Ren'Py - Witch Hunter [v0.24] [Lazy tarts]

The game is good at creating problems, but bad at delivering sex scenes.
I had to spend hours in bad minigames and forced plot twists to get to some sex stuff.

Minigames are bad.
- In bookstore you have to be lightning-fast to find some books while shooting thieves. And most of the time theft happens when you have a new client and you accidentally skip their request, and then have to ask again. Also, many requests need IRL knowledge to complete, like knowing comic book publishers (hint: its not only marvel and DC).
- Fights are even worse. Wait for loading - get beaten by an evemy 2 levels above you, repeat. But if you manage to levelup to lvl 10(max) - you'll get stunned, loose a few turns, miss your hit when attaking. Everything happens really slow, you have to wait a few seconds before next turn. Health potions are unaffordable at low levels and useless at top levels. Even on max level (10) - your health will be lower, than your enemies and you need mana to cover the gap by transforming into snake, but you always start with zero mana.
- Board game. Trow dice poker with completely random outcome. I dont know any strategies to win in this game, so its a money sink, instead of income source.

Quests turn this "sandbox" into a poorly made linear VN. Most of the time you have 1-2 active quests and have to skip time to the right moment, so you can see a small conversation, and then skip time again to trigger another. So, its basically a VN, but with added chore of skipping time.

Sex stuff - its just a static pucture most of the time. Some of them are animated, which is alot better.

But the art is good, story is ok, and I havent run into bugs. So give it a try, maybe you will like it.

Grinding 10 glands from a mob when your combat system is literally spam one button and wait for the loading screen? No warning game over dialog options? Yeah, no, fuck this. Devs should stop padding their weak updates like this once and for all. Or was it some kind of grand artistic vision? Yeah, no, fuck this twice if that's the reason. Respect players time a just tiny bit.

A great game an interesting story and nice visuals. It can start of a bit slow and the static scenes early on and can seem bland. However, once you get to the mid game and the newer scenes, the art goes from ehh to amazing. The devs have improved and it shows. The animated ones are the ones you are looking forward to.

One of the criticisms I have is that it can be a bit grindy. But the game does hold your hand and there are ways to overcome the grind if you save scum.

Overall good game with enough story so far and great art that you should give it a shot and support the developers if you can.

Love the art style. For 2d this is some of the best rendering and the story is quite good too. Quests can get tedious at times and updates are few and far between but it's still one of my faves. Can't wait for the whole game to drop.

Witch Hunter [v0.19] [Lazy tarts]
By now the end of the game seems near, so I think I can give my personal assessment.

I consider the game sufficient only thanks to the art style and the protagonist that works well.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is badly managed, just look at the fights where healing yourself with a potion is only a way to throw away the turn (if not losing more life than the one cured).
Or a quest where you have to take a certain material (several times, I don't remember the number but many times) from a randomly generated monster, so you have to click and hope not to waste too much time.
Despite the not too fun gameplay, I still recommend the game, which all in all does its duty.

Would have been way cooler if it was in a visual novel format rather than a sandbox, but hey, at least there's a gallery mod if you're into that. The story feels kinda meh to me because I'm not sure if it's sticking to the original "Witch" series canon that I've never seen, or if the author just made stuff up and crammed it in there. It felt like the game was going off the rails, especially after I got halfway through the story. Some of the character conversations felt forced, and there were these awkward sex scenes like ntr or sharing that you couldn't even avoid.

On the bright side, the art is actually pretty good, and there's some decent music in the game. But here's the thing, it's been in development since 2017, so I don't know what took so long. The hand-drawn graphics are alright, I guess. The game description promised multiple endings for the main character, but as of right now, none of that is actually being developed. You'll make some choices, but they mostly lead to the same outcomes.

Great game! A fascinating story, memorable characters, good direction, cool ideas and beautiful scenes.

I would like to point out that the game at least tries to give the player a choice, to be a bastard or a good guy. It's very nice when the game doesn't lead us by the nose, making us hostage to the character of the main character.

Well also the cartoon on which the game is based, I loved watching as a kid, because of this nostalgia made my impression of the game even better.

The only thing I can point out the bad is the battles with monsters...Even the game on cheat fashion, you have to mess with these bastards! It's boring, tedious and drawn out. Although these mini-games make you take your dick out of your hand for at least a little while, letting your bro have a little rest.

I'd also note the rather large variety of fetishes. True, there are very few kisses in the game, especially considering the romantic scenes...

The game was made by a russian, and I also russian (from the translator reviewed), and playing in russian, all the dialogue looked pretty good. And I can admit that the dialogues in English can be delirious.

But regardless of your opinion to the game, you know, dude made LITERALLY the best game of Rus.game building over the past 30 years, and it's not a fucking joke!

For the cheat mode, a special respect!

Another game that doesn't get the importance of balance between lewd scenes and text. This game throws endless amounts of text in your face without giving you anything in return over the first 1-2 hours.

The mini games are absolutely no fun to do, but you need to do them in order to earn money or progress with the story.

Eventually I got "stuck" in fight with a character that I apparently by game design can't win. The fight just started story wise, but my character doesn't deal enough damage - I got no healing potions,no skills and can't escape. So all you're left with is autohit until you die.

Since I saved in that fight, my savegame basically went into oblivion, I can't continue the game anymore. Which means I quit the game today, I won't replay all of that. The game should prepare fights that can potentially send you to game over better.

Anyways, as always before I quit games that didn't manage to entertain me long enough I do peak into the gallery and see what I'd have unlocked otherwise by playing: The art is nice, but there's only like 3-4 animations, everything else are super short lewd scenes that completely consist of 1-2 pictures. Yes, I am talking about literal pictures, not 1-2 frames moving forth and back.

So for instance if char X gives you a blowjob, you get ONE picture where she does that, the same picture with cum added and that's it. Which is a shame because the artstyle of this game is really nice, which it gets the 2 stars for.

The story also is absolutely stupid and the fantasy world / setting isn't explained well at all.

This game is one of the best on this site.
I really don't understand why people are not happy with it. There are so many games on this site where the tags it has are meaningless because it basically doesn't exist or is executed horrible. Here the fetishes really hit. The blackmail, the corruption and others are done to perfection.
The art is very good, the story progresses nicely.
I just used the built in cheat so I didn't have to grind.

If you like the tags, you have to play it.

Wonderful game with high-quality graphics, and an amazing storyline, had fun playing it and will recommend anyone interested in sandbox-like games to play this, it's not just another read dialog al the time kinda game you actually have to explore, I like a challenge and it doesn't feel like a grind.

I have no idea the source material it is parody of. But I still enjoyed playing through this. Even with the grammar errors in English it was still understandable and was an interesting story. The bookstore minigame is a bit grindy for money but also is probably the most creative one I've seen for a Renpy game.

My only complaint is that Cedrick's snake form's dick is brought up several times and you never even get to see it let alone see it in action XD. All in all definitely worth the time downloading to try and see if you want to support it.

Brilliant game, great animation, amazing story that keeps you interested. Definitely in my top 5 adult games of current times. Never seen the original cartoon that this was based on but as parodies go, this is a quality made one! *****

[v0.17.0.1]
So, you have notably two events where the game goes out of its way so that you can choose to keep a girl to yourself, which your character themselves notes they want as their personal property, but then if you do, you are eventually blindsided and forced to give her to your boss, and train her for your boss, being forced to fight 10 monsters, before you can fight another monster, all to give a girl away, or it's game over in at least 4 different ways? Before giving her away, you are literally given at least 9 different choices of what to say, but are forced to choose the 3 consecutive choices the game forces you to choose, which gives her away, or it's game over if you choose anything else.

Yeah, that's some BS right there. NTR, Netorare, Netorase, Cuckolding, "Sharing", whatever you want to call it. It's cuckshit that the game goes out of it's way to force onto you without warning, after letting you think you didn't need to worry about it. This same character can be thrown away earlier so there's no plot driven reason to
even do this. It's just insulting.

On top of that the writing and plot can be inconsistent and out of order. For example, one character claims her parents won't let her do something, but at this point in time her parents could have been long gone (and were in my playthrough) making this a plothole. The MC can also change from character to character to the point he'll go out of his way to rape a few, but go out of his way to date a few others. Whatever the writer wants, he'll do, including being a plaything for some girl he just met, when he could literally make her disappear or be his sex slave. Things he's done to others.

There's also times where the dialogue misses a word, but nothing that detrimental, and fortunately the only thing that's untranslated (that I've noticed) are a few pictures that you can optionally view in a porn mag.

Combat is also annoying, and to be frank, I don't see why anyone would want to play this game without cheats in the first place. Even then, though, combat is still annoying. Missing at times and being stunned so you can't move for a turn, will never be fun to me.

Overall, The writing and story isn't really anything you won't mind skipping through, the gameplay is just clicking whatever the game tells you to click, and apparently the little player agency there is, will either be mocked or ignored later on. At the end of the day the only thing that makes this game notable is it being a parody and it having nice art. The animations are also fine, so 2 stars. 1 for being playable at least, and another for the art.

There is little content, the content itself is very weak at the level of 14 years, the plot is also not interesting. The characters are boring, the gameplay is too.
It's not bad drawn, but the dialogues during sex scenes are just garbage.

Great game! just lost hours of progress due to it having some kind of "time limit" in some decisions and the main bad guy just killed me giving me a game over with no chance of going back to that decision. Tried to start again and one of the main quest was bugged! making impossible to advance in that save. But I suppose im the one to blame since I didn't save so often, right?

The art is absolutely gorgeus, and the writing is not bad.
However, the game is nigh unplayable without cheats, the story might be a little too dark for the taste of some people and the worst part is that the corruption element is very poorly managed, tbh. There's just one girl you can corrupt, which you can't really do until well deep into the story, and not only does the corruption have very little options from the beginning, it does weird jumps from the girl being uncomfortable with you seeing her tits, to her totally naked grinding on your dick.
Another pretty disappointing fact is that when you get the gallery unlocked, you don't get a reenacting of the event, but a few images of the intercourse, like just the different frames, no text, no nothing else. So if you can get off just by looking at those images or if you enjoy this kind of game as structured as it is, it's for you. Otherwise, not really. A shame such incredibly hot art is not accompanied by a good system to play.

I love the art and of course the story. While the story been quite linear the passing feels great. the corruption of these beloved characters is well done. Im greatly impressed by the mother-daughter scene and twin-girl scene well done.

promising, but suddenly the mc lost the ability to think, became a pussy and sharing/voyeurism became unavoidable.
ruined the game for me.
wouldn't recommend.
it lost it's potential. which is a shame.

Art quality and Animations - 5/5

The visual aspect of the game is its strong suite by far. It manages to pretty much carry the game to the finish line each time. The quality of both art in NSFW scenes and SFW ones is good and stays consistent in each new update. This good quality of caries on the animations as well, which makes them stand out even more. It is a shame that the animations are not that many, and they are overall quite short with only one loop present.

For me at least, the best part of this game, is the art style, it has a nice blend between western art style and more anime style art. It also keeps in touch with the original aspect of the characters from the original show. I may say this is the best in terms of 2D art style that i saw until now. It manages to give a look of fantasy and realism at the same time without going in any of the extremes. In short, it hits a very nice sweet spot, which I did not get from other games.

Music and Atmosphere - 4/5

The game manages to create a nice atmosphere for its scene most of the time, which makes in turn the immersion easier to maintain. The backgrounds for the NSFW scenes and animations are well-made, and they do not feel as being left out. Another good point that helps with building the atmosphere is the build up before the juicy scenes, which the experience all the better.

Still on this side of things the background music, fits the game's well and the choices of the soundtracks made for various scenes was made in a tasteful manner. One negative aspect here may be is that the soundtracks chosen are not unique to this game and depending on what games you played before you might already know the tracks and take away from the immersion. But is still commandable that there is any background music.

Story, Setting and Characters - 3/5

I found the characters likable and believable, and their personalities to be above average compared to the rest of the adult games out there. For the most part, the characters motivations, actions and desires are plausible and rational. The guardians personalities feel different and unique, which for me was a pleasant surprise, since I expected for their personalities to be a carbon copy of each other.

I have no gripes with Cedric as a character or his actions, for the most part his actions were understandable and fell in line with the rest of the story. Elyon on the other hand seems to have a too simple personality and which does not make the task of Cedric with her especially hard. Although I saw in the 0.17 update a hint towards how Elyon might develop, and I like that direction.

As for the rest of the supporting characters, for me, they were forgettable and some of them feel like they were abandoned by the dev. Some examples that come to mind are the sister of Cornelia, the mothers of Irma and Hay Lin which were introduced in the story and had some scenes, but they were left out while their plot lines kind of developed into plot dead ends. I am sure they will be addressed in the next updates.

Going forward to the next point, which is the story. At the beginning, the story feels unfocused and lacking purpose. I mean, the general mission and drive of Cedric was clear, but the way it was carried on further is unfocused and missing clear objectives. Fortunately, this seems to be changing, and the story is getting interesting again.

The last point for this section is the setting. Here, the settings vary from overly used ones to not used at all. What I mean by not used at all, a good example is the park, where some story events took place and after that it was left abandoned, there are no H scenes or events there, and it is a shame because there is good potential to give more variety to the story. Another example is the station or Elyon house.

Gameplay - 3/5

Generally the gameplay is not great, not terrible. There is not something unique in terms of gameplay, for the most part is the average visual novel gameplay experience. What ruins the experience and might turn some people away are the mini-games and the grind. Grinding in the bookshop for money and for Elyon corruption are not an engaging experiences and feel for the most part a chore. It takes quite a while to get into the meet of things, but for me, it was worth it.

If you do not find the grind pleasant at all, at least there are some cheat codes you can use to skip most of it.

I will also add here the routes you can take in the game, or more exactly the lack of them. There are no routes you can take besides the one with Will, which truth be told I cannot really classify as a route, but more like an option on how you prefer to interact with her and what scenes you can get, the end result being the same. For the most part, the decisions taken in the game have no effect on the story.

If it were not for the grinding and the Will options, this game could be classified under the kinetic visual novel category. I personally hope that there will be more choices to be had going forward.

Update cycle and Content ratio - 4/5

I started playing this game at 0.15.2 version and went through 2 updates 0.16.1 and 0.17.0.1. And I got to say that the update cycle for the two versions was not a predictable one. The wait time between updates varied quite much, and the same true in terms of content. From 0.15.2 to 0.16.1 the content update was on the small side, truth be told it felt more like a bonus content to 0.15.2 than actual progress in terms of story. From 0.16.1 to 0.17.0.1 this felt more like a proper update in both terms of content and story progression.

I have to say that 0.17.0.1 set a good standard for content update for his game and I hope the devs stick with it going forward.

As for the future of this game. On the Patreon page, the dev shared a roadmap for the future game updates, and the last update that the game will receive will be 0.25, meaning that there will be another 8 major updates for the game. What I can say about this is that it feels bad to know that the game will end. I am thinking and hoping that maybe the devs will release two more updates after 0.25, like a DLC, to show how the characters evolved after some time. But time will tell.

Overall, the update cycle for this game is in the range of not great, not terrible and maynly the score for this section is based on the update 0.17.01. There was a long waiting time for 0.17.0.1 due to some world events, but on the flip side, there was plenty of content to be had.

First of all, use cheats. The game is really grindy, the systems introduced at the beginning are ass and the dev seems to have realized that but instead of changing the system he just added a cheat mode.

Secondly, the MC is a huge dick in about the first half of the game, to a point where i legitimately felt bad for Elyon.

The art is absolutely amazing, the character art, porn, backgrounds, it's all great. The latter content also introduces nice animations.

Combat kinda sucks ass but you can always scum through rollback.

As for writing, considering what sort of game this is, it's fine.
Do expect some typos though, it's never gotten bad enough where i wouldn't know what's going on but every now and again you'll find a word spelled wrong or repeated.

Up untill recently the game was overall Meh except for the art. A 3/5 at best.

HOWEVER

The latest patches were a 5/5, the content with Susan, Will as well as the progress of the MC and Miranda was great. Will's corruption went great with a hint of mindcontrol and actual choices, combined with the MC basically remembering how great he used to be and returning closer to his prime for the lack of a better word, thus becoming more competent, less of a....retard and gaining a very specific and limited mind control power (Such as it can't contradict their values, it can't go against objective reality, can only be done once etc.) This is also roughly the point where the Mind Control tag actually kicks in, you wont really find any prior to this with one exception.

I've mostly just skipped through text in the first 2/3 of the game but this caught my attention and actually got me to read and i honestly quite like where it's going.

Taking into account how "ok" most of the game is and how much i legitimately like the recent developments, i've arrived to a 4/5, would give 4.5/5 if i could

If it's gonna be 4/5 for you or a 2/5 will depend entirely on how used you are to scumming shitty game systems. Namely the combat since the rest is fixed with the cheat. For example there's a point where you need 10 of an item that drops from a specific a monster, if you rollback at the start of combat, it can spawn in a different monster, do that if you didn't get the one you need. So i've done that and got done with the 10 items quickly, if i didn't though, i'd probably quit lmao. Same goes for the difficult bosses, just attack and then fish for enemies missing their attack through rollbacking, otherwise you'll have a bad time.
I'm used to it from shit tier porn games so scumming combat doesn't bother me but if you're not used to gameplay systems designed by artists, i'd honestly wait and see if the maker of this game expands the cheat to also oneshotting mobs (or until people somehow figure out what the new console command for oneshotting enemies is, because as of now, it doesn't work on my PC).