Ren'Py - Haremence [v0.13] [Arpel]

V0.13 ends around Day 34 and lasts around 6 - 7 hours at average reading speeds without any skips. However if you minus the repetitive grinding and clicking around we are looking at around 4 hours of content.

Story
Escaping from evil organizations, having a device to corrupt ladies and staying with a troupe of LIs in a house are common themes in the adult VN space, so no surprises there.

I suppose the LIs being Scientist is perhaps more unique, but then so far the characters look and act no different from high school girls.

I can see how the story might unfold successfully if the developers play their cards right, but the current pace is too slow. There is very little progress on the main story after considerable time so I hope things can start moving in future versions.

Game Mechanics
Standard sandbox splitting time into 4 blocks where players click on various rooms in the house to interact with LIs, gain points and occasionally move the story forward.

Progress is linear with variations largely coming from the order which stories happen rather than branching into different ones.

There are also points like Relationship, Attachment, Lewdness and Submission but so far it hasn't been fully implemented and it's hard to tell how they really affect gameplay.

Background / Character Renders
The backgrounds generally adopt a lighter tone and color palette with rooms and cityscape standard stock builds.

LI models follow the typical white, slim and big boobs archetype. They are pleasant enough, but lacking in differentiation. Most of the distinction is done by hair color and attire.

Character Development
One of the better aspects of Haremence. So far the LIs have interesting backstories and characters which are adequately reflected in the way they interact with MC.

There is a good backstory for Chloe, Mia, Yuki and Amber so far and I hope we can get to see some of Alice, Eva and Chris's ones filled up in future versions.

Sex Scenes
So far no kinky stuff for LIs - mostly HJ, BJ and vanilla sex. Animation is smooth with short loops. It's the direct strip, fuck and move on kind for most scenes except for Chloe's which was more varied and interesting.

Yuki's slave scene on the other hand was hot as hell. Hopefully we'll see more of such quality going forward.

BGM and Sound Effects
BGM is the generic kind and if you play enough VNs you've probably heard them before somewhere else. Sound effects are very basic minimal.

In short it does what it needs to do but nothing that would be memorable.

Conclusion
It's a decent start with some potential. The game needs to be better balanced between advancing the story and room grinding. Currently it's too slanted towards the sandbox room clicking.

The sex scenes are ok, but hopefully things will get interesting when the mind control device is actually put to use to advance the story. Overall I would give this a 3.5 out of 5.

Review for version [0.13]. Obviously, contain spoilers.

So, Haremence is a Visual Novel which could quite easily be a kinetic one if not for the sandbox part, which sadly increases the playtime twice without actually allowing player to play with the sand within said box, as there is simply too little sand to play with. While the description and intro are stating one thing, the game is actually rather different than you would think it is.

Story is rather medicore, at best. And it is about, too young in my opinion, group of few brilliant scientist who are hidding from companies trying to hire or unplesantly recruit scientist and steal thier very dangerous and powerful inventions at thier same time. At least that's the story for a few early days, because it's actually about fucking every sinlge girl of said group without using MC's dangerous mind-control device, while also using said device to control other, currently only one, side(?) girls.

MC's friend was kindapped by one of those companies and MC ain't even worried that much about her, but only cherfully reminding everyone around him she is tough and can easily get through this until they rescue her, while simply fucking around every single pussy thrown at his face instead of actually trying to help find her. But he doesn't have too, due to multiple "Hacker ex Machina"s,

You want to find your friend, but you really do not know where to start? Don't worry about it at all! Let Hacker-Girl do that for you when you fuck everyone instead.
You managed to save at least one of your friends, but what about your family? They could be used as a leverage to force you to work with them and give your invention to them.
Do not worry about it! Hacker-Girl already hacked company database and your family members are not on the list of possible targets, so they are safe. Seriously?
But they surely won't need do to that. After all they took your friend and all the data about the device are stored on her laptop, so they just have to simply build it with the schematics, right? Worry not! They are encrypted! But encryption can be broken, right? Of course not! Because said encryption is the greastest unbreakable encryption on the world, because it was made by no other person than, yes you are right, Hacker-Girl the leader of the decepti... the group.

Story doesn't have to be explained at every single possible step, nor it has to be logical everywhere, but just enough to be believable. Making characters not knowing everything is better than making them know everything. That's just simply boring.

Girls are... girls. At least they have thier own personalities. Not much of them currently, as the game is quite on the early stage of development, so there is really not much to see, but just enough to distinguish them one from the other. Still they could be and act a bit older, while also looking older than teenagers, as it is hardly believable they are scientists rather than bunch of random out of school girls.

Graphics... Well, there is really not too much to write a poem about. Rather standard set of random, yet smillarly looking, girls with big to huge breasts, except for the maid girl and slight overuse of the the stanard missionary position.

Gameplay simply sucks, as there is no gameplay other than click-fest for the sake of clicking around just to waste your time while looking for a place where you can start an event. But, sadly, you need to repeat that every single timespan, every single day, to be sure you ain't missing the right time for said event to start, because there is simply no hint screen, nor indicatior where girls are located, no way to actually earn some additional cash to use in the online shop. And if you won't check your phone regularly, you may get weird feeling of having conversations about things of long and distant memories of like 10 events ago. And you can actually play some events out of order, so immersion, of you actually manage to get into one, is flying out the window.

Game ain't that bad, but it's far from being the average one. Not when story is going into it's own direction, when gameplay promises one thing, but all it gives you is a sandbox in which all you can do is to click around to find events.

So tierd of MCs that you have no controle with how he acts, i mean even when someone ask a simple question "did you like my tits" why cant i just say no when i hated them......on top of that MC is also set to be a pervert that molest girls.....

Main story is just meh just yet another plot you have seen a million times over, MC invents a mindcontrole device which he ofc has to use as a pervert so he can touch or fuck girls, its boring and pointless and it feels idiotic why you have to "build" up points with the girls when he could just mindcontrole them i mean?

I dont mind a good mind controle game but if you cant deside who to use it on or even more importen who not to use it on game is just boring and unplayable.

In any case its also a sandbox and its really shitty, i couldent find any hints so all you can do is randomly click on stuff and move around the map and hope to run into something, but when you finaly find something that says "new event" and it does nothing and just tells you to explore more? makes me wonder why the event shows in the first place when you cant do anything with it.

Its also the most shitty type of sandbox where stuff only happens on a set day and a set time which makes it even more impossible to do fuck all without hints, its just not worth wasting the time on it.

Next thing is really what kills the game, you have 0 freedom your forced to follow a kinetic set quest line and quests are connected with one another so you cant do it in the order you like or skip a girl you hate, every girl will be forced on you so you cant controle anything, why not put a kinetic tag up so people know what to expect.
Then theres the grind to level up girl to controle them..its just to much and with all the other shit its just a hard pass and wouldent recommend this one.

Girls 2/5
Main focus is big tit fetish, i dont know why devs cant figure out its an idiotic thing to do since they lose everyone not into big tits, make some diversity in builds so theres something for everyone, anything else is brainless and lowers the number of people who might support games.

Animations 3/5
Pretty standard stuff nothing special.

Music 2/5
A bit boring background stuff and again nothing special.

Choices 0/5
Cant say no to sex scenes or relationships, your even forced to molest people you dont even know, like the coffee girl you get 3 choices touch her tits or her pussy, forgot the last one but its in the same area as the the other two and no choice to do nothing, so it really is just all kinetic

Sandbox 1/5
Awfull without hint system, pointless since you have no freedom.

Starts slow but quiet excellent once it gets going, hope to see more in the future! Really good world building for these types of games. Enjoyed the MC aspect of it can't wait to see the harems stuff flesh out, hope it has group stuff coming that is hinted at.

This review is on version 0.12.

I have a hard soft spot for the "Mind Control" genre, so this one has been on my list to check out for a while.

Haremence is a pretty standard game. Effort has clearly been put into the visual details, and the girls are universally rather attractive. There is an obvious intent to tell a story and develop the characters into individuals while allowing the player a certain degree of freedom when interacting with them.

The issues start to arise with that interaction. At this time it is rather limited, and the employment of the actual "Mind Control" by the player isn't really present very much at this time.

The sorest points however, and the ones that really do bring my opinion down, are the language, actual storytelling, and knowledge of subject matter.

The English is...not the best. It's serviceable and I would call the speaker fluent, but it doesn't feel native. The actual grammar is fine, with just a few common mistakes here or there, but it's the word choice and way the sentences fail to flow together that make them foreign.

I have no issue with the direction the story takes on a high-level. It's very typical, but in an adult game the story is secondary and serves mostly as a catalyst to deliver the "content". My issue is actually related more to the character definition and stems from the language issue. Primarily, the characters don't do a good job on communicating through their dialogue and they tend to come across as rather stupid.

Here's a specific example:

Lastly, the subject matter. One of the characters is supposed to be a brilliant hacker. This isn't out of the ordinary for games but she...isn't. Many of the explanations or commentary she gives don't make sense.

Effectively, the visuals and concepts are both good and fine, respectively. However, the game is in need a pretty significant low-level rewrite to give it a sense of quality.

Version Reviewed: v0.11

Overview: Harem Hideout

Story: You and your pretty research buddy accidentally discover a mind control device, and unfortunately for you at least two evil organizations know about it immediately. So you go into hiding with several other genius and also gorgeous girls who have invented technology that would be too dangerous in the wrong hands. Your job is to corrupt a waitress and get in everyone's pants.

If you've played one of the more popular hotel relationship sims on this site you will be familiar with the interface. There are rooms you click on to advance the story, although sometimes the story advances in other places as well. The story itself is a mishmash of dating sim and preventing world domination, although the world domination story usually takes a back seat. For example, your lab partner was kidnapped almost immediately in the story, and by the end of this version you've done almost nothing to free her. This one doesn't seem to have a good quest tracker, but hopefully they will add one soon.

Your "job" is to basically practice using your mind control device on a local cafe worker, getting her to do increasingly lewd things as you slowly grind up the relationship.

Gameplay: Kinda grindy, and needing to hunt around for events is a bit of a hassle. There is a sort of quest tracker where you can click on the doors and sometimes it will tell you what you need to do, but that doesn't work very well and usually the doors offer no hints. Overall it's not too bad to play, but it could be better. Navigation is another area that could use improvement, there is a big menu you can go to that gets you to several places, but not all. To get to the cafe you have to be in your room or the bar for example. To get to the generator room you have to be in the living room or bar. The navigation menus could definitely be improved.

Graphics: Honey select, and there's sadly not much special going on in the graphics. Backgrounds aren't just default assets and everything is done reasonably well, but you probably won't be wowed by what you see in 2023. The bar has been raised over the years.

Conclusion: This was close to a 4 star thanks to the slightly excessive grind with the cafe worker, occasionally clunky navigation, and only partially functional quest tracker, but the story was good enough to get full marks. I really hope that the player uses his weeks of experimentation to improve his device so it doesn't take for fucking ever next time we need to mind control someone. I think the full mind control grind is around 35 interactions in this version, but there are nowhere near that many different scenes to play, so you spend a fair bit of time sitting on the control key watching it zip by.

I really like those mind control scene for Yuki,
hope next version can get more mind control scene,
and we can do more harder thing on Yuki.

If you like Nano-control, and mindless mind control,
you probably like Yuki mind control scene.

Rate Version: v0.1

For a first release, it's pretty good! Girls all have unique characteristics, more into the mind control aspect of it though so Yuki is a favorite. Story's still setting up future events and for what it is, it's OK. Animation on the 3d cutscenes are pretty decent but I'm no animator so take that with a grain of salt. Overall pleased with the experience and hoping to see more.

I'm not one to review, or even play a game this early in development, but I'd like to see this game continue.

Anyways, as a whole this was pretty good, especially for a first release. The UI is clean, there were no missing images or other bugs that break the Ren'Py engine, the story has me intrigued, the characters are interesting and distinct enough from one another, the renders have clearly had a lot of effort put into them, and there was plenty of content for a first release. All in all, this blows most other first releases out of the water.

Now for the criticisms.

1. The English is a bit rough around the edges. I'm pretty certain the writer is an ESL (English as a Second Language) speaker because there are a lot of small things in the dialogue that are either grammatically incorrect, or just don't seem right. None of these language errors made it difficult to understand, but there are a lot of them. Some of the more picky people on this site might be put off by this. Just to pick out a couple typical examples:
   • "as new your mysterious companion said" would be better as "as your new mysterious companion said"
   • "How can possibly be an email address without it?" would be better as "How can there be an email address without it?"
2. The process of controlling Yuki is a little too grindy, in my opinion. Needing to mind control her 6 times to increase the control level by 1 feels like too much. After the second or third time, I'm holding down the control button to skip everything. Personally, I would opt for reducing the mind control requirement to 3 times per control level. This would reduce the mind control grind, but maintain the narrative idea that the mind control needs to be repeated several times. Since Yuki is the only character you can mind control at this point, it's not a big deal now, but this will start to get annoying once you can start mind controlling other characters as well.
3. My only UI complaint is that using grey is not a good choice of highlight color for new text messages. I'd probably suggest going with some shade of yellow, but I'm not a color theory expert.
4. Once more characters and locations are added to the game, the sandbox nature could start making it a lot more annoying, and a lot less fun to play. I'd suggest the devs make sure they get a hint system for story events up and running sooner rather than later.

So overall, the only reason this wasn't the full 5 stars is because of the quantity of minor English errors. Everything else is just nitpicks with room for improvement. I enjoyed my time playing this and I look forward to playing any future updates.