VN - Ren'Py - Veil of Lies [v0.1a] [Holk]

The renders aren't very clean but the story, dialogue and animations are all fantastic. I genuinely can't wait to see more from this dev.
Instead of the normal shy college kid we have a skilled son of a secret agent slaying bad guys and pussy. The prologue was pretty decent sized so hopefully the chapters released going forward will also be lengthy.

this game is fucking broken! keep crashing all the time.
and omg the quality is terrible.

this game is getting 1 star for crashing .
also game is so laggy. like it takes 6-7 sec to even react when you are trying to save the game which is even worse.
never seen ulltly worthless saving system.

I like the amount of effort that it took to make this VN.
Seems that you have a way to go, but are on the "better route", if you will.
Pros:
Great sex scenes and the animation was really good, even better if this is your first hard try.
Amount of play for a first release is decent. If there ever was a VN that I would think could do better if it had a smaller release but more editing time.
Thats about all the good, but they are worth playing.
First big issue is everything is over explained to a fault.
Next is the way the story is scripted, all over the place. It felt like I played three different games, to the point that I really got lost and had to recheck the start to verify this was the same.
I think it you tweaked the wording and made this into a humorous VN it would be received much better.
Three stars easy. Just need to find your sweet spot. Good luck will be watching for future releases.

VERSION: 01a
SUMMARY: Good effort, semi-interesting plot, some good ideas but due to bad quality renders and voice, I think this VN is DOA.
RATINGS: (out of 5):

NOTE: The following categories and scoring method are my own criteria and may require more context.

1. Model Visuals............................................. : 2
2. General Visuals.......................................... : 3
3. Animation Quality....................................... : 3
4. Character (Persona).................................... : 2
5. Story Quality & Pacing................................. : 3
6. Writing Quality & Dialogue........................... : 3
7. UI & Game-play Mechanics.......................... : 3
8. Content Amount & General Quality................ : 3
9. Sounds & Music.......................................... : 3
10. H-Content & Fetishes................................... : 3

Average: X of 50 possible points giving a X% rating i.e. X stars.

PROS:

1. Story seems OK?, no worse than many games that are popular IMO.
2. Dialogue is structured well enough and reads fine, but the dialogue itself is also not great.
3. Sounds are not bad, ambient. Voiced are nice extras but not always good, to be fair its hard to pull off consistent good voice acting unless you a professional studio and expert. Ambient sounds are also a nice touch.
4. Some models do actually look good, if not for the poor quality renders they would be great.
5. The interface is not bad, at least the settings and general interface are decent and and cater for good functions, even if they don't all work 100%

CONS:

1. Unless I simply missed it, the MC name can not be changed so during my playthrough he was simply called MC...so that need updating.
2. Renders are pretty bad actually, grainy and simply poorly rendered.
3. Some textures are completely missing, like husband and wife having an argument scene, she finds panties and he stands up with a "pink" pair of bloomers and no pants. I thought immediately the panties are his and his a cross dresser meantime its actually missing texture!
4. Some models during the start especially just look bad and flat out ugly like the doctor.
5. Dialogue script and or translation will need a fair amount of work, right now its not that good nor consistent.
6. There is also places clothing clips through the NPC skin or the clothing simply looks painted on and not an actual piece of clothing.
7. Some of the voice acting is not good, its a good effort don't get me wrong, it just doesn't sound good all the time, some if it is actually pretty cringe worthy.
8. Added to the voice issue is the issue of muting the voice, even if the voice volume is muted, voice audio still carries on, which seems to be tied to sound volume which is a pity to need to mute also just for crap voice...

NOTE: The following remarks are my personal opinions and thoughts, which may provide more context which could be useful to the developer.

FINAL REMARKS, OPINIONS & SUGGESTIONS:

• Clearly the effort has gone into this VN simply because of the type of content the developer is adding, I mean voice acting, in game cinematic, ambient sound etc are still considered "extras" and nice to have on games even if its moving into "expected" norms, its still a bit of a novelty. Therefor I can appreciate the effort.
• The overall quality is just not great though, the sounds, especially voice need some work and often sounds like the filtering used is wrong, like one character would sound like they talking in a bathroom, while this is to convey "thought speech" its really not needed. I suggest drop the "thought" voiced speech and only use voiced speech during actual conversations.
• Some dialogue is just not good, poor and nonsensical e.g. MC (with cheesey voice) asks only person in the room when woken up being smothered by a pillow "wait, were you choking me" I mean wtf.... 1. Pillow on face = smothering, choking is like hands around your neck. 2. The sister being the only person in the room, who the hell else would have been "choking" him...? So either poor translation or poor script, either way, result is poor.
• I would also consider dropping voice all together unless done properly and focus on other aspects of the game like render quality, art and dialogue/story. Visual Novels are...well, visual and novels are read. So the primary focus should be that then add the extras, but don't slack on quality for the secondary extras as that will diminish your primary work if not done well, be consistent.
• Due to such poor quality renders, the character just look overall bad, the female characters are not too bad but the MC and other characters simply look BAD. The renders are grainy, fuzzy, out of focus and then simply lack the detail and polish of decently rendered images.

TLDR:

Not a bad start but also not great, the ideas and features are there and actually are good, the models look good but the level of quality and polish is just poor and this VN screams half baked at best, which is unfortunate as I would say the developer should put the best foot forward if they wish to garner support for this project.

I will revisit my review in the later future when this game has gone through several updates, hopefully some revamps and much love to the early stages too.