Lust Academy - Season 1

There's this thing you sometimes see in amateur adult literature where an author will write this long, long, impossibly long story. So you start reading it and it starts ok, seems to setup some possibilities that seem kind of hot, but as you keep reading every time they get even remotely close to actual erotica they back off to instead pile more exposition and lore about their world. And eventually, if you are foolish enough to keep reading, when you get to the second to last page they'll have like one paragraph saying "and then he had sex with her and it felt really good." And it makes you want to scream, because what you realize is that the tool who wrote the story fell in love with his own little world because he thought it was just so damn clever and that people would want to read that instead of what he purported to write when he posted it. That is this game. It's a Harry Potter rip-off where ostensibly they've made it adult, but it isn't. It's all tease and no payoff, at least not in any remotely reasonable time frame. 6 hours in and the game had introduced like 2 dozen potential partners and paid off on exactly one, with nothing but "oh you need to finish this first" every time it seemed like they were about to actually get to something interesting. Authors, here is a clue. Your puzzles are crap and what players have to get through to get to the stuff you've hidden behind endless absurd dialogue and world building. You need to hire an editor to break your hearts and brutally cut out all of the pointless sh*t you think is clever and good, but is really just noise. 6 hours! Maybe you do pay off eventually, but I'll never know because I will not throw good time after bad hoping you eventually don't suck.

So I've been looking over it a bit after reading the previous review and I think "feeding everything into Google Translate" is not what we're getting here. The game is far more legible than you'd expect, but you have to keep in mind that these projects are usually the work of either one individual or a small team. I expected an illegible game and while there are obvious portions of the text that feel a bit off, you do have to understand that the developer is not a native English speaker. I've run across this several times in the AVN market (that's what we're calling them) and you get used to it after awhile. As long as you can read at a basic level, it's not too difficult to understand. Also, if you allow this obstacle to impede you, then you're going to miss out on some of the other titles in the genre that have been promising, like How To Fix The Future. I will agree that the graphics are heavily detailed and the animations can be quite vibrant. It's not on the level of City Of Broken Dreamers (which the dev is interested in releasing here) or Being A DIK, but it'll give you something nice to look at. I also like the fact that I've been given more freedom to roam. I do love a good story, but often you feel like you're on the rails with these games and you can't really interact with anything. I think it's worth picking up along with the sequel. They're not long games and you'll spend a few days to a week with them. Then you can just move on to the countless other AVN adventures out there. Definitely pick it up on sale though, because it's not as good as Being A DIK - But few are!

The game looked nice enough to try, so I did just that. I only played the sandbox mode so far, can't say much about the VN presentation. It's nicely done, a little balancing is needed to win the trip at the end of the week. If you just follow the girls without getting points, you won't get to the second play area, meaning that the content there will find behind and in the end you finished everything else, and only have something left to do at weekends, which could become a bit boring. This could have been done better. While at the beginning of the game you have to draw runes for spells, the duels are done by a well timed click. I guess it was dumbed down at some point. If you don't want to get in bed with everyone, most kinky content can be avoided. Also only four sub story lines are needed for the main story to progress. The story arcs ... are not THAT original, you defintly saw every story arc in some VN or other game at some point in a very similar way, but they are presented quite nicely, they included some mysteries, nothing out of the ordinary, but still. So far I enjoy the whole package.

So far I had been disappointed. I had played 5h, idk how long season 1 is. Store page description implies a lot of interactivity: focusing on some of many available girls implies we'd have multiple routes, wandering implies freedom, minigames implies challenge. But till now it had been almost a kinectic VN. There were a couple options that seemed routes, but regardless of the event we choose, later when we finish it we're forced to do the other, so we only choose the order they'll be done. I had a couple of wandering on the house MC lives, but there's a unique objective on one of the rooms and the others were locked or I could get inside for nothing. On the university, I couldn't choose what to do even once, MC goes by himself to each place and to meet each girl. Only minigame I had is working on the café, which is just being presented to 3 products then remember them, and it was only the minigame introduction then going to it once. I had the option to do to job or go sleep, and I have nothing to do with the money, I'm not even informed of how much money I have. During class introduction it's explained that houses compete for points, so obviously I was expecting to have a few APs on each day and have to choose what to do, some sort of resource or time management. But nothing like that, I'm unable to choose what to do at all, I just watch MC follow his schedule, he hasn't missed any class nor any appointment, nor had any chance to earn extra points. Almost all options I had was when interacting with the girls, and options are of flirting or not, accepting their move or not. So, it's either to watch the sex content or skip it, to get more intimate with the girl or not. There's no choice for one girl or another, either we watch the content we paid for and obviously wanna watch it or not. The only use on these choices is in case we don't like some of the girls and wanna avoid her, which gladly wasn't my case.