Lord of the Manor

NOTE: this review is done for version 0.5.2, which was released on 04/02/2023. It is an absolute travesty that the only review for this game as of this one's posting is "there's no artwork, so it's garbage", especially for such a text-heavy genre as visual novels. Despite what the thread's tags may imply, there is plenty of explicit content available to get off to, although you'll be reading it instead of being able to ogle over a CG (for now -- sprites and artwork is on the way, albeit way down the road). The game has you playing as Flax, a nerdy, awkward horse dude who may or may not be an ugazi, which is some flavor of sex fiend. As that unholy word may imply, there's a lot of worldbuilding going on -- this is a game that really leans into its South African setting, with plenty of folk lore, scary Afrikaans and Dutch words and names, and a cast filled with local wildlife instead as well as an assortment of more standard furry creatures. For the end of the present college semester, Flax's cartoonishly oversexualized kilpspringer roommate Rav scores him a vacation at Paardenrust, a traditional resort valley town that is described as a "perfect gay getaway". You explore the town, meet a sizeable cast of decidedly male characters, and have a few lays in the process. It's a character-heavy experience, all things considered; the core conflict is ultimately Flax against himself, working out of his geeky shell and exploring the depths of sexual experiences, with Paardenrust and its denizens serving as vehicles for this personal development. This game is extremely gay. So gay, in fact, that the first couple decisions leads you to either getting a handjob from some weird hipster guy in a guys-only orgy/party or railing yourself with a horse dildo out of sexual frustration in the comfort of your dorm. If you're looking for traditional pussy, you're at the wrong place, but if you're looking for boypussy and cock, you're very much at the right place. In general, the writing is good. The characters are all well-crafted, the prose is good, there are minimal typos and script-side mistakes, there's a lot of intriguing behind-the-scenes structural stuff going on with how routes are being developed (which can be read up on the game's itch.io), and there's plenty of sexually-charged scenes, both more awkward and unabashedly horny. HOWEVER, by the end of the current build, things take a very significant turn. The game basically takes a completely different course, jumping from "fun but vapid sex adventures while on holiday" to "serious murder mystery supernatural drama with you (possibly) trying to kindle a romance in the process" in the span of one very overly long intermission bit. This is, as you can imagine, a pretty drastic changeup, one that caught me off-guard and frankly I'm not sure if I'm really for it, considering what I mentally signed up for. Ultimately, I'm rating this 4/5. This is definitely a project to follow, and while there's a great bedrock here and the present content is already of a high level of quality, it's still missing a few bits. Most critically, there's a resounding lack of visual or audio elements to go with this visual novel; right now, it's pretty much a piece of erotic novella built into Ren'Py instead of being stacks of paper bound in leather. As the game stands at present, the mind's eye is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, which the unimaginative or those with aphantasia may struggle with. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the story change may end up leaving you sour if you were expecting something that was ultimately more light reading as the first ~80% of this game is.

Played it ages ago when it first came out thought that the almost complete lack of anything sexual was due to the newness. Well it's been like a year now and there is nothing new so I'm going to rate it as it is. Absolutely nothing happens in this game and it's not worth your bandwidth. Maybe when it's updated some day I'll change my rating.