Ren'Py - Holiday Island [v0.4.5.1] [darkhound1]

Edit: I changed it to 1 star. It just got too frustrating to keep going.
You just have to read all of that boring dialogue. Holy shit. Why put all that effort into writing something so damn boring and awkward? As well as all the "OMG"s. Seriously? Who speaks like that?
It's literally just a bunch of teasing with very little reward. You can tell how barren the game is of content and poorly planned out this game is when there's almost nothing to see besides teasing for a vast majority of the characters and maybe 1 sex scene for half of them. The only one that has more is the hugest grind. It's so bad, it's not even worth it when you finally see it.
The MC goes as the only man, to a private island full of models and escorts who are supposedly there to have sex with him only it seems like their real goal is to either get him to fap alone in his hotel room like a sad fuck or get teased 24/7 walking around with blueballs. That's what 95% of the game's content is. If this were some kind of specific kink game then it'd make sense with all the teasing, denial, muscular women fetish, etc. but it's not. Which just makes it weird and dumb. Shit. Maybe this really is that and I just didn't read the premise properly.
And the stupid zoom-ins. Dude, I'm holding ctrl right now just trying to get through all this awkward-ass dialogue I've seen 1,000 times before. Just let me get through this.
I like sandbox games, I really do but this is just bad. Even some of the worst sandbox games I've played still had repeatable content. This makes you jump through hoops and over hurdles to get one scene and then to see it again ... you have to jump through the same hoops and hurdles.
So much more wrong with this game. Just go read the other negative reviews. Those other reviews sum it up better. I'd rather just delete mine but we can't do that so I decided to change it rather than just let it sit there.

After playing this game, I realized it would be quicker for me to get back in shape, learn to code, actually win the lottery, and move to Tahiti in order to get some action in my life.

Jokes aside, this game is GRINDY. I'm a guy who likes some grind and when tits are involved (very much like this game) I can have a shocking level of patience for grind. In the end, I was defeated, it still was too much grind for me.

It's a shame because from what I can tell from the intro and reading about this game, it has a very decent intrigue and plot, and I'm a sucker for that. Personally, I love the art, especially the bimbo aesthetic.

So here is my breakdown:

GOOD

- Story: by most account this game has a well fleshed out, engaging story that we have to discover through playing.
- Art: Lovely models that will please breast-lovers and bimbo-lovers of this world.
- Open world: I like the idea of an open-world and the freedom it gives the players. I like the slight confusion of figuring out what you have to do for the first 1 to 2 hours of a game.

BAD

- Art: I've read that some art has been updated to be higher resolution and I appreciate it. That being said, I did not see any of it. While the characters are gorgeous, most of what I saw is too low-res and seems fuzzy.
- Dialogues: With the sheer amount of repetition necessary for this game, it would be nice if the dialogue was more fleshed-out and more different for any girls. As its stands now, talking with any chick is the same 5 lines with slight flavor added to it.
- Narrative flow: Since there is some much repetition and grind, I've been abusing the "Ctrl" key... meaning I'm sure I've missed sparse tidbits of narrative development buried in the umpteenth repetition of a certain event/dialog.
- H-scenes: The grind was so much that I couldn't get to any worthwhile H-scene, but again poking around the game, I've learned that by most discerning account they are quite underwhelming considering all the gatekeeping one has to overcome before accessing them.

UGLY

- Grind: Seriously, this game is grindy. Personally, I believe that some of it is due to a combination of factors: numbers of stats involved, slow improvement of said stats, convoluted and unintuitive roadblocks on stats improvement, too aggressive RNG checks and stat decay.

I think the game has potential, with a serious update pass on the art to bring it in line with 2022-level graphics, expanded dialogs, and a tweak to how stats are handled this game could become very enjoyable and rewarding without loosing the complexity that the dev obviously worked very hard to implement.

PS.: Dev, I see you "thumbs-up" all the 5 stars review, but don't ignore the less-than-5-stars reviews. I've read all of them and with a few exceptions, even the negative reviews like huge portions of your game. We all want to see your game become the best it can be and I hope that you'll see that making your game more accessible can only be positive in the end. I'll keep following your project, because there is so much here that I like that I can't just walk away.

This is going to be a short** review, because the game is (like so many) a WIP and a lot can change in the future. This almost feels like a five-star game for me. It has a lot going for it in terms of customizability (in terms of LI's, if you can call them that), and activities and player agency. The renders look decent and the Poker mini-game is a fun little time-killer with "alone time" material for a payoff (more if the woman likes you enough).

(** - This ended up not being the case.)

This loses a star for that last bit. "Likes you enough." That sounds straightforward, but this game makes it WAY more complicated than it needs to be. There are variables for lust, love, affection, favor, tease, anger, charm, and these all seem to combine to dictate whether [insert woman here] is at all interested in the advances of you, the literal only man on the island. The man they're ostensibly there to see and hang out with.

Were this a "normal" story -- like a slice-of-life where you're wandering the world [or day-to-day existence] trying to get in the good graces of strangers and/or friends/loved-ones/classmates/whatever, then sure, add all these variable, it'd make sense then (though I've never seen it in that context in a game). But it is just *weird* that on this "holiday island" where it SOUNDS like they're all there to, I don't know, compete for you affection? Cater to you? It's not entirely clear (I should perhaps re-read the intro), but whatever the case, their moods are all over the place, and a woman who hit on you in an email one minute might respond with a sneering tone if you dare respond in kind. [No exaggeration, I received a message from a girl who sent me a lewd pic of herself, so I had the MC send her a sexy text in response, and she ended up being utterly turned off. Makes no sense.)

I don't mind a bit of grind, and if the player does something stupid, then sure, penalize them. But the amount of emotional plate-spinning this game requires every day of every week, keeps this from being a 5-star experience. And I suspect that aspect will not change any time soon, which is a shame because there seems to be a lot of fun and sexy content buried under the "you're hungry but you're not allowed to eat right now on this vacation island" and "we don't know each other enough for me to call you by your first name (WTF?)", etc.

Maybe implement a difficulty setting, or toggles to turn off and on some of these features. Or if you're going to make the player keep up regular maintenance on all of the women, increase the granularity (if that's the right term) of the day, break it down into 15-minute intervals instead of making everything take one or two hours. (Or the half an hour to chit-chat, half hour to masturbate, half hour to shower.) You should be able to take a nap that's less than two hours.

-7 Enthusiasm, new Enthusiasm set to 72.

When i first saw this game and the screen shots. I thought It was a generic Ren'py, with odd looking character models that I've seen 100 times. But when i played it, Holiday Island Exceeded my expectations.

You play as a nameless character that won a lottery to a small island with women and have Intimate relations with them. You find this too good to be true but soon find some mysterious things behind this island and try to find out what's going on here, while having a fun time with the ladies.

The gameplay is more of a sandbox, interactive dating game with minigames. Where you talk to all the girls/women and find their interest, favorites and soon date them and have sex with them. There is a lot of RPG stats like, Hacking, charms, looks, strength, love, affection and much more that make game more realistic and progress which girl you wanted. There is strip poker, HotShots, Butt and Wet T shirt contests, hacking and other interactivity you would love to see.

The Hentai scenes take a LONG time to get it. But you'll be rewarded if you play the Affection, Love, and Lust meter right. The hentai scenes are animated ranging from 20fps-70fps (I don't know why...) and other sexual poses. You'll get many favorite female and some unfavorite as well. My favorite girls are Jennifer, Heather, Eva, and Alice.

There are issues with the game, but it's kinda easy to spot when you're not trying. The character models are hit and miss, as some look pretty and other being the opposite. When Loading a specific file doesn't show the scene or error occured. And the Biggest issue of this game, is that It refuses to start the game in the first place. Find the save file from the C:->User-> Appdata and delete the "persistent" to run it again.

Once you start playing this game. You can't stop playing it. This game has a lot of content, very nice visuals, and a lot of girls to get intimate with.

fantastic game but in all the time i've been playing the voice files for the sex scenes never work can anyone provide a fix the files are all there but don't seem to work.... would be much appreciated and would def enhance the game play experience

With 20+ hours of conent and hundreds of scenes, events and appointments to unlock, this game skyrocketed into my top 10. Absolutely love the game, all the characters and the gameplay. There's so much to learn and unlock and every day in this game feels fufilling in a way. There's always something to do and work towards and all the girls are extremely beatiful and each has their own unique personality, 5/5, 10/10, 100/100 would reccomend

The reason this game is getting 1-star is because the character never gets entitlements from knowing, dating, or having raunchy sex with a girl. I mean if an MC has had such insane sex, why does he have to ask like a pathetic incel to have sex again. This game is plagued with grind for exactly this reason. An MC should be able to call females on the island, and meet and have sex, YES repeat scenes at will. Not do all this date nonsense. Once it's established that they've had sex, the bar has been lowered, but NO NOT in this game. Just forget it. There are other more enjoyable and easier to manage games. 1-star is fitting.

Simply the best erotic game I've ever played. The reviews which complain about the grind don't seem to understand the simulationist, sandbox intent of the game. This isn't a virtual novel where you skip dialogue until sex happens. This is a game where immersing yourself in the context and paying cursory detail to your daily schedule and the various proclivities of the women on the island pays dividends down the line. The game isn't complete yet, but there's a lot of content to enjoy and oodles of potential.

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.