Ren'Py - Holiday Island [v0.4.1.0] [darkhound1]

This game features some of the most atrocious grind ever featured in a piece of entertainment. I truly tried to get into it and deal with the dozens of hours required to unlock even the most basic content for each girl, but I just can't justify the time -- and no, this isn't a hidden jewel that rewards you for "paying attention to each girl's schedule" as others have put it, the attention to detail required here is about as enjoyable as filling out your taxes... and about as rewarding as about once a year you may get some payback for all your effort. There is variety here, that's for sure, but the characters are shallow like puddles from the morning dew, the conditions for unlocking content are obscure and arbitrary at best, and the graphics are just a notch above passable.

It's just not worth your time, unless you really, really need to hang around some bimbos with breasts larger than their heads and engage in pointless conversations until one of them decides you wasted enough of your time to deserve to see her with a bit less clothing than before, and maybe hold her hand while you walk on the beach… even though every single one of them went to that island specifically to have sex with you, the only man in town.

I'll keep this short (unlike most of my reviews).

After over 8 hours of gameplay I haven't seen a single scene that could get me off. A ridiculous amount of grind is required to unlock the most mundane and poorly animated sex acts. This is the perfect example of a game that does grind wrong. Not only do you have to constantly grind away every day to eat, sleep, rest, flirt, etc, but the moment you don't talk to a girl for five minutes her stats start dropping requiring you to grind even more.

A truly awful experience. I don't know how I hung in for 8 hours. I guess I was hoping it would get better but it never did. I actually was fast-forwarding most of the time since the dialogue and scenes repeat constantly and in fact many of the girls respond exactly the same way, so if I were playing the game at the expected pace, it would have been 30+ hours at least. 30+ hours with nothing to show for it.

On top of all of that, the requirements for unlocking events are needlessly vague and complicated. "Reach lvl 75 affection, meet her in her room on Wednesday when the moon is full and you're wearing a tie, convince her to wear her nightgown and then catch her the following Thursday talking to her friend while at the Spa at 11:30!"

Okay, just... no. Hard no. There are infinitely better games available.

Good modeling and simple gaming. Girls are all smoking hot and obviously a plus for a big boobs guy. Generally a very satifying thing to play only if there were more penetration sex scenes. Also, isn't there supposed to be an update on save files? When I load the save files they still show some scenes locked and unavailable.

I really want to love this game, but at the end of the day I just can't. At the end of the day, I gave this 2 stars for its current execution and 5 stars for its potential for an average of 3.5 stars, but I rounded down because I just couldn't justify giving it 4 stars at this point.

First, I should start with the good things about the game. I love the variety of models in the game. I know they aren't the most diverse or realistic, but you're supposed to be on vacation surrounded by lovely women, and most of these women fit that bill. Also, I am the kind of person who loves sandbox and likes a little grind in the game to make the content payoff worth it and there is definitely grind and content galore. But this last point also forms the crux of my dismay at this game: the game's mechanics make progression confusing and often counterintuitive.

Many of the best interactive games - lewd or otherwise - attempt to design the structure of the game in a way that keeps progression fresh, new, and somewhat intuitive to keep the end user immersed and engaged. This is something that is very hard to achieve and, because of that, most lewd game developers prefer to stick to the visual novel style of gaming so that they can control the story beats and the pace of progress. For the few intrepid developers that try to create sandbox games, the risk/reward balance is extremely tricky as it is supremely difficult to create a system where progress feels natural and rewarding while maintaining the user's sense of autonomy and self-determination.

If anything, Holiday Island's biggest failing might be its ambition. Over a dozen women, over a dozen locations, numerous player stats and npc stats, dozens of actions/interactions with hundreds of permutations based on character/time/location combinations and further augmented by numerous vaguely defined success/failure gates and unclear payoffs make it a massive undertaking to figure out how to move forward. Now the developer has tried to make the carrot of content a little more obvious with success conditions listed in the in-game cell-phone, but the process is so punitive that it becomes a stick in and of itself. Here's how it usually plays out:

Dev: to see this scene, you need 80 lust and meet them in their room
Me: Okay, I will try to raise their lust by kissing them - that seems lusty, right?
Dev: Love check failed - you have raised anger and lowered love and affection
Me: okay, I will grind to give gifts to lower anger and spam hugs to increase love and affection
- 15 minutes later -
Dev: anger lowered, affection and love maxed
Me: okay time to try that kiss again!
Dev: Love check failed - you have raised anger and lowered love and affection
Me: What?! It said I achieved max love, am I supposed have more than that?

Side note - yes, you are supposed to have more than that.

In the end, you are constantly playing this meta-game of trying to determine which actions/interactions will allow you to progress which stats and by how much until you reach a cap that can sometimes be raised to get access to further actions. It's basically trial and error to find a needle in a haystack which you then spam until you have to go look for the next needle and none of this screams natural, intuitive, or even fun progression. You're left to either constantly rollback, cheat, mod, or slog - all of which are non-immersive, to say the least.

Rant aside, if the devs can figure out a good way to make it more obvious what you need in order to achieve and action, what the likely outcome of that action is, and a little less punitive of missteps, this could be a really great game - it's got all the parts it needs, it just needs to connect them a little better.

i love that game ! i still dont finish all the things i can do in it , but i really want to do that one when he will be finished . if you have things i should know in that game , something i cant miss , let me know

Really wanted to love this game, the models are perfect and the setting is intruiging. Unfortunately it is a complete mess in my opinion, the writing is poor and there are too many mechanics and its definately not a fap game. Difficult to think of a more blue-balled experience I've had on the site. Even the mod just complicates things. Needs a stripped down, simplified rethink.

Still, the models are beautiful and very alluring, I suspect I will be making repeated attempts to "play" in the future. I really hope the project grows.

This game is just hilariously bad. The dialogue is terrible, which is sad because there are so many people doing fan writing that this could be so easily fixed by having them do the writing for the main game. The characters are all the same with minor differences, the main character has the social skills of a third grader, the animations look like they were made by someone who has had sex described to them but never seen it in person, the character's bodies don't match the way they're described in the text, the gameplay is stale and tedious and will be infuriating after about an hour. There's scenes in there where the MC gets girls pass out drunk, drugs their drinks, and then rapes them. No warning. It's pretty cringe. Patches take forever as I think there's only one person working on it so you can expect any issues with the game will not be fixed quickly if ever.

Great game!!I would to see the following as an update(s) or a mod(s):
A setting that turns girls in to Futa (u could be able to choose which girls)
A way to costumize their body:for example the more time u spend on the gym with a girl the more musclular she gets...or the more time u spend with a girl eating she becoms fatter
Breast/ass implants for girl to buy
sry for my english peace <3

This is a good one, by looking into some of the comments I was worried that the game didn't had much content but thay us far from the truth. The developer is regularly updating the gane nand there is a ton of content to play with. The girls are beautiful and interesting, even the grind stuff of the game wasn't too bad. If I had any complaint is some of the animations don't look too polished and smooth, sometimes you have a really smooth and good animation and then you have a stuff and awkward animation. Overall I'm having fun and looking forward to see what the future updates add to the game. Hopefully we will get more content with Aly and Yumiko.

Summary: this game is tedious, awkward, and grindy as a middle school dance with no chaperones.

Gameplay consists of running around appealing to the whims of silicon breasts sized somewhere between generous and monstrous, who seem to make up some kind of hive mind of slight deviations from the same personality. Occasionally, there are hints at some grand corporate scheme by the bust-in-chief, but nothing makes sense and attempting to disentangle it will only make you dumber.

Look, characters and story aren't everyone's bag, but if that's the case then why waste everyone's time with writing all of this? This game has the depth of a kiddie pool and the diameter of a lake, and the devs have chosen to make the player traverse the latter on foot.

I started to play with AVNs back in 2017. This was one of the first games I have tried. Then it stood out with its quality visuals(compared to other games). Other than that it was grindy and rather shallow on content. 5 years have passed. I have tried it again. I have to say this one matured rather well. It is still grindy(but manageable with a good guide), but has now a LOT of content. There are not many sex scenes still(man, after 5 years, one would expect, don't know...more) and the ones done, are rather lackluster, (like eg. one pose from the back with 0 camera angles to view the girl, not just her ass) but it concerns just some girls, has a lot of quality lewd content to make he player want to grind for them. So all in all it is like a huge amusement park for pervs, and really it has quite a bit of content to grind out, even if some is rather meh due to the issue I will talk about next.
One glaring weakness is however, that some characters got their renders updated, but not in every scene. So eg. Ivy, who has been there from the start, has one of the hottest new renders ever(she is not the only one) but only in some cases or locations. Clean crisp great resolution ones. And there are scenes(quite a lot and not just for her, but some regular, main, or even unique girls, who as their names say, get updated often) which are grainy and use the old models, which is like really an unforgivable mistake in a game stressing visuals this much.
I would have given this five stars, even with the grind and some bland and lack of variety in sex scenes, but this old vs. new look issue is something which should be addressed, cause this way the experience is rather lacking.

0.3.5.0

- Totally boring and grindy af. You have to repeat everything a ton of time to get your three stats from the girl rising. PLUS MC himself has 4 or 5 stats which you also have to improve...

- Models are grainy and absolutely outdated

- Animations are a 1 or 2 second loop

- Some of the girls are escorts (overpriced hookers) which leaves a bad taste for getting to fuck them

Played 3 or 4 hours and got only a handfull of lewds including one fuck until i got bored with everything aound it.

I've started this game from when it was 0.0.x version, so it was quite some time for me to really get what's good and what's bad about this game.

At the beginning, it was a pretty fun and promising project with cliche, but solid background, a lot of preludes to juicy content and steady expansion of game functionalities. I've dropped at 2.1, when I felt like I cannot bear with the recent lame changes anymore.

So, why good?
+ Has good setting, ways to improve and expand are still present
+ Variety of really different gurls, with fake natural melons, sturdy muscles, petite frames etc.
+ Pretty stable, not crashing much.
+ Some imitation of intimate progress is present, though in a pretty lame way
+ Dev really tries his best to polish and bugfix, but...

- Unsightful dialogues with zero personalization, which results in so boring game routines that you are getting irritated from them pretty fast.
- Very badly designed tutorials and to-do leads, you just do random things which pretty much results in the flaw mentioned above.
- Absolutely one-sided development progress, at some point, there were practically no content to most of the gurls except Yvette, Heather and Amy/Alice. The origin is obvious - they were leaders in Patreon votes, which resulted in completely biased dev progress based mostly on those 3 (with some rare bright moments of change to others like Faye, Natasha, Eva etc). Some gurls like Aly were not getting any content at all (still not sure if there is any significant about her even now, though she was one of those rare ones which had fairly believable natural bosom). So, at some point, new content became pretty much monotonous, which results in those flaws mentioned above.
- Events are nice and various, but again, the amount of text blocks you have to pass through each time you want to play it, makes it annoying at first, then simply boring.
- There is almost zero story progress, sure, there are some scenes which may be considered as a progress, but they are looking so random and out of place that may barely be considered as a story at all. Like, compared to other walls of pointless text you have to wade through, the amount of story is barely 2-3%. Not that it would be that bad, if not the flaws mentioned above...

So, based on all the +/-, I can easily rate it as 3*, there is definitely some juicy content somewhere in the text/click walls you have to wade through, but long boring game routines with practically no hints to catch will fade away all the fun you might be having at the start.

I'm not really dissuading anyone to play this game, it is definitely worth at least to be evaluated, just be ready for this game to challenge your patience in a very annoying way with all of its mechanics, routines, tons of recurring text blocks etc.

This game is fantastic and I have just barely started playing through it. Even at 0.3.1.1, there is a ton of good content to enjoy. The premise is simple - you're on an island and there is a varied selection of women to seduce. Gameplay is in the form of conversation options and some light minigames like poker. While there is sometimes a level of difficulty in advancing the relationships with each character, the rewards are plentiful and I greatly enjoyed the escalation with each character.
Where the game really shines is in the quality of the renders. There isn't a great deal of moving imagery, but the still renders are excellent and there is an assorted range of women to work through.
This is one of those games where I can't get enough of it and then I'm going to be greatly disappointed when it's all over. Well done, dev!

PROS
- It has gameplay. It is not strictly a VN with tons of text and some pseudo-choices dialogues.
- Girls look amazing, and there are lots of them
- Some animated scenes (could have more, but at least it has some)
- Great amount of content in general (could have more sexual content, though)

CONS
- Hard difficulty. I just want to enjoy a holiday island, not to be a detective trying to figure out how to trigger events.
- Some girls don't have enough content
- Could have more animations

Despite the cons, I still give this game 5 stars.

This game takes hours to get through with loads and loads of material, it is now the benchmark that I base all other games off. This game is fantastic! I just wish there were more frequent updates. The animations appear to be getting better with each update as well.

This is just so grindy game. You spend quite long of time just looking at your character stroking his dick. This is because you need the money from it and you don't want to him cum in his pants while talking to the girls - also single jerk off lowers your lust status just a bit. This makes the start very non-arousing and tiresome.

Game gives feel of seriously restricted interactions. You might have max stats with the girl but still have trouble finding to do anything sexual with them. That is because game requires your stats, girl's stats, time, location, outfit, your sexual status, people inhabiting the island etc. all to be correct before things can happen. There are also no clear indication of progress when it comes to some aspects making things somewhat frustrating.

All this makes game feel like clockwork mechanism with very specific possibilities, when it should feel like organic system of interaction possibilities.

It doesn't help that in a 2 years or so, the game doesn't seem to have received anything substantial update-wise. It seems almost like only updates in 2 years have been some frame-y animations.

Renders are nice but having to repeat the interactions endlessly with generic text plastered in everywhere does not help things. Girls don't seem to have any distinguishing personalities and events that you have to grind with them don't differ at all. Most use the same text lines, same camera angles, same stat changes etc.

Game is technically OK and visually very well made but it just misses marks when it comes to being a good lewd game. It just so grindy and feels empty of the content that matters. Things like girl's lust levels not plummeting after sex would be good way to make this more non-grindy.

The only thing that this game did well was the intro.
The intro seems good as it seems to give a feeling of an unique game. you get to choose which are your preferences and the character in the island will change depending on them. this mechanic is good as there are tons of character and putting them all in would confuse the players.

But this is the only thing that seems good about the game.

- The graphics and animations are decent.

- Extremely grindy and confusing systems.(Hours of gameplay with no sex scenes unlocked)

- buggy game

- lack of any scenes as most of them are just filler(idk about this but already grinded for hours not gonna waste more time)

The core gameplay doesn't do justice to the intro and never really had fun.

Another "young man finds himself surrounded by hot girls" cliche story with terrible cringy dialogue and gameplay that's: "click the same buttons over and over again until an arbitrary stat gets big enough to allow you to have fun" and by fun I mean get a hug or kiss. This project is basically a mix of semi-sandbox, multi-location, time-managemant, time-waster with hug/kiss/play poker-game that's called dating-simulator that result in the worst kind of anticlimatic scenes ever. Graphics is outdated and plastic with the most attractive girls get the fewest scenes. Character-wise all characters are the same. Everything gets repetitive and very boring very fast and it's honestly impressive how little there is to do in this "game".

Prime example of how to make one oft the most awful, terrible, repetitive and uninspired games ever.
This is basically a hug, kiss, play poker simulator over and over and over again. The Dialogue is laughably cliche and terrible, to get a girl to even hug you, you need to raise affection and love over and over again until you can go in for a hug??
Poker is basically winding back until you win, there is absolutely nothing good in that regard.
Animations run on 30 or 20 fps, I don't get all the good Reviews, I'd rather watch a hand-drawn slideshow of stickpeople fucking then these terrible and awful "animations".

2/10, characters may look very good, the rest of the game fails to do anything which would come close to "impress".