Personally i dislike them heavily. Im sure theres some golden ones out there but the majority just make me go
(also this OP was modified by me since apparently the previous OP may have been conflictive?)
Personally I like Ren'Py a lot more than most others tbh. Not even bc I like VN's, but bc of how ... well, "bad" the rest tend to be for me. And the many QoL things Ren'Py comes with that others really don't.
- My favorite game type is definitely RPG. But like 99% of RPGM games are just horrible when you have ADD.
- Hours of walking around wasting time and doing nothing interesting at all before the game even gets started.
- Horrible controls, LCtrl skip disabled as a rule, no way to view dialogue history, and a constant time waste on overly verbose dialogue or "cool" little animations and scene fadeouts, and ofc an ungodly amount of grind, and so much more...
- RPGM on average offers the worst possible lewd experience. Sure, there are exceptions (Acerola / OneOne1, the Agnietta team, some smaller studios here) but they are very rare and tend to get repetitive really fast.
- I also really like sidescrollers, stuff with real gameplay. But there are very few lewd sidescrollers and most of them have the same problems.
- The controls are almost always horrid, and rather than lewd being part of the gameplay it's just your typical defeat mechanic. So playing the game & moving forward, vs. actually enjoying the game for the stuff you're there for are mutually exclusive. Which makes no sense to me.
- 3d games, like 3:rd person perspective Unreal etc. stuff with a full on gameplay would also be amazing normally. But they tend to be horribly optimized and come with a mix of the problems above. They also always have 2h controls which just doesn't work with a lewd game.
- The more complex a game is, the bigger the chance for bugs, random configuration or translation problems, those dysfunctional controls etc.
So it's not that Ren'Py or VN's are particularly good. It's more that the engine removes so many of the problems other engines have. 1 set of controls works for all, and they're always 1-handed. You can save anywhere, skip instantly and anywhere, easily view dialogue history & change your choices etc. The pacing also tends to be much better. Ren'Py has no real gameplay and the flow demands frequent visuals, so it sort of naturally makes devs avoid the kind of time waste like grind, supermassive dialogue or bad gameplay choices you run into with the other games. Even the few that have some grindy repeated scenes aren't even an issue bc you can just hold that LCtrl and do it 2 seconds.
A lot of the other types of games, especially RPGM also actually play like kinetic novels (I can't stand kinetic novels, I need choices). But it can take up to hours to find out about that or other problems, to see it's not even something you like. Reviews are far from reliable so this is a problem that happens all the time for me. But with Ren'Py you can find out if it's not your thing in an instant.
HTML is pretty good too for similar reasons but with more options they tend to develop more of the same problems as the others. A lot of pointless extra clicks, tons of grind and other gameplay issues.
