Ren'Py - My Girlfriend's Friends [v2.0b2] [Kyle Mercury]

Lot of people complain about this game's update time, but I feel it's fairly unfounded and extremely inconsiderate. The author could easily give up entirely on this and we would deserve it. I really enjoy every aspect of this game, the writing and characters are all excellent and keep me coming back. I always look forward to the next update.

This game's best feature is its bawdy humor. Due to the visual style, which I don't care for, there is only one girl I find sexy with her clothes on, and there are even nude scenes that don't do much for me. Though it's very common, I don't care for the gameplay either. It's one where you have to visit the right location at the right time of day and contact the right girl for something to happen. Too much tracking and clicking for my tastes.

Because of all this, I nearly quit early on. However, I stick with it for the great humor, and I'm glad I did. In addition to lots of LOL moments, the visuals do get sexier over time.

The game deserves a rating that reflects current reality.

The drawings or art whatever you want to call it are more and more ugly, the updates are more and more buggy and especially longer and longer.

It looks like a dev who put everything into the first 6 months of the game and then lowered the quality of the game to save money on the artist who draws because it's impossible for it to be the same person, the drawings are too unequal between them.

the sex scenes are ultra short now, less exciting than at the beginning because they are less well written.

The sound and the music...meh

Story 4/10
Animations 3/10
Characters 2/10
Renders 3/10
Music 3/10
Enjoyability 2/10

I have my eye on this game... I was surprisingly shocked with how things are paced in the game. It's a bit of a sandbox type of game, but the grind seems rather minimal right now. (There's barely any grind, you just occasionally have to work a shift or two for money.)

I've read the previous reviews and I understand that a lot of people are upset with the game for its bugs and long wait times for updates and things like that.. They may have a point. That's why I'm gonna watch this one for now.

I'll change my review, but for now.. I picked up this game a few days back when it updated and it just now updated again. I've played through a couple of the paths so far, and I'm actually not disappointed with the girls, the story, or anything like that at all. It has every hot girl type you can think of: The airheaded pretty girl, the perfect on the outside-slut inside type girl, Tomboy, Goth chick, Bully chick, The Token Tsundere, gamer girl, your childhood friend, girlfriend's sister, girlfriend's mom... There's a few more as well, but I honestly would rather see quality over quantity in this.

Currently the game has a number of bugs as well. My current furthest save I can't catch up on the rest of the paths, cause my Mia vanished from the world and can't mediate for me with Charlotte.. My Sophia has also just vanished into thin air since day 1.

All that being said, the game is on an easy track to be a banger of a game, easily a 5/5.. If the bugs get worked on and the game keeps getting regular updates. Like I said before. I came along when it updated about a week ago. Now I'm seeing it update again. Maybe it's a sign the wheels are moving? We can hope.

I'll come back and change my review as needed though.

At face value, this is pretty much a 5/5 game. The art is good, the theme is good, the map is readable, quick, and concise.

But then you play the game. It uses AI backgrounds, which are extremely distracting. When the game was done with I figured maybe a year to two years worth of development was put in to it, not FIVE. Worst of all, the bugs. The constant, never ending, confusing bugs. I think it's fair to say that at a certain point in the game, about 40% of the things you can click on just don't work.

Games an absolute mess. I have no idea how to conclude this. Play if you like seeing train wrecks.

This game used to be good, but the developer has been milking it for the last couple of years with bad excuses and increasingly long periods between updates. This last update took almost 2 years for about a minute worth of gameplay while in the meantime ruining the existing game with an unprecedented amount of bugs.

This game is now unplayable and has lost all its original appeal.

It is an alright game for most part, the writing is a bit off, but okay. The animations, models are not great, but they are still decent enough to play.

Now to the part which deducts two points.

1. Writing - I think moving on a girls for MC should be more of a choice and not a given, for example scenes with Mother of girlfriend trigger on their own without any given choice. The game writing would be more compelling if there was a choice, and even if the choice would delay certain scenes, but not cancel them altogether.

There are a lot of scenes where sex is kinda forced on MC, and a lot of scenes where buildup is non-existent.

Currently, MC jumps on every woman that shows up, sister of girlfriend, mother of girlfriend, friend of a girlfriend, maid of a friend of a girlfriend, friend of a friend of a girlfriend, enemy of a friend of a friend of a girlfriend, literally everyone.

2. There are critical bugs in the game.Lots of scenes get blocked because when clicking phone or character model, you get somehow a mother scene replaying as well.

3. There is time restriction for unknown reason that ends the game without finishing all content and there is no gallery to see the unlocked or missed scenes. You might miss something without knowing.

The game overall is a sandbox where you chose which activity/girl to chase, but this kind of breaks spacing altogether.

If you are already doing a harem/sleep with all girls kind of plot, why bother ending game after you reach a certain point with one of those?

I just checked that the game is not an early beta... but 5 years in development, having critical bugs that close up about the half of the routes in one chapter, after 5 years of development is nearly inacceptable, the amount of content is also more comparable to new games with 6-9 months development.

Should be renamed to "My Girlfriend's Friends, Family, & Other Unrelated People".

Game starts off strong - it has six main characters who cover quite a wide base of types. Your girl's the bubbly airhead, there's the girl who's a main protagonist of a romance novel, there's the shy antisocial gamer girl, the princess type girl, the sporty type girl, and the childhood friend. These are all the "main" girls you can get.

Then, it starts going downhill. Your girl's mother and sister come into the equation. Sure, I guess they can be considered her friends, by loose definition of the world. Then the princess girl's maid..? Okay, I guess, since at least she's in the scene? Then the gamer girl's roommate?! Then three completely unrelated women who just hate the heroine-type girl and don't even know our GF at all?! And some other girls who are so irrelevant I don't even remember where the fuck they spawned from or why?!

The game runs on a route system, which means you can't get every girl on your first run; it's got a time based issue where you can only really progress a single girl's relationship all the way through, so you need multiple playthroughs. Then, there's the fact the game is still developing - there's simply not enough content currently existing of the main girls to justify all these other add-ons. Then, there's the fact that they're simply... just not relevant to the fucking game. We went from 6 girls to around 13?, which is over double. This is not a harem system either, so they're exclusive to eachother, or dependant of a single route. It's simply scope screep. Nothing warrants this.

The game itself? Riddled with bugs. Sprites that stay on screen, weird navigation, tons of weird little bugs around where to go and what to do and who to talk to. Not a good time. Artwork? Inconsistent from what we can see in previews, though finished scenes in game do look fairly good - but then again why come back if the style is gonna be different. Actual story? Gone off the rails as mentioned earlier. Each girl has her own contained storyline but because of the time based system and of how early everything is it's hard to even call anything in this game a "story". There's a few highlight moments, but nothing that would justify me telling you to read it. The overarching story, if you can even call it that, is just uninteresting group dynamics. Music? Hah.

Pair that to the fact that the updates never come out, and that the game is 4 years old and we've basically not gotten past the prologue (game has basically 1-2 scenes for each main chick), and I can safely say the game will never be completed. Which means even if I liked it better, I still wouldn't be able to recommend it in good faith; the content is sparse with each girl and the project's probably gonna be abandoned.

Good concept, God awful execution.

Game is pretty good not gonna lie , good animation, good dialogue, ok story , just a excuse to ruck everything that moves , variety of fetishes a bit extreme some times but not that far thanks God ,
now the bad :content is scarce and even has a time limit that makes the already scarce content even more also has a bad habit to introduce shenanigans to stop mc from fucking someone like random friend appears , girlfriend appears that gets boring pretty fast also having to have a thousand saves to keep scenes to rewatch them is annoying for a game this convoluted a gallery would be more than necessary.

[v1.5B]

A game about the MC cheating on his girlfriend.

You could say there are a lot of games that feature the male MC cheating, but how many of them actually focuses on this theme instead of it being just an incidental thing that gets brushed aside or entirely ignored? Not that many.

So yea, there is definitely a niche, and this game does a pretty good job of delivering.

It's a work in progress, so you won't get to the juiciest bits yet. The scenes that are in the current version are pretty hot though.

As for the writing and art, not much to complain about there. It manages to be quite immorally stimulating while still being light hearted. It's a tough balance, imo, but they pull it off.

Man. This game is all about the writing. The characters are very attractive, and simple three shot animations are gratefully available, but the interactions with the characters, the excellent erotic writing, is where this game really shines. Very hard to put down. Having to pick and choose girls on which to concentrate only makes replays desirable. If I had extra money I would give to this developer. Just truly excellent work.

At the time of review, the prologue and chapter 1 seem to be 100% complete and chapter 2 somewhere around 40-60% complete.

Basically, the game is satisfactory and creates potential, which, however, is still completely in the future.

The premise of the game is to either be a loyal boyfriend or lose yourself in the girlfriends. The concept of not building a harem was clearly formulated by the dev from the start.

The girlfriends are subject to clichés, which you either like or don't like. But the clichés are beautifully worked out.

Each girlfriend has two possible routes (except Emily), which are "romantic" or "naughty". Generally a nice concept, but in my opinion the naughty side in particular is way over the top.

Through the girlfriends, "side chicks" from their lives are added.

Pros:
In my opinion, the art style is very well done and speaks for itself. As of now, there are already animations that also shows potential.

Potential but not easy to assess:
Story: As described above, you determine the story yourself. How good it is, however, cannot be estimated at 1.5B. In Chapter 2, however, there are simply still "romantic" or "naughty" routes missing in various LIs. So it's currently a bit choppy to follow.

Coding: All over the place You always have bugs that confuse you (bad) or at least make you laugh (sprite bugs). Ok for the beta imo, but it should never be like that in the finished game...

Cons:
Communication: Communication is a mean disaster. Postings keep happening on the discord (sometimes), but both patreon and the itch.io page are dealing with long periods of silence. This has to be improved, but it is certainly also due to the biggest problem, namely the...

Project management: In my opinion, this is where the greatest problem lies in the project. I feel like there isn't really a "release" concept.

1.5a was released in JULY 2022. It was quite buggy and on August 2nd they promised to fix the game with 1.5B ("On a side note, I'm currently still bug fixing and if I fix a significant enough amount of them that I feel like I should re-release the build again I may do so, I really dropped the ball on the bugs this time around and I apologize for that." Kyle patreon post).

In December (16th) it was then said that 1.5B will no longer appear in 2022, but that attempts will be made at the end of January.

January (31th) "needed a little more time" Turning out little means end of May (28th).

That's a big uff.

I like the inital concept of this game but I have a few irks with it. At base this is a decent game with time management being the main gameplay aspect. Quite a few problems crop up afterwards though.

• The girl development is extremely quick for no good reason. I guess they are horny and starved for attention for them to talk to the guy 3 times to suddenly want to jump his bone.
• art is inconsistent. I know that development is rough with artists being based in awkward positions because of the war but It irks me that there seems to be 3 different art styles that all change portion/visuals for the characters depending on the scene you watch.
• Each Patch is slow and tiny. Looking at his patreon alone, he said that this release was delayed by 4 months because of UI issues. Looking at the UI, there is barely any change and the content of we were given in the last 6-9 months (maybe longer) since the last update was litterally 2 scenes? and bit of changeup with chapter 1.

It just feels like this game has become a cash grab at this point and as someone who use to support it. Not happy with how much its progressed since I last saw it.

This game isn't good. Not if you're looking for proper lewd scenes, that is.
If you're into cheating where any kind of lewd act = cheating then you're probably going to love this, but if you're into cheating that involves actual H scenes, with, you know, the MC going into another girl that isn't your gf then you're going to hate this.

It drags on and on and on and on without any major sex scenes happening between you or the available girls. And keep in mind, I'm someone who loves cheating games. I also don't mind slow burn, as long as it leads to SOMETHING. I just can't stand games teasing you over and over again with the same "uh oh! we got caught! better luck next time in the next update that's coming after 6 months!" cliches. I'm sick and tired of it.

If you want some basic (albeit very well drawn) lewd scenes with other girls, go for it. If you want actual cheating where you bone other girls, skip this, This game has been in development for I don't even know how many years now and the dev refuses to give anything substantial. It's so fucking tiring. I keep following this game with each "major" update and it's disappointment every time.

Later down the line we're definitely going to get substantial content, but considering this game's been up since 2020 and all you do is get BJ's from girls then I really, genuinely cannot be bothered.

One of the best in this genre of sandbox town full of different types of girl.

All of the main friends are differentiated in the writing making each path interesting. Side characters add even more variety.

The gameplay isn't monotonous like a lot of these sandboxes are. Cuts past the minigames and money making stuff in other games and right into the interesting interactions with the women in the game.

That's not even mentioning the art which also provides some good diversity. Only critique I would have is that none of them have pubic hair so far, which is very minor but in my eyes that is the only thing holding back the game's variety. Something like the mom or the arcade girls having full bushes, the class president having a trimmed bush, and the blonde popular girls having a landing strip etc etc.

Overall excellent work, especially only 1 and a half chapters in at the time of this writing. Will be interesting to follow this game as it develops.

This is an unfinished game, but what is there is great, so I think it's 4/5 so far. The finished product could easily be 5/5.

++Great dialogue.
++Great use of tropes.
+Good art
+Many characters

--Buggy and difficult to navigate at the moment.

As of 1.5, im very excited for what's to come. My main concern is how they'll balance the array of characters in the game but, I don't mind if they treat a few like side characters and the some like mobs just for the sake of variety.

Pros....
1 a lot of different girls to choose from
2 very nice art work for sprites and sex scenes
3 the dialoge is very nice and I dont feel the need to ever skip through the dialogue
4 the fetch quest style gameplay never gets in the way of the story or the lewd scenes

Love it. Definitely a major kink of mine so it's great to see someone write it so well. Great characters as well. I look forward to seeing it develop but it felt like a lot of content considering it's just the start of it.

Great game with a lot of content, some minor bugs though. Sometimes characters stay in your screen when they seem to be in a location that they shouldnt. Overall I really like this game and hope to see more