Redemption for Jessika (En, Sp, Fr, It, Ge)

[Marduk99]

I really enjoy this game. I have some trouble with the lewd path though. Some help would be appreciated. Maybe in PM.

If I am nice enough to Sylvia that she brings me to her apartment. I seem to be locked into "well rounded or planar" no matter how lewd I am trying to be after that. I assume there is something I am missing?

This took me a bunch of try's to get. in the initial conversation with Sylvia you have to maximize your negative score without making her leave. Once you get there you stare look at SaraB's boobies make the joke and apologize. You can be an ass right the way through the conversation as long as you don't overstep and apologize when you need to, once they throw the cushions on the floor approach them. they'll ask you to leave. I managed to get a lewd score of 6 from this which was enough when added to later stuff to pass the lewd route. Slightly counter intuitively you don't want to positive points from sneak booty peaks etc

Thank you

[Ministry]

Very good game.
Good story, good pics.
Maybe the best game i played since DwE.

The nice-path was a little bit too easy i think.

[GleebToo]

Really great game, thank you for it I am not sure what to say of it as its "just" as great as any other Tlaero and Phreaky classics, so one of the very best game rivaled only by older Tlaero, Phreaky and Mortze games (Its hard to compare LwK, GtkC, Pandora and RfJ as these games are all simply great with believable story filled with hot and innovative scenes). My wishes are to get another game like Daydreaming with Keeley but if you just continue with games like RfJ I will remain very happy and grateful (donator ;-)

I think that lewd way was kinda too difficult in the beginning (even with the hints) but I am sure that others will disagree with me. After finishing the good path the lewd one seemed to me a little short in comparison when I discovered how to progress through the beginning.

Loved all main characters - Jess and both Sylvia and Sarah with bonus scene fulfilling almost all the unanswered dreams. I can just hope that we will see boy-girl (or threesome) scene with Sarah really enjoying a man in the future I actually do like these three girls more than Elsa ... not sure why ... maybe I consider Elsa too erratic

So when I see all these great games ... Tlaero, will you marry me? :-)))

BTW the art is great, all hail the Mortze, The Very True Successor of Phreaky

[always86]

I think that lewd way was kinda too difficult in the beginning (even with the hints) but I am sure that others will disagree with me. After finishing the good path the lewd one seemed to me a little short in comparison when I discovered how to progress through the beginning.

Loved all main characters - Jess and both Sylvia and Sarah with bonus scene fulfilling almost all the unanswered dreams. I can just hope that we will see boy-girl (or threesome) scene with Sarah really enjoying a man in the future I actually do like these three girls more than Elsa ... not sure why ... maybe I consider Elsa too erratic

So when I see all these great games ... Tlaero, will you marry me? :-)))

Agreed about the lewd path. Very tricky to get in to. For me the reward wasn't quite there as well. I'd have preferred kinkier scene with the main cast rather than other characters i'm personally less interested in.

I'd have to disagree about Sarah though. I liked that she only is just about persuaded into a handy in the bonus scene. To me it would have felt out of character for her to join in.

Once the game is out i'll post a review and wishes for the future. I'll continue to support both the patrons.

[tlaero]

So when I see all these great games ... Tlaero, will you marry me? :-)))

Sorry GleebToo. I'm spoken for. (-;

(No RfJ spoilers. This is about DwE.)

Regarding Elsa seeming erratic in DwE, I believe that's a result of my having her character change based on how you interacted with her. I did that a little in CfK and a lot in DwE. I think I went too far in DwE, and that weakened her characterization. Live and learn. I'm still working out the right balance between "the player impacts the world" and "the NPCs are believable." Having done both, I find that interactive fiction is quite a bit harder to do than plain old everyday fiction...

Tlaero

[GleebToo]

Sorry GleebToo. I'm spoken for. (-;

Tlaero

Bummer :-)

Regarding Sarah - I agree that a boy girl scene would be pushed too far in this game ... but maybe in the future someone fixes broken Sarah ...

Regarding Elsa - yeah maybe it was too much (at least for me) I actually think that Christine, Keeley etc. had some changes in behavior but very subtle and kinda linear but very natural. Or have it like Daydreaming with Keeley where its clear that everything is just a pure fantasy so anything can happen. I did not enjoy CfK as much and I have no idea why, maybe i will replay it sometime to have a recent opinion. Maybe I am just spoiled by the other games :-)

IMHO RfJ comes with elegant solution but always86 disagrees ;-) and as I don't like lewd girls as much as the good ones (both in RfJ and in real world) the lewd scenes were very good anyway

on the other hand making a (personal) lewd girl from a good one is imho very hot and that's my personal dream game - Dayreaming with Keeley style (just enough story to start the situation but not too much to risk unnatural character) where you change a good decent girl into horny girl enjoying everything too much to resist ... in one neverending night ... but keep the love between the two main characters :-)

But no game can be perfect to all. I think that its best to experiment a little in every game and thats exactly what you do :-) and you do it very well and I am grateful for that :-)

[Mortze]

tlaero wrote:

Sorry GleebToo. I'm spoken for. (-;

Tlaero


Bummer :-)

Yeah. I'm runing counseling meetings because of that...

I don't think Elsa changed considerably through the game. I think she is like most of women. Shy, cautious at first, but when trusting the men she is seeing she revelas a healthy sexual apetite. Women do like to have sex. Or so I've been told.

[Arden]

I loved DwE, didnt see what some have said. Not ghot to play the new game yet but sure it will be great

[ares]

A very good game up to the standards of the authors.

There was a little chat about this before but in my case, I particularly enjoy the permanence of the world and that there seem to be things happening behind the scenes. The player is left I believe wanting to understand those.

Regarding Sarah, I don't know why being with a man would "fix her" in any way. She is a lesbian with no sexual interest in men, period. There may be other things broken about her but there really is nothing to be fixed in that respect. And the game makes that point abundantly clear.

The graphics were very good as we can expect from Mortze. And the main story I felt was quite original. Many of these good things have already been said so let me say some things I didn't like all that much [MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, REALLY DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED]:

As it tends to happen with many of tlaero games, the male character feels sort of weak compared with the female character. As a male player, I am not sure why the hot lead singer in a famous rock band is interested in the PC. Because he is "a good guy"? Maybe I'm mistaken but good guys don't seem to me all that rare as to make that quality the main reason a woman would fall for you. Or is it because he is "immune"? Is a passive skill that the guy has, supposedly due to being lucky at birth, the reason why this woman is attracted to him? It is established in the game that he is good looking so he has that at least. But next to a woman who is extremely good looking, the lead singer in a rock band and can control a crowd with her voice, the PC just feels underpowered.

To add another layer to this, the PC doesn't fail in assuming often self-deprecating tone. It's the trying-to-keep-up attitude that is familiar from GtkC. In several occasions the PC's dialogue goes back and forth between 'You are so awesome' and variations of 'I am so lucky to be dating you, you are way above my league'. And who goes to absolutely all concerts of a band no matter how hot the lead singer is? Maybe it is just me, but I can hardly identify with such a line of thought. Of course, she is a rock star. If life and personal relationships were all about who is hotter or who plays the piano better she definitely would be above your league. But fortunately, that is not the case, or else rock stars would only date rock stars. And at least I enjoy playing a character that believes that he is bringing something to the table. All in all, as it has happened to me with other tlaero games, I just didn't identify with the PC. In many situations, there is no option for he to say what I would have done or said if I had the goal of dating this woman.

The resolution of the game is a bit ex machina although to tell the truth, I did enjoy the redemption aspect. But the danger of Jessica's exboyfriend felt a bit out of nowhere. So this guy treated Jessica bad and appears smiling in a picture in the riot concert and all of sudden is a terrorist? Ok, that's looked like a bit of a stretch to me. I did follow the lewd path and well, it seems that the authors have an idea of what is going on that may be continued in subsequent games. If that's the case, excellent, although it may have been beneficial for this game to give some more clues that there is something bigger going on than just redeeming a singer who misused her crowd control superpower.

[tlaero]

Thank you for the feedback, ares. There's a lot of good stuff in there, and we'll talk at length about it in a few days. One tiny thing now though:

Did you play through the scene after the credits? It specifically addresses your questions about the villain.

Tlaero

[GleebToo]

I consider DwE a very good game I was just trying to explain why I like GtkC, DwK, LwK, Pandora and RfJ even more.

I agree that PC seems to be "weak" in comparison with Jess or Christine but I think its completely natural that Jessika chooses nice guy after a bad breakup. So PC is the right guy at the right place at the right time and exactly what Jess needs. This happens in real life as well.

Regarding Sarah I think I have seen somewhere a dialogue option about she beeing hurt by a guy in the past so I don't mean the fixing as making straight girl from a lesbian, but simply to let bisexual girl enjoy the men again. Maybe I got it wrong.

[boyo111]

So when I see all these great games ... Tlaero, will you marry me? :-)))

Regarding Elsa seeming erratic in DwE, I believe that's a result of my having her character change based on how you interacted with her. I did that a little in CfK and a lot in DwE. I think I went too far in DwE, and that weakened her characterization. Live and learn. I'm still working out the right balance between "the player impacts the world" and "the NPCs are believable." Having done both, I find that interactive fiction is quite a bit harder to do than plain old everyday fiction...

As someone who writes a lot of fiction, writing is about characterization in cases like this. What helps is having your character be flexible enough that when another character interacts they "push the right buttons" and you can influence the behavior. Otherwise there is no influence, either those behaviors are there and there is curiosity, or there is no way to make a character do something they don't want to do. It's somewhat trickier in a game to have that, but you are also more able to create certain paths so the end result will be Y, otherwise actions will always be X. Making a good solid character is hard, and making different ones that have to stand out in a game is harder, especially so you don't fall into caricature. You have some solid writing there that make the characters come alive for me, I enjoyed watching them change, especially in DwE. A lot of times it is live and learn to see what works, that's what feedback is for.

[Dasati]

A very good game up to the standards of the authors.

There was a little chat about this before but in my case, I particularly enjoy the permanence of the world and that there seem to be things happening behind the scenes. The player is left I believe wanting to understand those.

Regarding Sarah, I don't know why being with a man would "fix her" in any way. She is a lesbian with no sexual interest in men, period. There may be other things broken about her but there really is nothing to be fixed in that respect. And the game makes that point abundantly clear.

The graphics were very good as we can expect from Mortze. And the main story I felt was quite original. Many of these good things have already been said so let me say some things I didn't like all that much [MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, REALLY DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED]:

As it tends to happen with many of tlaero games, the male character feels sort of weak compared with the female character. As a male player, I am not sure why the hot lead singer in a famous rock band is interested in the PC. Because he is "a good guy"? Maybe I'm mistaken but good guys don't seem to me all that rare as to make that quality the main reason a woman would fall for you. Or is it because he is "immune"? Is a passive skill that the guy has, supposedly due to being lucky at birth, the reason why this woman is attracted to him? It is established in the game that he is good looking so he has that at least. But next to a woman who is extremely good looking, the lead singer in a rock band and can control a crowd with her voice, the PC just feels underpowered.

To add another layer to this, the PC doesn't fail in assuming often self-deprecating tone. It's the trying-to-keep-up attitude that is familiar from GtkC. In several occasions the PC's dialogue goes back and forth between 'You are so awesome' and variations of 'I am so lucky to be dating you, you are way above my league'. And who goes to absolutely all concerts of a band no matter how hot the lead singer is? Maybe it is just me, but I can hardly identify with such a line of thought. Of course, she is a rock star. If life and personal relationships were all about who is hotter or who plays the piano better she definitely would be above your league. But fortunately, that is not the case, or else rock stars would only date rock stars. And at least I enjoy playing a character that believes that he is bringing something to the table. All in all, as it has happened to me with other tlaero games, I just didn't identify with the PC. In many situations, there is no option for he to say what I would have done or said if I had the goal of dating this woman.

The resolution of the game is a bit ex machina although to tell the truth, I did enjoy the redemption aspect. But the danger of Jessica's exboyfriend felt a bit out of nowhere. So this guy treated Jessica bad and appears smiling in a picture in the riot concert and all of sudden is a terrorist? Ok, that's looked like a bit of a stretch to me. I did follow the lewd path and well, it seems that the authors have an idea of what is going on that may be continued in subsequent games. If that's the case, excellent, although it may have been beneficial for this game to give some more clues that there is something bigger going on than just redeeming a singer who misused her crowd control superpower.

Personally I didn't find the male character weak, if he was just a nice guy when he first meets Jessica in the bar she try's to push him away. It's the fact that he's (I'm assuming) one of the few people she's met in a long time whose immune to her power. As she says in the scene the next morning her power means she could never be sure if someone genuinely had feelings for her, or was just spellbound by her power. The fact the player is a nice guy is a happy bonus but what first draws her interest is his immunity, she'll know that his feelings whatever they turn out to be are genuine.

[tlaero]

You have some solid writing there that make the characters come alive for me, I enjoyed watching them change, especially in DwE. A lot of times it is live and learn to see what works, that's what feedback is for.

Thank you, boyo (and the others who like the characterization in DwE).

I should clarify what I meant about DwE. The problem, in my mind, isn't that the character changes. Elsa changing from a shy recluse into someone who will leave the lights on, strip off her clothes in front of her boyfriend, and have multiorgasmic sex in multiple rooms, is one of the main points of that story. And I'm comfortable with how that played out. What I didn't like, was the multiple routes to that change. Is she the kind of woman who feels sexy when you stare at her rear, or is she the kind who feels objectified when you do it? Because I had the two paths, set largely before she was even introduced, she's both. And, in retrospect, I feel that duality weakened her. The problem isn't so much what she became. It's how she started. She starts in two places depending on what the character does, and that's weird.

Now, it was precisely what I was trying to do. I was trying to make a game that you could play the way you wanted to. Tired of always needing to be respectful in my games? Here's one for you. Etc. But in the end, I felt it weakened the game more than it strengthened it. But, what do I know? Just before we released it, I was feeling kind of down about this. I told Mortze I was worried that his big debut wasn't going to go well and that it'll be my fault. He confidently said no way, it was going to be great. And the public appears to have agreed with him more than me. DwE is still the top game on PlayForceOne (though very close to falling to #2).

Of course, determining the reasons for success in this genre is ... complex. Yeah, Christine's characterization is more consistent, but I suspect that it's a subset of the multiple million people who have played my games (wow) who would put "characterization" above "eroticism" in their priorities. Still, I'll keep trying to get better at this.

Case in point, I'm very happy with my characterization of Jessika. I hope the rest of the world is too. (-:

Tlaero

[moskys]

Problem with Elsa is that, in fact, it seems like there are 2 Elsas: when you think about her after completing DwE, you don't really know if she is a shy, romantic girl who felt in love with her own Charming Prince, or just a kind of repressed sexual beast who was just waiting in her bookstore for a straight-forward man. Although both endings are pretty similar, there are still slightly differences and paths are so different (almost opposite, if we talk about personality and male-female roles) that players may feel a bit confused. But I don't think it weakened the game. As you have said above, you just gave us the chance to play different roles, like 2 different games in one. IMO, the weakest point is that chat options are pretty obvious once you understand that there are 2 different paths to follow, and it's quite easy to advance; DwE lacks of complex choices between, let's say, a comment and a pair of actions that could produce different reactions from Elsa (like "is she now ready for a soft caress or do I need to compliment her a bit more?" -that kind of dificult decisions).

So there's no problem on having 2 different Elsas in one game. But that's a pretty nice problem if you are trying to build a universe, because at certain time you must choose what Elsa we are going to see from now on. I mean, Elsa is now a sexually active woman, no matter how you've completed DwE, but I don't think she would change her favourite book (and, if I'm not wrong, books tell different stories depending on the path). And I suppose that both Elsas have their own fanbase, so there always be someone disappointed, someone who will think that her beloved Elsa has changed, or that she is not a solid character. That never happened in your previous games, where girls have always an only and well-defined personality and player had to find the right way to treat them. IE, Keeley only changed a bit when she thought her marriage was in trouble, becoming more proactive, and Christine was always the same brave, self-assured woman even when she was just a "supporting actress".

But, funnny thing is that almost nobody realize that the one who's really changing depending on the path is Jason. He actually defines the paths, for goodness sake! What about him? Yeah, he doesn't seem as important as Elsa, but he's the key.