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Just to let anyone thinking of playing this know, you absolutely have to download the fan mod from f95zone. It allows you to go through all the girls' stories. Otherwise you arbitrarily have a limit on the number of actions you can take before the story advances; you cannot see this limit, and you will receive scenes which imply you've advanced with girls you haven't had time to visit. Until the dev fixes this, the mod is necessary.

Thanks for confirming. Could you provide a little more info?

Check out the walkthrough or walkthrough mod https://f95zone.to/threads/halfway-house-ep-9-az.33607/

I mean, if you go down the Ashley path you get a good number of sex scenes, and they start in the early episodes. But Emily is so cute, so I understand people wanting to move faster with her. But the game is trying to tell a relatively grounded story, so I understand the developer not wanting to let the mc suddenly seduce her, given she has no experience.

I'm up to Zara and really enjoying this game so far. My question: what if any impact do the choices (which are mostly in the sex scenes) make? In the release notes I read that there is a romantic path for Sybil; are there also different paths for other characters? Perhaps a romantic vs. submissive path Clermont, and a dominant vs. submissive path for Nyx?

Amazing game, one of the best AVNs out there. How's the progress on the Director's Cut? I'll definitely be replaying and hopefully leaving a full review on my blog when it's released.

Does anyone know what the points actually do? I understand that choices have an impact, and there is one place which checks if you have at least 3 dark points. But beyond that, I can't see where anything checks your total lust, pure or dark points.

Thank you, edited!

Everyone reading this: consider playing the unofficial Ren'Py port (https://f95zone.to/threads/rick-and-morty-another-way-home-r3-6j-night-mirror.79138/) instead of this version. It doesn't crash, streamlines the playthrough so you will always get all the scenes, and adds choices to skip scenes you're not interested in. Ferdafs has done a great job with this game, but the port helps fix the problems resulting from their desire to make a semi-sandbox title. On an unrelated note: how on earth has this game stayed up? I would have though it would have been bombarded with cease and desists. Not that I'm complaining! Maybe it's because Roiland and Harmon are secretly enjoying it...

Edit: The link was wrong, I've corrected it now

My shortform review (v0.8.0)

Visuals

The game's renders are middling-quality. However the time saved here has clearly been used to extend the game's length (for the unaware, rendering takes a very long time).

The game uses a style of model which sits between anime and photorealistic. This is an appropriate choice given the rendering quality, but the models aren't as visually engaging as premium AVNs. The women mostly have large breasts, which is fine by me, but small-titty lovers will feel left out.

Writing

The plot starts slowly, but progressively gets more interesting. However, it is never the game's strongest point, as the game feels much more focused on telling each of the girls' stories. Thankfully, the characters are not cardboard cut-outs. As the game progresses, it carefully balances screen-time between all the important characters, which it uses to flesh them out with backstory, personality and development. However, the game falls into the trap of including too many women, reducing the amount of time which can be given to each one. This doesn't feel as egregious as something like My New Family, because the mc is not (yet) in anything approaching a serious relationship with anyone, so there isn't a feeling of disconnect between who the mc should be paying attention to versus where he is spending his time. But there are some women (notably Paige) who feel they should have been given more attention, due to their importance in the plot and the mc's backstory.

The mc is written without a strong personality. This avoids a common problem in AVNs, where strong mc personalities often lead to irritation or uncomfortable player-avatar disconnect. However, the mc's dialogue does sometimes come across as bland. The mc is intended to be morally upright in the plot, and thankfully this does come across in the writing. 

The line-to-line writing is strong. Dialogue feels natural and conversations aren't too short or too long. However, the style of speech does sometimes feel too similar between characters, though this is a common problem even among tier 1 AVNs.

Decisions

The game operates using a choice/points based system. Currently, there don't seem to be any major key choices impacting the story, and the points don't often make much of a difference to which scenes you see. In dialogue selection, there is normally either a "correct" choice which gives you the most points, or none of the choices give you any points and only change the dialogue slightly, or all of the options can be selected one after another before continuing. There are only a handful of places where there are several choices, none of which are truly "correct", which have an impact beyond a small dialogue change. This is certainly better than some games where the developer wastes too much time writing a bunch of branches and so confusing the story and delaying the game (I'm looking at you Where the Heart Is). We can expect to see some previous choices have more of an impact in future updates.

Sex

Sex scenes are frequent, and all (or at least almost all) are extended with multiple animations. The animations aren't very sophisticated, and they are so far all very vanilla (save some optional, fun lactation play). As always, your mileage will vary with how hot you find them.

Audio

Audio consists of some nice background music and the occasional sound effect. More could be done with audio during sex scenes, and there are occasional periods without background music which could benefit from something like ambient background sound.

Verdict

A strong entry into the AVN genre, with a surprisingly long playtime and good writing. While the visuals aren't tier 1 quality and the sex scenes somewhat basic, you can expect a decently engaging story with increasingly 3D characters.

You can download the official guide in the downloads listed above. However, because there are so many decisions in the game, the guide is pretty long. Therefore,  if you want to use a walkthrough, I would recommend using the walkthrough mod on the f95 page, which lists the points for most decisions. Then you can supplement that with the official guide for when the mod isn't enough.

Thank you! Corruption it is then!

I'm really enjoying this so far. I've just got up to a point with a character where I have to choose between 'It doesn't have to be him' and 'He doesn't determine your self-worth'. The walkthrough mod is telling me that the choice can lead to a path where the character cheats with me. I'm happy to take this sort of path, but I was wondering whether if I don't take this path, I can still get together with the character; perhaps she leaves her partner first? Advice would be much appreciated<3

You're doing it again, ILS! A strong. engaging plot with characters and relationships which feel real. No 2D stereotypes to be found here, and no boring mc. Just as in Now & Then, the mc and his story are central to the narrative, making the game so much more enjoyable by giving it real meaning. I can't wait to see how this turns out.

However, I was moved to leave a comment because there are two glaring issues that I think need to be addressed. The first is that you can't complete all the girls' events in one run! Obviously the player will want to see all the events - they are central to the game - and obviously you want the player to, so why would you prevent that? It's not like you are expected to do an X run and then a Y run for each girl or ending, like in Now & Then. On the contrary, the dialogue seems to expect you to progress with all of the girls! For example, the mc was talking about visiting Roe's home even though I hadn't had "time" to do so. After reaching the end of the update and realising I had been forced to miss a number of events, I had to load up a previous save to play them, in which I hoped I was far enough back that I still had "time" to do them all. But this didn't feel "canon",  because in my head the mc would of course progress them all. Please consider rectifying this.

Secondly, the mc is again cracking awful jokes and references during the sex scenes. This was easily the worst part of Now & Then, which was otherwise a brilliant game. Jokes during sex are almost always a turnoff; they pull you out of the mood, and I find myself trying to quickly skip through them so I can enjoy the scenes. There aren't many sex scenes yet, so this would be a great time to change the writing here.

I don't know how you do it Caribdis. Once in a lifetime was excellent, and Eternum is easily the best adult game out there right now. I'll be playing v0.4 soon!

Thank you!

Thanks, I'll try and get them using this info.

I enjoyed playing this, thanks for making it. I played the public version v0.12. On the patreon it says I can get the 'Full Game' by subscribing. Is this really the full game, or is it just called the full game but in fact is just v0.12?

Hi there, I've really enjoyed your game. I'd say it's the hottest breast expansion game on the market, perhaps tied with Expanding Universe's 'Hypnosis'. However, I'm having some trouble obtaining some of the achievements.

Baka! - I've attended Nicole's graduation with her at score 1, but I don't know how to make her mad.

Fried or Poached? - I've selected the additional breasts serum multiple times, including with the full harem ending and a couple of individual girl endings, but it never unlocks the achievement. 

I enjoyed this game, but there are some achievements which seem impossible to get. I've turned on the reveal all guide paths cheat, but after looking through literally every conversation tree, I can't find how to get these. They are:

Alex - Titty Monster, Nipple Suck, Grope Orgasm, Masturbate (even though she has masturbated and I have fingered her...), Boobslam

Hailey - Selfie (even though she did send me a selfie...)

Lin - Hug, Kiss

Lina - The fourth Nerve achievement, which currently comes up ???

Additionally, making Jenny prey/predator status doesn't seem to do anything except enable one kiss in the TV scene.

I have to agree with you. I've reached the start of chapter 4, and after seeing a montage of each girl pining after the mc, I'm asked to choose one to pursue. But it's an impossible choice, because I don't want to let any of them down, and so I can't continue. I'll try to come back to it later, but for now this is just too overwhelming a choice to make.

You should consider making some merch my dude. I mean, I think body pillows are the full on cringe, but would I buy one with Nova on it? Probably...

Aight, thanks.

Personally, I was able to empathise with the mc's experience of bullying despite the points you detailed, but I do understand that it would have been more impactful to have been shown some of the scenes rather than them being described in the abstract. That could have clarified his relationship with Aine while in school, because as is, it isn't entirely clear why he stuck with them. Simping just isn't a realistic reason. So yes, we are left  wondering whether there was a good reason, or whether he is complaining over nothing.

I still personally like the scenes which delve into the detail of a character's backstory, revealing a lot about their personality and how it formed. Some games choose to trickle every character's story out over a long course of time (this is done very well in Harem Hotel). However, I like the way this game occasionally chooses to dole out large chunks at a time. Emma's chapter made the most of this, delivering a very moving and self-contained mini story, which wouldn't be the same if it was spread across multiple chapters. The developer has also decided to take a more measured pace with some characters, such as the pizza worker / runner (I forget her name), and these also clicked with me.

Nevertheless, I agree that the pacing isn't always perfect, and Jess' reveal is an example of this. I imagine pacing is very hard to get right given the serialised development cycle of these visual novels. Fifty Shades of Grey is an (extreme) example of how serialised writing can result in a meandering mess (in case you didn't know, it was originally written chapter-by-chapter as a Twilight fan fiction). I think My Bully does an admirable job of threading the needle.

I've just finished the prologue and have arrived in Carceburg. So far, the main character has been subject to sexual harassment, sexual coercion, sexual assault, and attempted rape. Her ability to defend herself has been stripped away. I am definitely not into this. My question is: does this continue, and if so for how long? If the main character quickly regains her defences and self-agency, allowing the player to kick the butts of those trying to coerce, harass and rape her, then I would like to continue. If not, the game is just going to continue to leave a sour taste in my mouth, and I'd prefer to stop now.

I don't agree on your about giving too many things dissociated from the mc's feelings. By occasionally following different characters, often for flashbacks, the game is employing a solid storytelling device used in many great novels. It's put to good use here for "showing" some of the character's backstories rather than only "telling" them. The most moving part of the game is of course Emma's backstory, told mostly from her perspective. Sure, by expanding the scope of the narration beyond only following the mc, it creates a disconnect between the mc's knowledge and the player's knowledge, but this is commonplace in video games. It's really just a different style of storytelling to that which creates a one-to-one link between character and player knowledge: neither is inherently better or worse.

must protec!

Jesus Christ. I haven't cried that hard in a long time. It's been a day, and still all I can think about is E's story... it will break my heart if she and Kei don't get some resolution soon. Thank you for making such a moving game, but please, don't elongate her silent suffering for too long. Oh and I hope Kei is able to sort out the harem dynamics sooner rather than later, because I can't forgive him if he doesn't start taking steps to prevent breaking his girls' hearts.

Note to new players: When you play the game, you will have to choose how to name the relationships between Kei and two of the women. Although the game defaults to 'roommate' and 'landlady', the game makes  more sense if you go with more familial terminology...