Ren'Py - Time Loop Hunter [v0.72.00] [Hydrahenker]

This game doesn't deserve all the bad reviews. It's definitely at least a bit convoluted and it's much more complicated to progress in than most other games on this site, but I don't necessarily think it should be condemned for that. It's satisfying whenever I find a new dialogue option after figuring out what I'm supposed to do, and there's a sense of reward for moving forward in this game moreso than others. Yeah, the hint system could be much better and the reset system is tedious to use, but the content is there and the variety is too. If you download this game, don't expect to just be able to skip through everything to the h scenes. It requires a tiny bit of effort on the player's part. 4 stars instead of 5 because of bad hint system/finnicky mechanics. And bring back the old Cas.

Boring and repetitive grind - not recommended anymore.

Well, firstoff the basic game idea with a time-loop has been promising. I played this game in early state long time ago and it really kept my interest - so i left it for more content and today i went back to check on it ......
....
... well .... bad idea

This game just overdoes the "Timeloop stuff". Nothing against a basic "Groundhog Day" (There is another game with that idea - which got the same problems right now) - but this is just too much.
Hiding a grind behind a time-loop story is not THAT cuffing to be able to ignore what it REALLY means: GRIND - HORRIBLE GRIND.
Not only you have to repeat day after day like in other games, no - in this game you have to repeat THE SAME days over and over again.
Asides that, it's now so complex that it's imposible to play without having a Walkthrough open on second monitor - resulting in not actually playing or enjoying the game, but more like feeling like a bot - you just do what walkthrough tells you, or you have no real chance to get that far at all.
Giving 2 stars because of the graphics - maybe it could have been easy 4 if not even 5 star game with less Timeloop and more forward story, but i guess sandbox doesnt even help either on that.
So overall a never ending grindfeast instead of much joy of the story - feeling really sad about that, but it is like it is - so sorry - for me no grind, i quit

This is the most insane adult game ever. Honestly, the time loop mechanics and how you slowly unravel the plot is so fascinating that I would still play it even if it had no sex at all. I particularly love that the game gives you freedom to make stupid choices that will get you killed or worse just for FUN. There's a large variety of characters for all tastes and you can get to know them in depth by abbussing the timeloop. Only con is that the game is massively complicated and without a walkthrough it's pretty hard to get far in it. Nonetheless, this is a masterpiece and I'm looking forward to see what further updates will bring.

I m giving a 4 because it is well made, with plenty of options to perv out too.

That said, I hated it. I think i had resets somewhere in the 20s, and i never got past day 3. I ended up deleting it and adding it to my never download again folder. That is just me though, if you like complicated puzzles, you will love it.

It does have a hints system, but it is just that, a hint, not an answer or direction. You will need to do every option to get a clearer picture of how to proceed, and how the mechanics work.

The models and animations are good, and they are not all one body type, another plus.

The backgrounds are a bit lax, but i dont remember seeing reused ones. Sorry, that isnt fair... the backgrounds are good, art is great, they just are a background only, the models arent apart of them. That is a playstyle.

The mechanics themselves are new and interesting, definitely worth a try just to see them.

I dont remember music, but could be mistaken.

Spoilers:
My advice, have a third option for hints and cheats that really make the puzzles retarded easy. A good example: instead of have ??? for an event, describe it and how it needs to be done to complete it, then cross it off or highlight it or something to show completed. it took me 4-6 resets to figure out that I needed to let Dana get hit and just watch it happen. It took another 3-4 resets to figure out I needed to ask the receptionist about mom before I could even ask about Dana. When I saw that I then needed to figure how to find out about her family, frustration won out, and the game was deleted.

The puzzle is interesting, because you have to think in an extra dimension, or just grind it out event by event.

Keep going, you will have tons of fans once you start fine tuning your logic. Thanks for sharing your hard work,

It's just to difficult and extremely confusing. I would say it's the most complicated game on this site. I tried very hard and got stuck at day 2 and no way to progress. Only thing I can do in the game is sleep and masturbate. If I sleep I start on day 2 again. Now way to progress. I can just move around but there is no choices to make. Tried really hard and follow the story but I'm just stuck. The hint system is not helping. For me the game i unplayable.

The sheer skill in creating a game like Time Loop Hunter must be incredible. So many variables, writing a worthwhile hint system, making sure changes in updates don't break earlier requirements, and more I'm sure.

It hits a lot of positive notes with me, especially the puzzle solving aspect. To trigger a specific event, you need to plan out conflicting events to get the desired outcomes. The creator also has a sense of humor that works well in an adult title.

That being stated, the game is certainly not for everyone, like people who don't like logic puzzles, if such people exist. However, even if you do like puzzles, some of the solutions are unintuitive, or require specific steps that the hint system did not spell out. Or, you might know the solution, but the game does not let you attempt that until you exhaust some other possibility. The "fun" scenes can be pretty far apart.

However, its a game I keep coming back to and recently played to available completion, which is by far the best compliment I can give it. 5 stars for just how high the developer shoots, even if the ambition exceeds the ability... though it takes a lot of ability to manage this level of complexity.

Has OK visuals but is way too repetitive and is unplayable without having a guide open next to you. The aforementioned guide is ~300 steps long and unless you have no standards what so ever do not play this. How anyone can sit down and make this thing and think it is fun is baffling . That there is a Patreon with people paying for this development is even more baffling.

I like the time traveling idea, but I wish the Developer would make the Game easier and faster. Its way to heavy and unplayable without Walkthrough. Even with WT you need hours and hours for every little step. It feels like 10 times repeating every single day of the week for 1 mission Point, its a lot repeating and very annoying. You need severel hours for the next H scene!

Giving 4 stars for the decent renders, and the thought that went into building such a unique game.

Perhaps I should have gone with 3, because the game got quite confusing for me after ~6 hours into the game. The choices branch out geometrically, and it becomes so hard to keep track of what sequences of events lead to what, even if I've done them before. There are so many of them!

Consolidating / removing many smaller steps, or allowing a macro skip button for certain routes would simplify things greatly. But since the game is already so far developed, that might be difficult

Repetitive and confusing.

I love time loops and traveling to the past - in books, movies etc. It's often very interesting. But this game fails to be entertaining. I have to start again and again, repeating some actions and often puzzled when/what to do. I know the developer(s) tried to assist in that, but they failed.

It feels like a maze where you need to bang at dead ends again and again.

I give up.

Even though contents per se might be decent, the gameplay approach should be different.

This is one of the few games I know where time travel is a game mechanic and not just part of the story. I love it for that.

I don't know if it is fun. The interfaces and the system by which you keep track of the paths taken is not great in my opinion and this makes solving the puzzles and finding the ideal sequence of events to trigger your target less enjoyable.

The story and characters are interesting enough and revealed slowly through your own actions. I can't explain why without spoiling some small things, but I really hate some things such as the way the sister and mother interact with each other, and how the MC reacts to that. I'm not sure the MC cares about anyone outside of his goals.

This is one of those games where sex is just a thing that people do and has nothing to do with love/relationships. Sex for punishment, sex for bargaining, sex for fun, sex to show power. I personally hate that.

I'm so torn on how I feel about this game, but I have kept coming back to it for years, so that says something. On the one hand the things @HydraHenker is doing with the engine is fucking brilliant, and he's kept it all tight and stable. The girls are both complex, and a range of shapes to suit all tastes. The actual models are not the best though, and the insane genius of the game has become so complex that I can't play it without the walk through - way too many moving parts (and huge props to @Kamelkido for that). It's a lot of work to get to the sex, but thats a good payout I think. The sex scenes themselves have a few animations now, but they aren't great, and those without have few renders. Clearly the dev is better at the story and the code than the graphics.

Really dig the concept of this title. Time manipulation with a twist
Have been following this for ages. Love the humor and the complexity, and the fact that you can keep resetting without consequence and get what you want from trial and error

this game concept is good.i really like it.
but model are bad some even ugly too.
i really like that explore a game rewind the time and make right decision after what will happen future.
+10 for game play (but i know this type of game make some people don`t like)
-8 for bad graphic and model.

This is one of the more boring sandbox games. Not at all fun. I'm surprised that this hasn't been abandoned yet. Everything looks so fuzzy and blurry too. I like the game name, the description, the banner, and the engine looks like the developer put a decent amount of effort into the interface. But the gameplay itself sucks. Not at all fun. I wish nooby developers like this didn't make such weird, boring games on non-Ren'py engines.

Hmm. Its difficult for me.

Part of me respect Dev for his work. It really is a time travel game in true sence.

But other part just can't enjoy it. It impossible to play this game without walkthrough. And even that changed after each update. Besides you already forgot where you were in the game.

So 4 but only for respecting dev ambition.

One of the better VNs, definitely the most ambitious in terms of plot and interactivity, hidden under a very underdeveloped UI. The UI is generically Renpy with only minor helpful features while in reality for this game to really work well it needs a huge amount of customization and thinking by first principles approach it.

The actual writing and story content is porn-tier nonsense, but to be fair the story doesn't seem anywhere close to being over yet.

Playing the game normally is a useless time-waster. I put probably about 2 hours into it and got stuck frequently with only a tiny amount of progression. Once I discovered the walkthrough I realized how little progress I made and the actual impossibility of blindly finding my way through the labyrinth the dev has constructed. I'm not sure if this gameplay is appealing to anyone, an easier form of it might be interesting... but as it is it's far too difficult, I would say impossible to play correctly without the walkthrough.

I have serious doubts that the walkthrough authors played this game legit, ie I think they looked at the code to figure out what to do.

Anyway playing with the walkthrough is an absolute must unless you hate your time, and my score would be a 3/5 for a walkthrough-experience, with +1 for ambition which I always like and want to reward.

I do want to say that the walkthrough does take away from the experience of actually playing the game as it doesn't really explain why you're doing everything, so it is definitely not ideal. The UI should really just be usable instead, but I understand why that's difficult.

The biggest criticism I can give for the design of the timeloop concept, which I do like overall, is that it actually results in a kinetic novel with basically no choices. As far as I can tell there is only 1 path and you just need to figure out the right buttons to click in the right order to get yourself onto that path. That's kind of disappointing.

In summary: Nice try, and this is one of my higher scores on this site.

sigh!! ... this is one of those games that i really really wanted to like but unfortunately the current state of ui, story progression and the general repetitiveness is too confusing, annoying and frankly not worth the effort.

The game is EXACTLY as it's title suggest and there in lies it's main problem. This game makes you go through same series of choices again and again with maybe one or two different choices at certain point before the day gets reset and again go through the same series of choice ... and again ... and again ... until you have "collected all data" required for "true path". In short each and every time you have to make a different choice that may be just to get a little information, you will have to go through ENTIRE days choices again.

For example i imagine a 1 2 represent route "a" choice "1" and select option "2" . then
A 1-2 2-1 3-1 4-1 reset
A 1-2 2-2 3-1 4-1 reset
A 1-1 2-1 3-1 4-1 reset
A 1-1 2-1 3-1 4-2 reset
B 1-2 2-3 5-1 4-3 reset
B 1-2 2-3 5-2 4-1 reset
B 1-2 2-3 5-2 4-2 reset
C 1-1 2-1 3-3 4-2 6-1 7-1 8-3 reset
A 1-2 2-1 3-1 4-1 reset
B 1-2 2-3 5-1 4-3 reset
B 1-2 2-3 5-2 4-1 reset
A 1-1 2-1 3-1 4-2 reset
C 1-1 2-1 3-3 4-2 6-1 7-1 8-4 19-1 20-2 reset
C 1-1 2-1 3-3 4-2 6-3 7-4 8-1 reset

so just for very very slight variation in choices you will have to go through ENTIRE series of choices. and this gets more and more convoluted as you discover more people, more information and more choices ... vastly increasing the number of resets, which in return delivers very very little pay off.

Honestly, my advice to dev will be to make a "memory flow" where player can store the list of choices he did before and when day resets the player can jump to exact choice where they have to pick different option and then continue playing from there till next reset, like in the VN "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors"

If you want a game where you spend hours at the computer, confused and desperately clicking your mouse to watch numbers rise until they're high enough to give you two minutes of pleasure and release. This is the game for you.

If you want an engaging story without a UI you need to fight against to unravel, one without needless grinding and bloated content, look elsewhere you philistine. You won't be able to appreciate the majesty of this game.

Interesting and complex story that is hampered by a very annoying interface design choice, which makes it very user-unfriendly.

The story starts simple but becomes increasingly ambitious. You have to follow several seemingly unrelated plot threads which nevertheless affect each other in sometimes non-obvious but logical ways. Each character has their own story, and finding the right solution to advance it could be a decent brain-teaser if trying out solutions was not so tedious.

The main mechanic driving the story is a simple loop: 1) Play through events until you are stuck or fail. 2) Replay the same events but take better choices, often by using future knowledge, allowing you to progress further down a path. Often, the events are also connected so deeply, that a hint you get in one timeline gives you important information a parallel one.

That’s right: Timelines. The story not linear at all, and there is not one true solution to the events. For example, you might like to use an injured person as an excuse to explore the hospital. However, in the timeline where the person is injured you’ve never met them and cannot pass as their friend. So you need to go back to a timeline where she is not in the hospital and befriend them there to get the information needed to pass as their friend in the hospital timeline.

As a more straight-forward mechanic, you may also need to do some events several times in a row until the MC has learned enough to ‘beat’ them. As an example, he keeps being distracted be the girls in a Yoga class until he has looked at them enough to finally concentrate on the lesson itself.

This results in an enormous amount of backtracking and repetition. In order to manage all this, the player is given two powerful tools: The ability to travel back in time in one-day increments and a limited number of "Timelines", which means in-game save slots so you jump between, for example, a timeline where you had befriended someone, another where the same person was in the hospital.

There are major issues with the last two abilities, however, that make the game virtually unplayable for me:

1) There is no way to know which timelines you are going to need until you already need them.

The Walkthrough orders timelines by what happens to a specific girl and whether you have joined a debate club. However, as a first-time player you have no idea that these are the important markers. You might have just as well sorted them by whether you have reconnected with your sister or whether you have helped you landlady and her criminal boyfriend.

Likewise, you have no idea which secondary objectives you need in each timeline. In the timeline where you save the girl: Should you have also reconnected with your sister or rather spent that time stealing the university keys? Will you need your Lust value to be at a certain level the next time you load this timeline? Who knows, let’s just hope you got it right and you don’t have to go back to day one and redo everything entirely…

2) Going back to the morning of each day means you have to redo every single event up to where you actually want to go each time. If there is an event at night, you have to redo 4 time slots for every repetition, which may involve several choices and a lot of dialogue, taking time and effort even if you fast-forward. Even the close-to-optimal solution of the walkthrough has ~3250 distinct steps. Something as simple as trying out several outcomes of a Poker game can easily bloat into well over a hundred steps.

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Here are two improvements, which might reduce how tedious the game is:
1) Allow the player to step back by timeslot instead of by day. Even just the ability to redo the same timeslot several times in a row would be invaluable. Not only might this reduce the "optimal" walkthrough-path by hundreds of steps, it would also make exploring and trying out various solutions much more enjoyable.

2) Give the player some hints on which timelines to create. Maybe even very direct hints. At this point I would not even be opposed the decision being taken out of the player’s hand entirely, since that would be better than having the "wrong" slots and having to redo things from day one several additional times, hoping to get the right solution.

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All in all, I’m impressed by this game. Narrative-wise, it is one of the more ambitious projects I’ve seen to be sure. The characters all feel unique and interesting in ways that make them appear realistic instead of just being overblown caricatures. There are several tidbits that give their personalities depth without being bloated or unrealistic. For example, the landlady adapts her lifestyle to her current boyfriend, without just being a total pushover that goes with the flow.

I highly recommend everyone play this game, but be sure to keep the walkthrough open and don’t be afraid to follow it by the letter.