Ren'Py - Dilemma of Devotion [Ch.2 Ep 3] [PulseHavenStudios]

TLDR; Don't waste you time.

The models and renders may be okay but that's not even saying much. The gameplay is bad, nothing is interesting, no content and what I'm guessing what most are here for the very very little content there is, is locked behind patreon version of the game which I wouldn't even bother with if I wanted to pay.

“Dilemma of Devotion” is a game that has managed to capture my attention in a way few games do. As someone who appreciates a well-crafted sandbox experience, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the depth and detail embedded within this title.

From the outset, the game introduces a cast of characters that are not only visually appealing but also boast personalities that are distinct and engaging. Rachel, for instance, stands out with her unique style and personality, making her a character I’m eager to see more of in future content. The main character (MC) is another highlight, with a cool demeanor and a strong presence that makes interactions with the various characters particularly compelling.

The narrative is still in its early stages, but it’s clear that the developers have laid a solid foundation with the potential for growth. The story is intriguing, revolving around an MC with a traumatic past, struggling to move on from a lost love. The game’s loyalty system, which penalizes players for straying from their past, adds a layer of complexity to the gameplay, though it can be frustrating at times when it hinders the development of new relationships.

While the game’s visual novel elements are strong, the sandbox mechanics need refinement. Navigation can be cumbersome, requiring multiple clicks to move between locations, which can detract from the overall experience. However, the developers have shown a willingness to listen to feedback, and I’m hopeful that future updates will address these issues.

The game’s technical aspects, such as the UI and transitions, could use some polishing. The textbox, for instance, can be obtrusive, but the promise of an opacity slider in future updates is reassuring. Additionally, the game’s use of multiple languages adds a layer of authenticity, though translations would be helpful for those moments.

In conclusion, “Dilemma of Devotion” is a game with a lot of heart and potential. It’s a diamond in the rough that, with a bit of polishing and attention to player feedback, could shine brightly in the sandbox genre. The developers have done a commendable job thus far, and I’m genuinely excited to see how the game evolves.

I love this game! even tho im not usually into a sandbox game, I pretty much enjoy it.
All of the girls in this game are very gorgeous, and I like most of them. but my personal favorite is Rachel. I like her style and personality. im definitely looking forward to more content of her.
And the last thing i want to mention is the MC. i like him. he's cool, and totally not a pushover. which makes his interactions with all the girls very exciting.
Overall a very good experience playing it, good job for the devs!

Review, currently chapter 2, ep 2
4/5

Alright so, honestly, i don't play very many male protag games, I'm usually pretty selective of the ones i do. In my opinion, this one isn't too bad. The renders are pretty damn nice lookin as someone more used to 2D. The story, while not exactly perfect, is solid, its still early in its development so ill say its more so that it has potential. I believe with more time, it can be corrected and touched up to be a little more than just "solid". The characters, there are a lot, are pretty well written for the most part! A couple of dialogue errors here and there, would recommend more proof reading from a 3rd party to help with that. Sometimes the tone of the writing can clash a bit, but never really too much that its an issue. The pacing can be a little wonky, but not too much that its a major flaw, despite a hiccup here or there, it flows pretty nice. The gameplay is, not really my favorite, but i think objectively it's alright. While i did say the writing clashes tonally sometimes, it's generally pretty good despite it's errors, i legitimately do like some of the characters and are interested in what the dev has them offer. I do think there is an abundance of them however, this is one of the pacing problems, it kinda introduces a lot of characters and sometimes it can be a bit to keep track. You can kinda start going "this character sure has a lot of screentime.." Despite that, the dev does their best to keep them interesting enough to still pay attention to their story.

All in all, conclusion. I mean i enjoyed it, i would say it's good, with it being so early in development, there's obviously flaws here and there and kinks that need to be buffed out. But from what I've played through, i think it's got good potential and I'm interested to see what it will be like after a couple updates.

Review as of Ch.2 Ep.2

A little torn on this one, start of the game introduces good characters, a decent story and has nice renders but fell off after the prologue.

Characters I'll give 5/10
Right now imo there are just too many to actually care about them. None of them have had enough screen time to actually develop a personality, or relationship with the MC and right now we have 1-2 scenes with a bunch of different people rather than learning about specific ones.

Story and gameplay: 3/10

I really dont understand what the "point" of the story is. The MC comes from a traumatic past that is haunting him. Cannot get over his old partners and the game seems to want you to move on from it, meet new people and gain experiences. But the player is punished every time they do it.

There is a "loyalty" system to keep you loyal to your past, but at the cost of advancing any relationship with any other girl in the game. Look at a girl wrong? Lose loyalty. Get closer in class to a student, by TEACHING her? Lose loyalty.

Then it introduces hard checks you need to hit, Did you drop below 100%? Well now you dont get some scenes. Drop below 95% well now you dont get others.

The other stat is corruption, which you collect by interacting with the other girls. Which by the way, also have missable events if you dont have specific amounts you just dont get those scenes and they are just missed.

VN / Sandbox mode 1/10

Right now its trying to do both. The VN part was pretty good, the sandbox part is terrible. There is no quick navigation menu, you have to manually click arrows, doors, to navigate the spaces. To get from your room (which you have to wake up in every day) to the school is 9 separate clicks. The navigation is horrible.

There are specific areas to advance time. You need to rest. You need to go to the shop. You need to talk to a random person. No option to just advance time.

Overall Im giving this a 2/5 because the potential is there, but needs serious work. As it stood it was just not fun to play.

Story 3/5
The story it self is pretty decent and some ok stories with the girls but none of that really matter when game breaks.
It dosent help that there is no real content yet and by the looks of it most will also be behind a paywall only for patrons, which dev might think is smart but will hurt more since game wont become a hit since most dont pay or help a game when they dont know if its any good or not, so i think most will just delete game and forget about it just like i did.

It starts out great being a VN game then it turns into sandbox and a really really bad one at that, you have no mini map or well any map of any kind your forced to click your way around by clicking arrows constantly which is really only annoying not to say just pointless and does absolutly nothing for the game.

Also it dosent have a time skip so your forced to go to bed at home to skip town them click arrows to get out of house again it drives you nuts.
It like the only reason sandbox is even there is to waste your time since it serves no purpose at all and game could have been 4 or 5 stars if it had been a VN only.

You have alot of quests but as for now theres alot with no content so after talking with them once its end of content and some has nothing from the very start of hitting sandbox.
It does have a quest log but its pretty shitty at times where it tells you what to do but not what day or what time of the day your supposed to go there.
Cant scrolls back and using history is shitty since menu covers some of the page...
Quests got game breaking bugs as well got stuck at terapist went 10 times to her on saterday evening and it talking about the same thing every time and a pop up saying quest not found so couldent progress.

It has alot issues as well like missing images/background which is a bit annoying.
Then theres the dialogs with diffrent languish that arent translated making you wonder wtf they are saying, got to say thats a brainless thing to have in a game.

Girls 2/5
Well some looks good some just dosent and i dident find the diversity in builds any good, its big or bigger tits so if you dont have that fetish there arent much to come for, there might be one girl with smaller tits but thats to poor a mix.

Animations 1/5
Well hard to rate what arent there, i saw one where a girl played with her self in the bathroom and that wasent worth much.

Music 3/5
Average backgournd stuff.

Choices 1/5
This might be low but since there are so little content i cant say how it works yet, it does have a point system where you gain loyalty or corruption points, if you have a choice in who you have a relationship with im not sure you might have a choice, but if quests starts to become tied to other quests like most sandbox games then you wont but time will tell.

Sandbox 1/5
Its just the most boring sandox you will see, it has no real purpose other then making you waste time clicking arrow theres nothing else to do in it, hint/quest log dosent tell you what you need, quests are done at one set time of the day and some only at one day in the week meaning alot of skipping time which is again just wasting time, also dosent have a skip time on map so forced to go home to bed room skip time to then click arrows to get to where you need.

I can honestly see why this would get such a high score despite it's massive flaws, this niche of gaming is so saturated with dogshit that something like this with thin surface level illusion of quality will get people hyped up. But despite that, this is not a project that you should be excited for, at least for the time being.

These are the problems that in my opinion will forever keep this game from being what it tries to fool you into expecting:

No scalability: This comes in 2 forms, the code and the gameplay. When finishing a questline, doing the same action again will retrigger the first event of that questline. I haven't gone into the game's code to be 100% sure, but that is a pretty clear indication of horrendous coding and that the developer has no idea what they're doing. Pair this together with a plethora of different back-scrolling bugs, prompts being stuck on the screen forever sometimes and other issues, this has started off on the wrong foot when it comes to favoring further development. Then there is the issue with the story. This sells itself in the description and in the prologue as a slow burn, choices matter game with branching paths. But then the first quest that I did with Eugene goes from watching TV together day one to having her act like a slut within 6 days. This is with one interaction/day and no cheats or exploits mind you. This also happens with the neighbor lady as well and while not having played that much, I expect it to be a widespread disease, Not a great start by any stretch of the imagination, I understand wanting to have some "content" in an early version, but there had to be a better way.

No vision/innovation. This is a sandbox game in the worst possible implementation of it. As a preface I love sandbox games and stat management, so this is not the argument here at all. The argument is that this is one of those sandboxes, where you have to click 10 times to do one action and the action amounts to basically nothing. Everything that is implemented is misused. You have a calendar/time system but most characters can be interacted with only in one timeslot/day. In the beginning it's usually the same time slot too, so you're stuck having to deal with them one at a time hoping they would take up a different slot further down the line. There's also the dreaded, can only interact on a specific day events where you have to remember what this day is for multiple characters and then usually just brush your teeth/nap yourself for 6 days to get there, only for the event to be short and offer basically no progression. You have phone chat that does nothing. You have stat management but no way to track it, this is especially bad since you can trigger a quest that you don't have the stats for and are unable to back off and do it later (as an aside this would be perfectly fine in a heavily branching game maybe 15-20 updates in, this is not ok when that is the single event with the specific character in the current version and in order to see it you have to restart the entire game). Bottom line, the sandbox in this is a mess and is also pointless. Should have been a navigation type sandbox where you chose the building from a map and then be able to freely move to any room within that building at any time. Maybe even a tracker for who is in a specific building/room at a time so you know what you're doing.

The milkman cometh: Step right up to see your wife get fucked: we've got 200 million characters introduced in the intro all bearing retarded names because there's just too many. We've got 16 times the locations that you can't interact with. We've got content being paywalled in the first version. We've got a galaxy's worth of branching paths when the first release has 30minutes of content so we promise this will be completed by the time the sun engulfs the solar system. And of course, my personal favorite: Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended Content for this version has ended.

I can call this game trash in so many ways and there's so many more problems, but this review already took me more to write than the dev spent on the entire game so I'll end it. I've been called cynical by a bunch of cunts so I'm giving this 2 stars for the renders and the fact that the premise was good enough to make me waste precious hard-drive space for 3h just to see it (not to mention this review) and some problems highlighted above can definitely be fixed, but the core problems cannot, this already set itself up to be remade 100 times for code rewriting, systems rebooting and other "lack of planning/foresight" problems. I don't expect much and encourage you to do the same, but I am looking forward to being pleasantly surprised in 2-6 months when this game gets either abandoned or "complete" with "area not yet developed" and "content ended for this version" messages still in it.

Dilemma of Devotion [ch2 EP1]

This game was clearly a five star game in my book but some techincal elements annoyed me. I loved the story, loved the characters, MC's brother is a real bro (feeling bad for him in the future his wife gonna be a LI of MC). I didn't the completed this version fully, I'm writing this review at a certain point of the game where I lost interest in the game fully cause of annoying sandbox. Some UI elements are distracting too.

MC have two stats corruption and loyalty. Corruption starts with 0 and loyalty with 100. MC has a beloved (she is now dead think so, or idk) they are not together now. He see hallucinations of her. He is trying to move on (it's our choice). When MC sees other girl sexually his corruption will increase by 1 and loyalty will decrease. When his loyalty decreases he won't see hallucinations of his beloved quite often. It's our choice to be loyal or pursue other girls.

Plus points

+ Nice story plot
+ Renders
+ Good pace
+ Pretty girls with unique personalities
+ Writing
+ MC he got a nice charm, he is proficient in other languages, poetic and knows to fight, good looking
+ Textbox with opacity slider
+ Can change the colour of text

Bad points

- Name got separate box without opacity slider
- White UI buttons below are distracting no option to hide it
- Transitions take time and during each transitions white UI buttons disappears and appears that's annoying (there is option to skip transitions many don't use it often)
- Nicely going VN suddenly turned to sandbox have to click on many arrows
- No option to click on map from your room. You have to click through door and arrows to get map. It's not like map it's more like navigating outside
- Map, In usual sandbox games Map contains locations that are smaller in size, it contains almost all locations in one screen. Here locations are larger in size contains only 3 to 4 locations on a single screen, there is 3 directional arrows to click (more clicking to waste time).
Like I said earlier there is no map more like navigating outside
- Occasionally MC speaks in other languages but there is no translation for it. It would have been nice if there is a translation in bracket

I really wish if only I found its development thread earlier. It would be nice if Dev change game to complete VN and solved UI distractions. Overall it's a good game but destroyed by sandbox. I will continue the game later.

After discussing a few things with the dev I decided to try the game.
Usually I don't play games where 100% of the content is not available in one playthrough, but seeing the previews I gave it a try.

I'm not a fan of sandbox games, but sandbox could mean anything between traveling via menu choices or occasional free roam or full on sandbox where you have to click through a bunch of places.
This game falls in to the 'full on sandbox' category which I don't like, but I'm not going to give a lower rating because of this as I saw the tag but wasn't expecting this much sandbox.

You have to complete events for the girls in order to progress their story, there is a help screen in place which helps with where to go in order to progress which is helpful. Could be more user friendly but at least there is one, so I'm not complaining.
Not much happening right now, sure it's Chapter 1 but the game has too many girls and it's going take ages to progress with them. It's ambitious but still too many.

The textbox is huge, I had to change the code to be able to play it without it blocking 1/3 of the screen, but they are working on an opacity slider which should fix this issue. Also the positioning of the name and dialogue text could be better but that's probably personal preference so I've fixed that for myself.

I would say the writing is average, not bad at all but not great either. I found quite a few typos, inconsistent capitalization and other small errors. All the girls are falling for the MC right from the get go, which is not an issue just an observation.

The renders are great, the girls look great so everything is fine on that front.

I usually don't play games without animation and this game is tagged as 'animated' but I couldn't find a single animation while playing.

Multiple scenes in the gallery are locked and maybe these scenes have animations but because the game is not Patreon version it is unavailable.
I'm not trying to freeload here but paywalling content never works, it turns away supporters instead of gaining more by blocking content. They might unlock these with Chapter 2, I don't know, but right now there is paywalled content in the game.

Overall for me it is an average game for now, I'll check back after Chapter 2 and see how things changed and might give it a new rating.

Good luck!

I am not much for one for a male protag games, but, I had to give this one a go because it's part of the same universe as this teams first game which is a female protag

I really enjoyed this more than I thought I would, specially for a male protag game, the story and writing is perfect and the plot is more than just interesting, nice to see a heartfelt story within a adult game

After finishing the main plot of the update, you're doing side guests around the city, which is actually interesting, it's not a grind or anything like that, it's easy to complete all quests

Renders are so high quality, 4K picture perfect to where, you can see every blemish in the characters skin, every bump, every little detail, which this team has come really good at

Perfect first update, wish this team nothing but the best for the future of the game

Original story, with fresh characters. The writing needs a little polishing but nothing that distracts from the storyline. The play through so far has a low adult content and the ones i played through were the only part of the game that felt unnatural in the story. There is also only a handful of choices, and it did not appear to make any difference in the big picture of the game. The game is playing on a lot of feelings so if it does not grab you right away, it likely will not later.

A beautiful story with beautiful people that's beautiful to look at.

So much love has gone into the renders, the music and the writing. A real treat for the senses, I can't wait to see where it goes next.