Lemma Soft Forums

Hi,
I've been trying to find good ren'py games but it's hard as I haven't been able to find any actual recommendations and there's like 200+ games on the official list. Are there any actually memorable titles, any that stand out, any that are really good? I don't mind if they're short as long as they're well done.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

The people always say that Katawa Shoujo is. But I haven't read it myself. You would have to say what kind of game you like, because the best one can be different for other people because they have different likings. If you like mystery and twisted stories, you can wait for my VN

My favorite is Winter Shard. It's so epic.
Other really, really cool games that come to mind are Metropolitan Blues (awesome writing), Digital- A Love Story (very original) and Fantasia: Realm of Thanos (FUN, romantic, and has very very different branches of story.)

Katawa Shoujo is super impressive too, but it has already been mentioned.

There are lots of very interesting games in the archives. ^___^

Katawa Shoujo is not even done.

Lunethex wrote:Katawa Shoujo is not even done.

But the first act is out, it's pretty long, and I consider it very well written. Your mileage may vary. Suggest another game, perhaps?

I have not read many of the Ren'Py visual novels, but of the ones I did, I believe these to be decent: Memo (probably the best art I've seen in an OELVN thus far) and Trepanation (interesting ideas, competent writing). Cassiopeia was pretty entertaining even though the art was somewhat uneven, the story had some extremely obvious influences, the writing was a goofy knock-off of Nasu, and the piece wasn't complete.

Perhaps it would be beneficial if you listed the sort of stories or genres you prefer?

Thanks for the replies so far, I really liked Digital.

I'm not looking for any specific genre, more really well-done, polished and good-looking visual novels. Not that I'm looking for retro games specifically but I played the recent Air Pressure and it got me hooked so I want to play more games of a comparable high quality.

2008 had a special set of awards for the most notable games: The Lemmys. See http://lemmasoft.net/lemmys/results2008_0.html for the winners. Sadly the awards were discontinued for future years due to being too controversial.

There was a discussion about notable games on this thread, but that got somewhat controversial too...

Do you think it would be less controversial to have a public rating system like the IF community has at the IFDB (which looks terrifically difficult to implement)?

lunasspecto wrote:Do you think it would be less controversial to have a public rating system like the IF community has at the IFDB (which looks terrifically difficult to implement)?

I think that's probably the best of all possible approaches.

If the IFDB people can't be persuaded to share their server code, I would suggest either adding a simple voting system to renai.us / games.renpy.org, or creating a renpy subreddit where people can submit links to games.

We've already discussed the entire rating system and it's never been implemented.

However, we do have the featured games list on the right column of renpy.org.

I've also written some reviews of free visual novels.
http://samukun.wordpress.com/category/reviews/

So has this person.
http://vnr4.wordpress.com/

Samu-kun wrote:However, we do have the featured games list on the right column of renpy.org.

I wouldn't put much stock in this. It hasn't been updated in a while, and so ignores a lot of newer games.

I think it ought to be mentioned that the full version of Katawa Shoujo is going to contain adult content, so if you're not into that stuff, you should probably choose another VN (though Act 1 is clean and very well written). And Memo is definitely one of the better-illustrated ones. Sorry, I guess I'm just reapeating what everyone else has said .

Though a bit old... you might want to try umm... this VN... that is, if you don't mind the minor offensive words...
http://www.renai.us/game/tfq.shtml

"POOF" (Hides)