what it is. I think it just focused on replaying the same events too much.

Fun game. The payoff seems rather too little for so much playthrough in my opinion. The characters design are avarage. The type of game that you cannot figure out on your own unless you sort dust particles as a hobby. Thank God for the WT

PRO: this game made me acually lol so much and its not the tipical kind of game we see around here. Got to give that to author. He really puts the sweat to the story because its really well done.

Good Job

Idk about the old bad comments, but if you are actually looking for games and not just quick fap material, this game in it's current state will gives you a whole damn day of fun, long stories, multiple girls with lots of interaction, original mechanic.
It needs a bit of shorten down and bult-in walkthrough tho, makes it so that if you pass like 250 resets, CAS or another mysterious system in your brain will tells you some key clues, like how to pass day 3, and 350 resets will tell you how to increase self control to level 2 and such.
Love u, dev!

I liked Groundhog Day. I enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow.
I loved Day Break and Replay by Ken Grimwood
Time Loop Hunter might not have the best graphics out there, but I'm liking it. It's difficult and has an engaging story.

Version Reviewed: v0.26.10

This is a story of a guy who is tasked by an intergalactic police force to track down a sneaky parasite that apparently has some sort of effect on its host, but the cops are pretty vague as to what to look for. In order to help him he's given a time loop device that allows him to Groundhog Day his way through a couple of weeks to thread the needle on the perfect set of actions to accomplish his goal. The time travel mechanic is used constantly, where you have to know information from the future to complete past events.

Being a porn game you naturally have to sleep through every woman you meet in order to accomplish your mission, but on the downside you only have a few days to do it. Luckily for you most of the ladies you meet are very thirsty.

So it's a pretty interesting premise, but there are some issues. The graphics are good enough but not spectacular by todays standards. The storyline is naturally choppy due to the way it is laid out. However, these are minor nits, the fundamental problem with this game is that it's just way too hard. Every single clue requires you to thread the needle exactly right and without a walkthrough you WILL get stuck early and often. The built-in hint system is effectively useless as is the girl-radar. If you want to play this game just suck it up and download the walkthrough while downloading the game. You might think you can logic your way through the game by reading everything carefully and paying close attention to what they say, but it doesn't work that way.

For example, your character goes "I need some sleeping pills, lets ask my drug dealer", so you go to the drug dealer and there's no option to ask him. The option to ask him only appears at one specific time, and it is the one that is mutually incompatible with the point where you need the sleeping drugs, so you have to time loop twice. Except that he doesn't have the drugs, you have to time loop back to another point to ask a character to be told no so you can time loop back again to pick their pocket to time loop back to be able to do the pre-req and then pick the pocket and then use the drugs.

If you read the first paragraph thinking "I wonder if there's a prize for using the fewest time loops, maybe I can only do it 5 or 10 times?". Yeah, no. You are expected and required to loop time hundreds of times to complete the game. There are some timeline management tools that help, but they're fairly limited.

Overall, I'm giving the game 3 stars for having an interesting premise and delivering on it. Also I like that the PC has a fair bit of agency even if he is locking out of making the obvious correct choice a little too often. Just remember to download the walkthrough because you will need it.

I gave this game 1 star, perhaps undeservedly, but let me explain:
I really liked the scenes in this game, and also very interesting characters, different from the template ones.
The game is very unusual, the author of the game spent VERY much time on it. I would rate version 0.12 of this game for 5 stars.
But all these things were devalued by the following development.
Was introduced a WALL before day 3.
To pass the wall, I spent more than 300 restarts, but could not. Then I turned to the walkthrough of the game. And it turned out that I needed to start all over again. My ass just burned out. That's all I wanted to say.
(this is a game with the biggest grind of all that I know)

Great concept, flawed and grind heavy result. Every now and then you see comments relating to how a game needs a walkthrough but this game goes beyond that, even with a walkthrough it remains a grind fest that's punishing to play (and not in the fun BDSM way). I won't give it one star since it's a tough idea to pull off and I think there's an honest attempt here but just can't even give it three because it's just not that enjoyable to actually play. If you're going for the complexity of a time travel game you've got to make it more fun than this.

I had tried the game earlier in development when it had very little content so I waited to comment and give it a chance to improve as I thought it was a pretty good twist but it has turned into a tangled knotted up ball of yarn that you have to try and untangle only it seems it's worse as there's several timelines of yarn.
The character's are all missing depth and meaning as the dev focused on trying to have the player waste hours on far too many characters in far too many timelines in far too many repartitions. Whew!!!!!!
As far as the sex scenes, assuming you don't have a life and hang in there to actually get to see one it's not bad be it's also not worth the effort.
Maybe a walththrough mod will save this game else it will be left to people that do not go to school, work, have a girl friend, wife, friends or life outside of their computer.

This is a very long game because you have to play the same exact scenes over and over and over again. There are so many combinations of options but only one right answer so trying to find the way to progress a character's story is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Unless of course you use the walkthrough from the start and if a game can't be enjoyed without a walkthrough it isn't really a game at all. The devs really need to work out a hint system that is actually helpful. Would have been 1 star from me but the concept of time travel is pretty great. A shame about the execution though.

Obviously more content, faster, would be nice. But the content does come. The actual gameplay is fun, the scenes are good. It could use a bit of work as far as the "notes" system goes, it can be difficult to remember how to set the timeline up for specific things. The actual saved timelines system still seems pretty WIP, but it will be very helpful once it's streamlined and easier to figure out how things played out so far.

This game is literally something else. You can travel in time and begin exploring different approaches to how you do things, and discover things, the possibilities are vast and by the time you start connecting the things you discovered in your mind you will create theories about it and it will be the food of your thoughts for days. 10/10 would spend days playing it again. The characters and story are nice also, but the experience of playing it was by far the best for me.

This game is great with a consistent development cycle and an ambitious goal. I feel like this is less an adult game and more a game with adult elements, which has its blessings and curses. Most of the time when an adult game tells you they have 6 hours of content, they mean you need to go to work, make money, repeat 8 times, sex scene, repeat 9 times, sex scene. This game does a lot of things with time travel that real game studios would find interesting. I saw an E3 game which almost sounds like a demo reel of this game, so I'm not joking.

So now I'll break down the positives of this: the game is super ambitious and has great artwork. It's suitably kinky and the time mechanics are pretty great and most of the time when they update and add a character, they'll add some stuff they were doing on previous days. There's no grind, only ferretting out paths.

Negatives: The game has sexy models, but trying to masturbate to it is like reading a dimestore romance novel. Sex scene followed by 20 minutes of story. This only grows worse if you don't know what you're doing. Trying to get past day 3 morning feels like summitting Everest the first time. The hints are good, but not great, which is a problem I'm not sure can be fixed. You can tell me that Alice needs to be helped with the bike and then use the drug to make the concentration drug (for example), but I ran through that 20 times before I looked it up in the walkthrough and saw that Dana needed to be wounded or something (I was on the wrong route) despite not being involved. Another thing is sometimes you need to go down the dumb path for your character to randomly come up with an idea or just so you can fill a memory that obviously ends in a reset. Yes failure teaches a lot, but it feels odd for me to have to see the stage blow up from 3 different places before I figure out there's no stopping it. Part of me worries that the project will split into 35 paths by the end and it'll require a degree in quantum mechanics to solve without the walkthrough.

Still the sex stuff is good, and the story stuff is good. I'd give it a 4.5, but 5 is the better choice than 4 in my mind. Don't use it for random masturbation unless you have the ability to masturbate to a single scene as this is a novel's worth of text between scenes.

Review based on v.0.20.20:

I'll keep this review short, this game got some really nice looking models and sex scenes that are very well done, but the story while interesting so is the game itself far to complex for its own good. The hint system in game is almost non exisitent and to vague in what to do, and this sucks as you will be doing quite alot of backtracking between the different story paths.

I give the game a 3/5 because while I hate the gameplay itself so do I really like everything else about it. If you really want to check it out, then do it but be warned that you will have to be using a walktrough to get anywhere in the game...

Far too complex for an adult game:

The title says it all. The renders are mediocre, the gameplay is terrible and the sex scenes are ok. The story isn't great.

This game is too complex for its own good. You can't play this without the walkthrough. Even the hints the demon gives in the game are too vague.

this game is unbeatable play this game without walkthrough is too unobtrusive, the game is not intuiyive we never know what to do and where to go, it becomes a hazard all the time, to unlock the content this is impossible so walkthorgh mandatory but this one is a step not even more boring than the game is already Repetition steps again and again very quickly becomes annoying, and even after not following the walkthrough this one does not work properly this game is a headache without any interest because the story becomes that succetion of the same event permanently

Although the gameplay can get a little tedious at times, you can only but admire that it's extremely different from the countless other Ren'Py games being made. The models are good looking, the graphics arent the best I've seen but they're pretty good, and the story is one of the few that I actually read. I couldn't get into the story of DMD so that holds a lot of weight.

In conclusion, it isn't the best game. Though its unique gameplay is what stands out from the other top tier games, and it can only get better from here.

Let me preface by saying this game has a huge potential.
With that said it is currently a patience exercise.

Reluctant to use the word grind since at least I connect that word with doing the exact same thing over and over for XP or similar, that is not the case. Instead with correct use of the timeline feature you'll be doing slightly different things each step of the way. This would have been fine if there was any actual rewards at the end, but the game is currently lacking in this regard.
The UI could also have been done better with more use of the keyboard. Currently to for instance go from home to the University library its a total of 6 clicks, 8 if you include actually doing something there, since actions are hidden behind a submenu that needs to be clicked. For any other game this would have been fine, but in a game like this where you constantly revisit locations its CMS-inducing.

Looking at what content is currently in the game and the amount of branching it has, I don't expect it to have reward-worthy content for quite a while. If or when that is in place I'll change this review to 5 stars, and if the UI is changed to something requiring less mouse-interaction it will get 5 stars.

Edit:
Changed the rating to 3 stars.
Hydrahenker sent me a PM to inform me that I've missed a game option(Auto actions menu) that lets you skip clicking the sub-menu, instead having available actions automatically show when entering a new scene/location. This also allows the use of keyboard instead of mouse, so all my complaints in that regard are mute.

This is an exceptionally interesting game with some great CG, which is also borderline impossible to progress in.

Edit:

After using a walkthrough to progress., I want to edit my review and say this (was exceptionally negative before).

I like the writing in this game, I like the characters. I like the way the H-scenes are presented and the scenarios. I actually enjoy the... well, actually, I can't say I enjoy the story, because you forget the story. You're hunting some kind of parasite, except, you never do, lol.

People say the issue with this game is the "grind". That's true...but, it doesn't say it in the right way to me.

Imaging I told you that there was a treasure behind 3 doors. And you had time travel powers. What would you do? Well, you'd try all 3 doors, wouldn't you?

Except, this isn't how the game works. See, the treasure is behind door 2. In fact, door 2 has a big TREASURE here sign. But the game gives you no option to click door 2.

You can click door 1, and door 3. Then, you can go spend 8 years learning to be a locksmith (door 2 isn't locked). And once you're a locksmith, you can pick a lock 8 years in the future to get into an old man's room. You can then talk to the old man, and realize in his youth, he knew the treasure was behind door 2. So you time travel back to before the door ever existed to talk to him. But he will only talk to a clown of international repute. So you go to Clown college for 19 years...

This is kind of how the game goes. There are obvious soluion to problems, but you literally have to do every wrong solution. The game PRETENDS this is helpful. But imagine if I told you that, rather than just walking through door 2, you must first walk through every door in America, to "learn" about doors. THEN you get to walk through door 2.

Otherwise, good game. I enjoyed. I'd say "would play again", but I used the loop function 384 times. So, would play 385 times.

If Korean MMOs and Adult Adventure Genre had a baby this would be the result.

Official walkthought has over 1800 (that's right) steps to follow to see all the content that's available here, and most are minor variants of each other, but many are almost mandatory to get it to proceed for the next stages of most heroines, since the Main Character needs to use previous known knowledge in other timelines. So expect a lot of grinding.

If you don't follow the Walkthrough you'll be in a world of pain, because the game is not intuitive in the least, so you'll spend most of the time wondering where to go next, or what to do to later to trigger said event for the heroine you're following at the moment, or you'll not even know that you needed to trigger an event with Another heroine or a member of the supporting cast before you could proceed with that one.

Good premise, flawed execution.

Edited review on March 2021. Used to feel like an excellent game with a lot of choices, pathways and options but gets insanely grindy and confusing, and basically needs a walkthrough to go forward. I wish it had more adult scenes and was actual doable to a casual user without a step by step walkthrough.