Ren'Py - Completed - Midnight Paradise [v1.0f Extra] [Lewdlab]

Beautiful renders and scratches perfectly my niche fetish of sleep-creep-feet. Dreams of Desire was the first 'adult' game I played and I've been spoiled since. The girls are gorgeous and rendered well, the story is pretty decent so top marks from me.

Alright, this game has improved a lot, since the Unity start, but it's still far off from the good old DoD.
For a sandbox game it's alright, but I wonder how I would feel, if I didn't have a walkthrough to spare me endless, needless grinding.

This simply is another case where so far at least, the same story could have been told with far less effort as a straight VN, but no, devs have to force sandbox on everybody.

I mean, yeah I get it. The updates to those games are usually way smaller so someone like Lewdlab who is really raking in the cash is basically getting a lot of money for very little work.
I mean, he has a fucking team working for him and he offers what 5-6 scenes per update which amount to maybe 10 minutes of playtime, if the grind is removed?

That being said, as usual I love the ladies here. They are all great, with the teacher and the "landlady" leading the pack by far for me at least.

+ Very good quality renders and animations
+ Beautiful characters
+ Hot situations and dialogues

- Prefer when you can't see MCs face

I don't care much about the story in any game of this character.

I tried to play the whole thing before reviewing but the game doesn't let me progress anymore. I probably did stuff out of the intended order and it broke some triggers or something. It says go see mom in the kitchen in the afternoon but Ruby is there instead. I checked literally every location at every time of day and nothing is progressing.

Art - This game has great renders and models. I would have given it 2 stars just for that but the bug mentioned above put it back down. Really though, good renders are dime a dozen these days. What sets the art direction apart is the camera angles/lightning and how to scenes are portrayed. Some games does this so well that scenes come to life and resemble something like a movie scene. Here, its just decidedly average. Renders are just utilitarian.

Story - I suppose I couldn't play through the whole thing so it wouldn't be fair to go too in depth on this. I will tell you for sure that there wasn't any kind of hook to catch your interest in the beginning stages of the game.

Character - The characters are fucking retarded. Seriously. Your MC supposedly partied and banged a lot of chicks in college, but acts like 13 yo going through puberty. There is also not one single set up or plausible explanation for why the first thing he does is to perv on his family, even going as far as to molest every family member in their sleep on his first night back. "Just good old perv Connor," he tells himself. No you fuckwad. Thats not just being a perv. Thats sexual abuse against family members. I actually prefer evil MCs, but I want them to be competent and for the game to have some self awareness. The mother sees him checking her out on their first meeting and has the typical "is he checking me out? That's wrong, but flattering..." reaction. You won't see any depth for any characters here. I could go on and on but I'll just leave it at that. Again, I don't mind porn tropes here and there, but things should at least some sense in the universe that's being set up.

Dialogue/internal monologues - Juvenile. Thats the best word to describe the writing here. Childish. Dumb. It's so apparant that this dev cannot write good stories/characters. The teasing and stairway to heaven bullshit seen here is basically a 14 yo virgin's view of seduction/sexy situations. Its extremely cringe worthy. Every interaction with the teacher just boggles my mind that this kind of garbage can be written with a serious face.

Gameplay - This is probably the biggest shit factor of this game. I can see how some people might slog through the shitty dialogue and characters if the gameplay wasn't so mind numbingly annoying. I checked the objectives list at the start and saw "Joyce massage 0/4, Joyce Yoga 0/4, Ruby Massage 0/4, Isabelle Massage 0/4." You can probably guess my reaction to that. I have to grind these stupid massages, most likely repeating the same shit over and over. Actually, the fact that there is a massage grind AT ALL is just so fucking juvenile. I don't enjoy free roam games in general because they rarely do it well. Free roam games need to be framed in a specific way. They can be a life sim type game like High-Rise climb. It can be an "open-world" gotta catchem all type of game like A spell for all, Corruption, and many others. It can be a management game like Hentai High School. What it absolutely should not be used for is to mask the inability to craft a good story with proper pacing and transitions in an otherwise linear VN. I was already bored out of my mind by the 3rd day of doing the same shit after the initial introductions are made. We are not in a life sim. We are not exploring the town to find new girls and events. All we are doing is interacting with the same 3 girls in various locations around the house (but mostly repeating the same events and dialogues). Its just stupid.

In conclusion, this game sucks ass. The dev is riding on the success of his previous game which was pretty good for the time it was made. Instead of evolving with the times, the dev actually devolved and put out something that is even worse than the last game. For the next project, I would hope he brings in a writer at the very least.

I do not like the gameplay, I do not like the frame of the game, it gives an incoherent side. There is not enough interaction, it's pretty boring.
However, I was blown away by the work of the design, the graphics work and the animations of the characters. This meticulous work has made the difference and I believe that the author will offer us a game more fluent manoup in future versions.

the story is interesting & i actually quite like the MC. hes an unrepentant douchebag, which is much more interesting than your average bland self insert some developers tend to create. the character models for the girls are great as well. unfortunately there arent many sex scenes as the game is still somewhat early in development. ill probably wait a couple more updates before playing again.

Great art syle, sexy scenes with a slow build.
This is a pretty good one as far as adults games go.
There is also a decent story bvuilding in the background,d even though, to be fair, I'm more interested in doing the mom and sisters.

v0.5.0 played
I really held off on reviewing this after the initial release trouble. Thought that after a really solid and well completed project (Dreams of Desire) we should give some slack to the talented dev. Unfortunately, shit is just not coming together...

I'll just jump right in: Everything but the renders on your screen is worse then his previous project: Dreams of Desire, go play that instead of this one. It is better as a whole and still looks fantastic.
The story in MP is a poorly constructed one and is not hanging together, it is a disjointed affair and the only thing binding it all together is the MC, who is a pervert douche bag to begin with and thus an unlikable protagonist which does not help the game. On the one hand the MC has a criminal situation to deal with as the main story and in his free time he is busy competing with, molesting and seducing his family members. Maybe the story will come together in later releases but I will probably have lost interest by then, not because of the story though, there is some potential there to make it all work out in the end.

No the thing that annoys me to no end is the poorly constructed 'free roam'. It is a mess and it turns the 'game' into the stupid and annoying way of:
Be on location X at time Y or spend another day/week/cycle clicking around for nothing until you do to further the game.
It is bland, it is boring, it is uninteresting. It is all the things a titillating porn game should not be...
Other characters simply disappear or are 'better not disturb them', in this 'free roam' if they are not needed, as if they only exist to wall off content/progress, it makes the whole thing blatantly obvious and takes away any thrill the player might feel over characters or story.
Why not give them a big yellow exclamation marker above their heads instead of that silly pink dot? It is more obvious that way. /s

No, the only thrill you can get from this is if you are into sneaky-sleep-molesting-incest (and feet) stuff, which I am not against, but the sleep molesting is just rapey enough to not be my thing.
The animations are hot though, and that is what saves it from being a complete turn off for me.
The family characters are written very 2 Dimensional, with really nice looking 3 Dimensional tits (and feet) If you just want to look at fancy 3D models, this provides, but expect a lot of useless clicking around for stumbling upon 'progress' or just keep reading the 'objective' 'IKEA-styled-directions-manual. And for a v0.5 there isn't a lot of sexy content, just repeatable, at night molestation.
If the visuals weren't as impressive as they are, this would have been a one-star rated, hard pass for me.

V0.5.
Nice game.
I really like the art, the milf and older sister are top notch.
Story and gameplay are fine, no humongous grind ( almost no grind at all in fact ).
So far I didn't encountered any game breaking bug and the chance to be stuck in the progression of the story is slim.

So I wanna start of with the fact that I love the developers previous work and gave it a high rating yet I after playing version 4 as of this review I cannot say the same of this game.

Lets start of with the renders. The renders once again speak for themselves Lewdlab really doesn't disappoint he added a new variety of both background and characters with different looks that you don't see in other games.

Music is done also pretty well and again you feeling of immersion with regards to the situation or the location.

However now we come to the point where i have start to talk about the negatives of this game. A new feature compared to his previous work is the ability fully roam the game. Yet there is still a main storyline that seems to connect everything meaning that unlike some other games you are still forced to follow all the paths meaning you cannot avoid getting intimate with certain characters even if you are not into them.

Storywise and Character wise a lot of things just don't make sense our Protagonist starts the game by There also the instant attraction to the mom/landlady character and the other family members while no real context is provided why he feels this way except for the fact that hes horny. The developer also tries to make the story more interesting by letting the protagonist fall into some kind of scheme yet the storyline feels very out of place.

In conclusion although the renders and background are great and once again the sound that has been added is decent. But the roaming gameplay seems to be out of place and the story and character feel poorly written compared to the developers previous work and as such I will give it a 2.5/5.

I always loved lewdlab's games and this one is much better than others because animations and character details are awesome.I mean it's like i'm watching a movie under my control.Also the updates coming quickly so he is doing great.

story wise there is nothing to like in this game ,lacks content and it's just cliché like every other porn VN on f95 or maybe a bit worse, lol
but i loved the renders they are just top quality , videos are smooth , greatly drawn, models are really great and beautiful.
2/5 story
5/5 : renders and quality of images/videos
4/5: models

hope to see it improved in future updates.
v4.2

If you were to read a description, or see some pictures you would say its a porn harem game... but then you play it and then you realize it doesn't know what it wants to be.

GAMEPLAY-2/5
It kind of feels like a VN that decided during process to become a "world map" porn game. You have to do certain things in a certain order to activate scenes. If you didn't progress OLD BUSINESS DUDE story line - you can't progress the mother storyline [?], etc.
You need to massage each girl to the point where they start to the point where story will progress and then figure out then do the prerequisites which you may not know.

STORY-2/5
It keeps setting the stage for HOT whether its from family or storyline then kicks you in the balls. There is a story about a "super sex" porn drug and you wind up going to a club undercover. Sexy mob boss - check. Sexy dancers - check. Sexy sister - check.
The only porn scene was getting a handy from a girl talking about you being the chosen one. WTF?

PORN-4/5
Probably being too generous but its got some hot body types that are generaly not used which is nice [muscular/toned]. Its a bit heavy of teasing and not enough length/penetration. If you played Milfy City and did the sleeping options on the girls - thats pretty much what to expect of actual porn.

Should of probably gave 2/5 but its got good models, renders, lighting, etc. Gameplay/Story - not so much.

The best thing about this game is how it looks. The models are spot on and look very good. Also good animations.

The main problem with the game for me is the story, it has yet to capture me and is rather dull to be honest.

Another thing that bothers me is that its very hard to play without walkthrough. The ingame hint system leaves much to desire.

I don't know how it was done but this sad excuse for a "game" managed to take every trope I hate and make me hate them more.

It's got all the greatest hits of shit content including sleep rape, shower spying and my all time personal pet peeve, staring at a pair of tits with creepy internal monologue all the while unable to hear the conversation going on.

All that is topped off by a creepy as fuck steaming sphincter of an MC that makes the most immature prick in other games look good. I was shocked to find out he was in college, all he does is whine about shit and act like a 14 year old that's just seen his first pair of breasts. There isn't 1 single redeeming feature nor anything remotely likeable about him.

Within seconds of seeing his family he's perving on them in the creepiest way possible.

Better yet, even the writing can't make it's mind up what it's doing or what is going on. One minute the Mc is in the car thinking about how his little sister might hate him because he was a dick to her when they were younger then just as he's about to go in her room he's thinking about they were such good friends when they were younger, pick one.

The story is paper thin and not great, characters are flimsy but the animations aren't dog shit like the devs previous game. That's about as glowing as the praise is going to get.

The hilarious part of the game was when he's talking to a guy and internally calling him a douche .... the douchiest douche of the game, written with absolutely no self awareness.

TL;DR it's a shit story about a really tall child that sexually assaults it's family while they sleep.

The best renders I've seen on this website. The game does sadly have bugs with certain events not loading and a lack of direction but it shows great potential regardless. The switch to ren'py was also very appreciated.

Good Points
+ Renders and animations are pretty good.
+ Sex scenes have decent animations.

Negative Points
- Yes we do some colored choices but this choices dont effect anyting ingame scenes or dialogues. And this feel little bit disappointment. I think dev wanted to do someting about this colored choices but not things didn't go like planned. Probably we can see in future updates or maybe never...
- Updates takes to much time while we got soo little content with every update, game developing since 2019 and we dont have enough content for that much development time! And most amazingly with every update he adds less content! Thats just wow!
- Well we got update (0.15) yeeyy... But game direction totaly changed... With this update we get scene Isabella drugged by her ex, kidnapped, stripped naked and put in bondage device... If you make wrong choices while trying to save her he can facefuck her and yes with right choices you can avoid facefuck part but... You cant avoid other parts... So doesn't matter whatever hell you done: she still gonna drugged, kidnapped, stripped naked and put in that bondage device... Thats just great choice of writing... So making that scene fully avoidable was so hard? I gues it was... And thats not worse part is its literaly feels like: ''Isa gets raped (or rape try) by her ex boyfriend and MC trys to comfort her by having sex with her.'' and you can even use that traumatic situtation aganist her with doing same thing her ex done to her... Until this part MC tried literaly everyting, flirted with her, show her a lot of love, tried a lot of thing etc... But her sex scene happened only because of her ex boyfriend (trying) to rape her... Great choice...
- Eliana doesn't look good at all, main problem is her face, and her facial expressions are not looks attractive either, her body don't look that good either, but face part is the main problem here. She needed a rework since the beginning of the game, years passed, yet DEV done nothing about it.
- The game is ''completed'' but it's fully rushed, what a nonsense...

Last Words
This game had great potential, but it's big mess, and I'm not even sure it's worth playing, this is good as letting out some steam at best, and quite poor game aside from visual parts...

An absolutely mediocre game with a mediocre setting. The only positive thing that could be said about it is the quality of the renders, that and the MC is not using the same Middle School child model that is often used 90% of the games in this site. The game forces you to go scene hunting to unlock scenes, but by the time I unlock any serious scene I am already bored out of my mind and would rather move on and do something productive. Story is extremely nonsensical and hurts the brain just thinking about it. LewdLab was never really good with stories (his previous game was laughably bad but at least it was entertaining enough for a porn game) but this game takes bad storytelling to a whole new level.

Honestly I don't know what the fuss is all about. I enjoyed everything about this game. Yes the story isn't WOW but at least there's a story! And I'm pretty sure Lewdlab is going somewhere with the story, we can already tell from the recent update 0.4.1 that this game going to be special. People really need to stop comparing it to other big VN titles because clearly every dev has his own style and approach.

I mean look at the quality of designing and detailing.. They're amazing!! And if people can't simply appreciate that. then they sure as hell won't appreciate anything else at all.

I know the game had a rough few months to start with, bugs and all. But after the shift to Ren'Py, it instantly got back on its feet. Speaking of feet, Lewdlab designs the best feet and legs PERIOD (And maybe even characters)!!! If you have a foot fetish you sure will appreciate this game a lot more.

I think we have to be patient because technically ver: 0.4.1 is the first official update after switching engines, and Lewdlab has already added and implemented what was needed for the game to take off.

Great job Lewdlab and I'm sure I won't be disappointed with your work. Keep doing you.


Looking forward to future updates!

All Hail Lewdlab

Right now the only good thing about this game is the renders and the animation, If I wanted to watch some sex animations I would watch 3D porn instead, everything else is terrible , story , characters (you play as a douche btw), and gameplay which is leaner as fu*k.

I recommend they drop this game and start again, or/and maybe hire a writer (because they fu*king need one)

this game is beyond saving>