VN - Ren'Py - With Eyes Closed [Season 1 Deluxe] [Ker]

This isn't the most ambitious project out here: I've seen better dialogues, better writing, better LIs, better twists, better game mechanics, better animations and better renders. Then why the heck did I give it 5 stars. Becuse while this game isn't best in anything, it's very good in everything. It's very seldom you get a game without something sticking like a sore thumb and here is 'With eyes closed;. doing everything really well. I just can't wait to see how the story unfolds and I am thrilled to see if the realtionship between the MC and the LIs will get as interesting as in Going Rogue (the previous dev's game)

Finished season 1 which consists of four chapters. However each chapter is really short so all in the entire season can be completed in about 3 hours tops without skipping.

Story
The story starts out well enough, MC mysteriously kidnapped and dumped in a new environment with amnesia. He needs to figure out how to survive, find out what happened and I assume ultimately escape from the "prison".

However, the overall immersion is sort of broken by the unrealistic situation where the LIs simply start helping him out no holds barred when they don't even know him. The supposedly dire situation with an air of mystery suddenly looks lame and the prison town feels just like any other normal setting.

Game Mechanics
Standard visual novel with choices. Though the choices are numerous and many of them branch out, so far there is nothing to indicate they lead to different outcomes i. e the start and end points of each chapter is the same regardless which path you take.

This isn't bad per se, it's a good balance between a kinetic novel and giving players some form of interaction. Just temper your expectations and don't expect very different stories depending on your choices.

Background / Character Renders
The developers are generally good at rendering characters and both female and male models are well developed with distinctive features. Kate and Eva sort of match their profiles, but Luna's is way off.

The backgrounds are sort of fine if not generic. Other than the initial bar where MC got to meet Hangman, the rest of the scenarios look like stock assets and it's hard to tell this is even a prison town isolated from the rest of the world for 20+ years.

Character Development
There are three main LIs, the problem is so far only Kate seems to be somewhat interesting enough for further development. Eva quite simply a bore and no matter how you choose to interact, there's really nothing interesting she has to share with MC.

Luna's even worse, her only presence so far is to play the part of the damsel in distress, naïve and in need of MC protection. While the story tries to hint at something more in the future, she's coming across as a one dimensional passive parasite who is simply uninspiring, acting cute and dependent on Kate and MC for everything.

In fact due to the uninteresting LIs, I was actually far more interested in side characters such as the mysterious girl Mia in MC's dreams as well as Camilia, the rich man's daughter. They are far more interesting than either Luna or Eva.

Sex Scenes
So far no kinky stuff but the developer is quite good at animation rendering, camera panning and using light shades to create a pleasing experience.

Genitals are rendered in detail and realistic i.e. no monster cocks or giant holes in pussies. The dialogue is passable with decent sound effects and BGMs are generic.

All in I would say the sex scenes are above average though it's not at that level where anything will be memorable after playing through.

BGM and Sound Effects
Other than the starting BGM at the title screen, the rest of the stuff in game is a disappointment. They are so monotonous and generic that they do not help in conveying the mood at all. Considering the vast collection of free license BGMs, I'm not sure why the developer picked such a lousy collection.

Conclusion
This game has its strengths and weaknesses. The sex scene animations and presentation are good and worth pursuing, the story has potential but immersion isn't great as you don't get the sense the MC is in a mysterious and dangerous environment.

The overall package is also let down by bland female main characters that don't stick out especially compared to other side characters and of course a boring soundtrack collection.

Doesn't have much going for it. The writing is not particularly bad, but the story is boring. It's an amnesiac mystery, and not a particularly compelling one.
When it comes to decisions, I repeatedly felt that the protagonist didn't have the right options available.
The girls are alright from a writing perspective, but their proportions aren't right. The sex scenes aren't great either.
The biggest problem is that text takes a second to appear, in which time I think it's a textless screen, and hit space, and then the text gets skipped, so then I rollback, and then I have to wait. It's incredibly frustrating that I'm forced to play the game at a slow pace. Combine that with disabled choice rollback, and it's an unpleasant experience. I was glad to call it quits.

Nope. Despite a few well-rendered females, the MC is a lily-livered non-chooser. He comes upon this Luna gal, who he's rescued, and listens to some possible treachery through her apt keyhole. But does nothing about it! Slow burn works when you buy the burn -- but with this, eh. It's just not worth it.

Disclaimer: Some very light spoilers in this review, but nothing big.

Great renders and interesting plot, but so far it's all mystery, so I can't say much about it. There are a lot of choices and branching paths, which I usually love, but they feel shallow here. Maybe later on, it will matter, but I tried various paths and they all converge at the same point eventually, so choosing one or the other doesn't feel satisfying.

The LIs are a mixed bag. The only one I can confidently say is cool and interesting is Kate. Luna and Eva have a lot of mystery going on, but it's hard to trust them. This goes for all LIs, including Kate, since the game wants you to wonder who you can trust, but Kate is a good LI in the sense that while there are some oddities, it's still fine to choose to trust her, even if it backfires. The other two, not so much.

Eva is mostly useless and even if you are Visual-Novel-Protagonist levels of honesty with her, she still does nothing to improve her own standing. She hides things and lies to you and gives you nothing, then gets upset if you don't trust her. If this was a whodunnit movie, I'd be betting on Luna, she's secretive and highly suspicious with nothing to offer.

Eva is also suspicious, but unlike Luna, she is helpful and useful. But just like Luna, she hides things and lies to you, so not exactly forthcoming.

Lastly is the MC who seems to disregard some of the choices you make. Sometimes he acts as if he doesn't know something when he should, probably a branching mistake. The dev must have forgotten to account for your choices in some paths. Anyway, the MC's only saving grace is that he can fight, however, he's nothing special. He gets beat up twice, then there's a guy who is seemingly enough to care of him and then there's a girl, it's implied she could pose a threat to him. Meaning he's not that special in the fighting department either.

He has no memories, average intelligence and not good at decision-making. I feel like the MC's unpreparedness is a requirement to prolong the plot. The MC is not a saint. You are given the chance to say that you are willing to kill, implying that you might be a cold-blooded killer, but he could solve all of his problems if that were true. Seeing as nobody wants to help him out, he could start looking out for himself instead of helping everybody and trying to work through the "official" channels.

Now, I did keep playing because the plot is honestly a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of AVNs and I want to reward that, hence my score, but if this was a finished product, I would rate this a 6 out of 10 at most.

With Eyes Closed [Ch. 3 Deluxe], This is really a good story where the MC plays as a guy who lost his memory and has been imprisoned in a prison city much like the movies "Escape from NY" and "Escape from LA" where different gangs run different parts of the city. The graphics are some of the best I have ever seen and the women don't look like any other women that have appeared in any other VN. There is some sex but not a lot, it's a slow burn so far since it's only chapter 3. I am really liking the fact that the choices you make really matter and at the end of each chapter there is a flow chart of your choices with blank choices of what could have happened so there is plenty of replay value to this. I am really looking forward to see what happens.

Only thing that is stopping this game from being a 5 star game from me is im not really all that invested in the story or setting. As im not a fan of the idea of it being a city for prisoners at first as since the appearance of it feels closer to something like Fallout with the setting and that just feels a bit weird to me in an AVN.

Animations are top notch one of the best on the site ive seen. Renders are also really high quality, as well as the models.

Story : I'm not too invested into the story yet but I do like the mystery of everything and figuring out who you can and cant trust. I assume ill get more invested as more things are revealed.

I've only played on path / save so far. But it seems like branching and choices will matter if going by the end of chapter summary that shows all the branching choices you made and how other paths would go in a different direction.

Relationship building with the LI seems to be moving forward at a nice and slow steady pace where I do feel like you slowly do get to know them. While I still want to get to know them better it's better than alot of games on this site in this reguard. As they all seem to have some kind of story and you can feel you get to know them as they reveal things to you.

Overall not a bad Game but not a good one either. I'd say this feels like a B tier game to me as im not that invested into the LI or story yet, if it wasn't for the render and animation quality this be more of 3 or 3.5 star game to me.

Story 2/5
Its not a bad story but theres just to many things i find idiotic, MC wakes up in the trunk of car and finds him self in a prison in the form of a big town closed off to the world, he gets in a fight and ends up at a female doc who saves hes ass...all of that is great.

It all comes down to extrem lack of details in the story and a MC with no brain, i only got more annoyed reading it due to that.

Girls 3/5
They are somewhat cute but theres no real diversity in builds and its main focus is on big tits which i dont like so most girls dident do much for me personaly, if story had held up i wouldent mind but it dident either.

Animations 3/5
They are bad but not great either, scenes are to dark so lighting needs to be improved.

Choices 2/5
So far there are a ton of choices but they dont really do or mean much, it only really change small things like who you talk with first, but routes seems to end in the same spot no matter which path you take or what you choices you make, you can even pick all the worng choices with a girl and she still trows her self on MC and you still get the option to make up with her after 20 bad choices....

Music 3/5
Eveything seems very low even with game settings at max, but if you turn it up on your pc its not bad just not fun when you forget to turn your pc down again and do to something else

Super interesting game. It's basically a hunger games for condemned criminals in an enclosed city. You wake up with no memory and quickly learn you've been kidnapped and placed here. There's not much to learn yet, but there's basically going to be 3 main girls and Luna is awesome. The different gangs and their philosophies on how they want to run their parts of the city is pretty unique and interesting. Knowing there are "mutants" is interesting because it's not known if they are really mutants or just another random gang. Also, technology seems to be somewhat more advanced than you might think based on something revealed later. Also, it's worth knowing that the MC is not another beta MC as seen in numerous other games. He actually kicks some ass here which is refreshing. Overall, it's a really good mystery thriller hunger games type game and when I reached the end I was disappointed there wasn't more. Highly recommend.

Promising AVN with nice and interesting mysterious story

Pros
- Beautiful Render
- Good looking character
- Very interesting story
- Story settings are very intriging
- UI and chapter recap are very nice

Cons
- To much floating cam for lewd scene and it's turn off
- Lewd scene action are too short and not interesting
- Can't roll back option

Thanks a lot for good game

The branching is just plain stupid.
Also animations are garbage.
Story seems kinda fine so far i guess and renders are pretty good, but i'm not sure if i will play this again, maybe in 2 years or so? And it will be only once and by using developers walkthrough because this " Kinetic Novel " is so poorly done that i was almost thinking that this is actually choice driven game, which it isn't.
Terrible!

With Amazing visuals and great writing, "With Eyes Closed" is top tier stuff. Both the first release and now the update have been very sizable, which imo is indicative of the fact that this game is certainly something to keep your eye on.

Review for CH1;
We will see how it goes but for now, this is one of the most promising games came out this year.
I like the no-nonsense approach, even with heavy memory loss MC is alert(as he should be) and actually reletable human being. I don't get how it got popular but obnoxiously oblivious MC's seems to be on rise lately so this was a breath of fresh air.
Can't say much about the girls so far but they are pretty likeable and enjoying their company. but we will see.
Dev created the atmosphere almost perfectly, you can feel when you are safe, but not really. Always keeps you on your toes. Always on the edge even when there is a homely ambient.

There is little to no grammatical errors, proof reading is on point.
Renders and animations are smooth as fuck.
This is probably gonna be a slowburn(which it should be) so there isn't much sexy times, its too early and i rejected the common whore so only thing was the handy-jay i saw so far, thats why i can't give my critique on that matter, yet.

ALAS!

I can't wait to go up in the ranks, prove myself in this shithole city or maybe even escape my fate(?) with the love of my life(or more?).
Lets see where this dumpsterfire utopia takes us. Good luck gentleman.

Very engaging story so far, i was really enjoying it. I also bought Dev's previous project Going Rogue, and I must say that this game is a huge step forward comparing to previous one.
Story has a great branching with consequences.

Renders are great. Characters are beautiful and well written.
Also there are no any controversial fetishes like NTR, FF stuff and other, and it's amazing.

Really looking forward to more content.

Might be a bit too early but as is now the game has a very interesting and promising start. And the choice of the setting being thrown blindly in a walled-off prison city is great, love it.

The story itself is intriguing and has interesting characters with well-written dialogue and good pacing. The visuals are not the best but good and the scenes are very well constructed and conveyed, the game in general shows and tells competent storytelling.

Also, the dev clearly put emphasis on the branching story and the replayability of the game adding a graph of the story tree branches at the end of the episode and a choice of in-game hints. Although I feel the present story choices are kinda lacking and don't change that much but seeing as it's just the first episode it might improve further on.

Overall this VN's first chapter impressed me and it has the potential to offer an interesting and unique experience so I recommend checking it out.


Edit: After the initial release the quality of the game unfortunately dropped. Instead of following the potential this game had and putting in the work, the devs seem to have chosen the easy route and just made the game into a generic mediocre adult VN with nice visuals.

One chapter in and this one has all the makings of a truly elite game, as there's a lot going for it so far.

On the technical side of things:

• The UI is well-designed
• The presence of a built-in walkthrough is appreciated
• The models are realistically proportioned (bonus points for giving the MC an appropriately sized dick instead of an extra appendage)
• Animations are present and work nicely

With that said, this game is setting up to be very plot-driven and man, the plot is a page-turner for sure - I'm excited to see what happens next. It's so refreshing to get to play games like these where the sex scenes actually mean something in terms of the overall story.

This game is going to blow up... hope the dev is ready for all that comes with that!

Very enjoyable game so far (chapter 1). Renders are good quality and models look fresh also sexy. Story plot is intriguing with mystery and suspense around every character especially our MC. As far as the storytelling I'd say it has been a successful start hopefully it shall continue to hold my interest with future updates. Best of luck devs @Ker games and please don't do another rushed ending after five or six updates (like your previous project).

Talking about the animations and render quality, it certainly looks like an improvement from the previous project. Also some H - scenes during to balance the crime thriller novel is much appreciated. Let's hope these sexy characters could be developed further into really relatable love interests and don't make MC choose among the ladies (give atleast one Harem route).

I've a strong feeling that these mutant gang members are somehow connected to our MC, but more importantly was our MC a failed experiment or a successful one? This drives my mind more. Yes the plot is very unique and interesting. Great job on that dev. Keep it up.

Another thing that got my attention was how that beautiful broker lady mentioned there're ways to move in and out of this zone but advice not to visit that same place where new convicts are brought into the zone via train. Also there're no cars in the zone yet MC was smuggled via a car. That indicates there's perhaps a road way connection with the zone.

Perfect start. The novel is interesting without the erotic charge, the graphic quality and animations are good and the characters are well designed and deep. Although Kate seems a priori the author's favorite for romance, Luna and Eva and even Betsy have charisma to delve further. The novel is engaging and I'm already looking forward to seeing more chapters.

This is such a good story and writing. The idea behind the game is interesting enough to keep you wondering about the overall mystery of the city.
The female characters are, in my humble opinion, one of the sexiest ever. What's better than having a hot doctor caring for you when you're unwell?
And the red-head, Kate, seems like a trusting character with whom you'll possibly have some kind of a relationship with. I would love that!
The game has a very good start, I am hoping that the updates will be regular.
Oh and, the effort behind creating a flow chart with choices and unseen scenes in the end is great, I love the idea, that's why I replayed it.

The story is unique.. there's effort behind it. The renders are top shelf.. The writing is effortless and smooth. At the end there is an actual flow chart to show you which path you're on. Just a great piece of work in it's entirety.