VN - Others - Completed - Shale Hill Secrets [v0.18.9b] [Love-Joint]

There is a good story here, but it's buried under hours of inconsequential nonsense. The game has severe pacing issues caused by the inclusion of too many heroines. After chapter 4, the devs seemed to realize this and most of the side characters disappear while the story focuses on the main three, but after a few hours they all suddenly show up again. I guess they realized that the game was marketed as having 10 love interests or whatever, so they're all written back into the story and the second half of this game turns into a huge slog.

Viewed individually, all of the characters are fine, but they aren't viewed individually. They're tacked on to a story where the MC will ignore them in favor of the three girls who are actually relevant. This causes a conflict with the MC's characterization because he wouldn't be sleeping around with randos while he already has multiple intense long-term relationships that can develop romantically.

You might think, the more the merrier, but not in this story. Like the name implies, Shale Hill Secrets is all about secrets. All the characters have secrets, and they all play out the same way. 90% of the dialogue in this game is someone saying "i wish i could tell you, but I can't" which, again, is fine in small amounts, but when its every single one of these characters, it gets so repetitive.

I had pretty much checked out entirely around the time everyone started dressing up as superheroes for whatever reason, but I pushed through to the end because the core mystery was actually very intriguing. However, I regret doing so because the climax was a huge let-down. The tone is all over the place and some of my favorite characters were completely ruined.

I'm giving this three stars because it's a finished project, it looks good, and it had some good ideas, but I absolutely do not recommend it unless you want to waste your time for the narrative equivalent of a ruined orgasm.

SHS is not perfect by any means but it's entertained me, kept me on my seat, and hooked me back with Love-Joint ever since I played DFD and DH. It deserves the 5 despite the imperfections.

I'll keep it brief, music is amazing. Most of them fit thematically to the characters they were assigned to. Visuals are gorgeous, one thing that LJ had kept in it's quality is the renders and visuals which comes to no surprise as Mr. Vargas is part of their team. The lighting, and backgrounds felt real instead of stale and static. Don't see the issue with the game using it's own engine. Honestly, if you play on Ren'py then you honestly won't find much of a difference at all.

Now for the story. Oh boy, if you're into some happy fuck fest of an AVN then Shale Hill is not for you. This game is a slow burner when it comes to writing and story but that is NOT bad at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The dialogue is witty and felt human. The relationships you build with characters felt genuine which made reaching that anticipated sex-scene feel worth it with the LIs. Love-Joint games always had this formula of ordinary settings with extraordinary situations and SHS is no exception. The MC isn't some sort of strong, altruistic genius. Sometimes he felt annoying, he made rash choices and stupid decisions that even I would get annoyed with but you know what? That's okay, he is still a young college student after all. Imagine if you were in his shoes then you probably wouldn't be making all the right decision either.

CONS

The sex scenes themselves needs some improvement. A lot of the time it felt stiff. Unnatural. Certainly one of the game's weaker points.

Despite me being a narratively focused guy I do fine that some of the story beats tend to feel like filler. It could be just that I didn't care for the character involved at all.
Some of the endings felt incomplete as well. Some you'd need the Epilogue to feel like it's over and some even with the Epilogue felt like it lacked proper closure.

I’m not sure if using a mute MC added anything to the story in the end, but what I’m sure about is that it totally detached me from him, I was not the MC, I was just making his choices. Too bad because the story is great, full of suspense, plots, drama and it offers choices that really matter, which is truly enjoyable, but it’s missing immersion, which is usually the major point when it comes to Visual Novels.

MC: a good one, brave, though sometimes a little bit spineless and blinded when it comes to his relationships with the girls. Again, his mutism adds very little to the story but is a big factor when it comes to empathy, we don’t associate with him so we have no real feelings for him.

The girls: all of them are really cute, and you even get to bang a super-hot MILF, which was a plus for me (I was even expecting to bang the new professor, but it didn’t happen). You have 7 Love Interests (LIs) and 5 side-girls you can bang once or twice. The dev is clearly into petite bodies and small breasts, no big deal but the game lacks variety.

Renders & animations: not much to say, they’re great and the animated sex scenes are top-notch, with different positions and a good amount of foreplay.

Story: it starts with a simple thing, a spying software, but it quickly develops into a giant spiderweb with dark secrets everywhere and in everyone, to the point that we are totally trapped into it and have to play the whole game (it took me more than a week as I had 3 different playthroughs) to finally know the truth. It’s really captivating but not exempt from a few holes, unanswered questions, and easy shortcuts. A great experience overall, and unlike many many other games, it’s not filled with useless episodes that contain only sex scenes just to make the game longer that it needs to be. There are of course sex scenes, a lot over the 18 episodes, but they’re not stopgaps. It’s missing a bit of humor though, I did not find Toasterman and Dante funny at all, Toasterman was even very annoying most of the time.

Choices: they matter, so I suggest doing at least 2 playthroughs, 3 is perfect because of a choice Silent1 will give you at the Halloween party.

Endings: First, be aware that throughout the game you can pursue all the girls, all the LIs as well as all the side-girls, there is no impact whatsoever. You will only get to choose your LI at the end, and then you will get to see all the extended endings (they are whole episodes on their own, with loads of enjoyable content) with all the girls and as much as you want. That’s a great positive point because at the start I have worried about choosing a girl over another one, I was afraid some relationships would clash with each other. So now you know, feel free to explore as much as you want.

I would give this game 5/5 if it wasn’t for the lack of association with the MC, I couldn’t fully experience his journey as a mute person. I give it 5 stars nonetheless because its current rating is way too low in my opinion.

Love the art and the variations between the characters. The immersive story keeps the reading interesting and removes the temptation to "skip unseen text" just to get to the next fap scene. I'm rarely one to patron games on f95, but I HAD to get access to the chapters earlier because it was just THAT good!

Giving it two stars because the game is technically playable, with no obvious bugs or glitches that I've encountered so far.
Now that the positives are out of the way, I'll mention some of the negatives. For a self-described "story-focused" game, the story is terrible. The plot is about as nonsensical as can be but I won't spoil it here just in case anyone cares. The dialogue is stilted, awkward, and unnatural. There were very few conversations in the 3.5 chapters I've played so far that I can imagine actual real life people having. Worst of all is MC and his internal dialogue. He is constantly dismissive of other people, while thinking that he is very clever for using big words to say very little. Tbh a lot of it felt like an authorial self-insert. No professor is ever going to tell you that your assignment is so impressive that with a few tweaks it's almost publishable. Laughable.

This is a typical "everyone is horny for the MC" type story where none of the characters make any sense and they frequently break their established personalities (especially when it comes to the MC). Yet, despite all the girls being all over MC, there's only been one sex scene so far which was 'ok' so even the porn is not enough to salvage this game for me. Disappointing.

Review of V18.4b…

I really liked this game. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the description, but I got into it.

The character models are all gorgeous. The writing was good for the most part. There is the occasional spelling and grammar error, but it’s not bad. Just stuff that would have been picked up with a proofread.

The story is pretty good, but also a slow burn. There are 17 chapters plus the epilogue.

There are seven main girls in the game. You can choose who you want to end up with at the end. All seven also have their own extended epilogues. There are five or six “supporting cast” girls you also get down with, but none of them have any endings. There is also no harem ending, although, as of this review, two endings plus a surprise ending haven’t been implemented yet in the epilogue. The surprise ending could be anything.

The lewd scenes are hot, but the animations themselves are stiff.

There are a few things that bugged me which made me remove a star.

>The MC monologues to himself a bit too much. Also, whenever something bad happens he always imagines the worst-case scenario. It gets to be a little much sometimes.

>The MC also acts like a moron at times. A lot of his problems could have been immediately solved if he had just said something at the time. For example, MC is supposed to be searching for Sandra. At the same time, he is also planning a run for student council president with a superhero theme. After having sex with Samantha she steals the MC’s clothes forcing him to walk around campus in his superhero outfit. MC goes to work at the IT lab and Carmen, Sandra’s mother, walks into the IT lab and sees the MC in his superhero outfit and assumes he’s just fucking around when he’s supposed to be looking for her daughter. She becomes Irate with him and walks off. The MC, instead of simply speaking up and explaining the situation to her, just watches like a dumbass as she walks off.

>This is probably just my own personal nit kick, but I’m not a fan of devs putting their logos inside their games. There is one girl in the game, Kristin, who wears a shirt that says “Love Joint” on it. Stuff like that tends to break the immersion a little for me.

>You only have one scene with Carmen, Sandra’s hot Latina milf mom, in the entire game (not including the platinum scenes). That was a crime against humanity.

Despite everything I enjoyed the game. I know some people didn’t, but I gave it a chance anyway and I’m glad I did.

Starting this game, I was confused as to how it got such mediocre reviews. Barring the janky ass engine, I was really enjoying it. The characters were fun, the dialogue was decent and the plot was novel. It reminded me of a high-school mystery movie. I assumed that people didn't like the slow burn on some LI's.

After reaching halfway, I started to understand the reviews. The relationships don't actually go anywhere besides having sex once or twice. The plot, which was initially intriguing, started to get a bit silly. The MC and his "friend" who are supposed to be super smart, make some insanely stupid decisions. The extensive dialogue which I initially appreciated never evolved, so conversations became a drag. However, I was still invested, so I kept going.

Once you reach the last few chapters, you realize how fucking stupid the writing has gotten. The Valerie stuff in particular was absolutely terrible. Her motivations, backstory, characterization and etc was all so stupid it was laughable. It's obvious that whoever was writing had a good idea to start and absolutely no idea on how to develop it. The way people reacted to scenarios was so stupid and nonsensical it was surreal. At this point I was just skipping through scenes to see the conclusion to see how bad it would be.

In conclusion, the bad reviews definitely make sense now. Characters don't get any real interesting relationship development, "smart" characters act completely moronic, the plot and conclusion to the mystery is eye-rollingly stupid, and on top of this there is a mountain of inane monologues and text to get thru.

I don't expect much from porn-game writers, but I think I prefer poorly translated generic harem slop over this disaster.

Game had a bug in the last update that prevented progress once you hit an animation, but that has been fixed now.

Great game overall so far. I have not finished it yet, but unless it takes a really unexpected turn into shitsville, I'm confident enough to give it 5/5.

It´s one of the these novels, where you come for porn and stay for plot. And man, I really loved it.

True, with careful reading you could figure out the villain on your own pretty early, but it´s all about the details. Writing is very good: many nice references, metaphors and deeper meaning, some dialogue lines required deep field knowledge and it felt nice to understand them. Some quotes are just masterpiece, 100% would like to use IRL.
There is a lot of humor, very live-like characters and charismatic villain. There is an eternal topic of Crime and Punishment, with constant parallels between "good" and "evil" doing and a thin borders which makes a difference. This strong decision with the well-deserved ending for everyone, good or bad, was an interesting topic to reflect to. Kinda expected all the epilogues to be vanilla and plain "And they lived happily ever after", with mostly weird "I can fix them" trope, but I was mostly pleasant surprised by deep representation of mental health, guilt, inability to find your own place and live up to consequences of own actions.

About negative sides: some of the main LI felt more like supporting side characters and I didn´t really felt the chemistry between them and MC. And vice versa, some sides took all my attention, when they appeared on the screen and felt more interesting.
Dialogue system with prerendered character portraits, who always have the same outfit and only 3 to 5 different expressions, while floating over the background, felt kind of old, inorganic and even annoying in later episodes, but well... something I can live with.

I thought it was an incredible game, all the characters were worth it, of course my preference was between Emily and Vallery, they explored the relationship between them very well... the game's story is very immersive and I made a point of playing all the endings.
Looking forward to the new updates

Really loved this game, its unique having an MC that is mute yet smart and not incompetent. But i can only play on android and the in app download that was needed to play the game causes the app to crash so i cant play it anymore. Oh well.

This is a heavily story focused detective, conspiracy, action VN. It is pretty long (50H+), slow paced but very recommended for players who likes a more story reliant game.

From the first minute of the game, you can tell by the renders that you are in for a treat visually-wise.The characters are VERY appealing, I would even say from the top I've seen, this was mainly my first attraction for the game.

What next reeled me in is the characters' writing that was pretty good.It can be clearly seen that the writing wasn't done by some amateur, each character has its own personality and dialogue nuances which is fun and intriguing to explore and delve into, they don't feel like the stereotype characters you see in so many games due to their depths (of course few of them are though, but I would say that the ones that were stereotypical, weren't the important characters).The game makes it interesting to interact with each of the characters, and this is cleverly done by planting a mystery in each and every character. They tease you with something you would like to know but don't give that up so easily, making you want to investigate.

With these finished VN games, it is often that I feel they are dragged too much and can be much shorter, concise and thus more enjoyable and less chewed.This game is pretty long, it has a lot of content and the content does feel important for the story, but some of could be thinned down without the overall narrative being compromised.The story is very intriguing, and the second selling point of the game after the visuals.It has its highs and lows, some portions are more interesting and some are less and feeling like a burden, but the overall feeling I got was that the it was exceptional, especially the first few chapters, when you still don’t have an idea what's going on and the last few chapters, when you revealed some major stuff and now curious of how it will playout.

I thought the game would give me more choice to be ethical or not by the nature of the software that were given to the MC and it being the main plot point of the game, but it didn't seem to impact the game too much. Maybe at the beginning it presented you with choices that seem like it, but after some time they just dropped it altogether and its just a more of a linear story. The choices didn't seem to have much of a impact. Most of them were you controlling if you want to see the next scene or not.

So overall, I have no idea if they were meaningful and I'm not the type of person who would go and play a VN again to see how it will play out… so it is what it is.In games like this that feels like choice matter, I always struggle between staying immersed in the character and what I think is better for him to do in a situation, to not missing content, so it is killing me sometimes that I choose something to not miss and block my self from further content. There are moments where it seems to set a tone if the arc of some character with you will be romantic and friendly, and in my mind, even though I think it is better for the character to proceed with friendly and not romantic relationship due to the toxicity of the character, I choose not to do so because I fear of maybe missing X number of scenes with her later that may be blocked because of my choice.

Lets talk about the adult content here.The animation were pretty stiff, limited and repeating in my opinion. I'm not saying they are bad, because they are much better than countless of other games, but I was expecting more fluid and smooth animations due to the visual quality the game presented.Other than that, the scenes themselves flows really nice with build up, tension and release. There is a lot of "thought" dialogue in the scene and it makes it prolongs it and smoothens the transitions between positions.After some point, due to the animations repeating and being the same, I just started to skip through them. I was more interested in the story and I was tired of the game wasting my time with the same animations slapped on the same character, or best case scenario, another character.Another point to note, which some people may not like is that the scenes are far in between, but when they come, they worth it.

Even that it seems that I have a lot of criticism towards the game, I'm really grateful that I decided to play this game among the hundreds in my watch list.I would give it 5 start on the story and the characters alone (if you are mainly looking for adult content, maybe less so)

Pros

1. Nice graphics
2. Animations are pretty good
3. Hot girls

Cons

1. Really really really boring writing
2. Very slow paced game
3. There is just too much long winded dialogue
4. Not sure why this is even an adult game

This game has a higher rating than i've given and for many that higher rating is valid - it's a good game if you're looking for narrative mainly

The game has good writing but it has soooooo much of it. So much that every single day ends with offering you a recap. The conversations go on for so long, investigating with nothing else that for large portions of the game I thought the MC was celibate.

The MC is deaf. It didn't feel like this added anything to the game nor did it feel like good representation since every person you meet magically knows sign language.

The models arent my favourite style, a little cartoony but they are decent overall and they have normal proportions which obey physics which deserves complementing.

There's little real choice you end up in the same place whatever you do and you do not get to avoid those you dont want to interact with, since the story gets blocked

Maybe in a different medium SHS would have felt like a much better story, but as far as interactive story games go, it was a bit of a miss. SHS is like a college diploma work disguised as a porn game, but by doing so it caught the attention of the wrong crowd. Long walls of artistic and complex text and hours of highly philosophical monologues doesn't feel like the right way to tell the story in an audiovisual interactive game, especially intended for a bunch of horny dudes.

The mystery was quite intriguing and I had high hopes for SHS at first, but due to so much dry text which felt like the writer got paid by word count and tried to make it count, playing the game became a chore sometimes. Like it took the MC 5 minutes simple tasks such as flicking a freaking switch because he had another case of existential crisis he needed to share with the audience. Another thing that began disturbing me was the amount of times the MC's intelligence was sacrificed in order to drive the plot. As a reader I often felt 2 steps ahead of him and it ruined one of the most important elements of interactive narrative - self expression. Not saying the MCs have to be Mary Sues but they shouldn't be too much their own characters either. The players should have a sensible amount of input to personalize the MC.

The static renders were nice, and the girls looked pretty, although the puppet proportions took a bit to get used to at first. And regarding the girls, even though each of them had their own fleshed out stories which were intertwined with the main plot, they all ultimately felt like side pieces not actual love interests. There was no significant romance with anyone besides the epilogues. Most of the interactions were about helping them and gratuitous sex scenes without much of a build up. The only way the authors knew how to advance the relationships was to make the girls willing to let the MC enter through their back doors halfway through the story. The animations were rather mediocre as well.

This game is well-crafted and (sort of) finished (which is enough to award it 2 stars in my book). It's LIs are well written and fleshed out and they kept me interested in the game (+1 star). That's about the two positive things I can say about this game.

Now for the negatives:

In a medium that's fundamentally based on dialogue, the authors made the bafflingly stupid decision to write a plot that involves a main character that's mute. I get that there's a need to distinguish the MC, but... why mute? It's all the more baffling, considering that they do so little with that premise and use it in a half-assed way. I'd imagine an MC nodding and gesticulating a lot, yet, according to ingame logic, he mostly uses a text-to-speech app - even for the most mundane things like "yes" or "no". Why can't he just nod or shake his head?

This just shatters my immersion. Especially in highly dramatic and dynamic moments, like in a stand-off with an enemy, I imagine our MC typing in his (often quite verbose) remarks with flying fingers - the output of which apparently sounding like that Stephen Hawking robot voice. It's weird, unintentionally funny and just so, so unnecessary!

On top of that, the main story is confusing and draaaggggggiiiiing on. The first part of the story that culminates in a halloween party (check that on your bingo sheet) is relatively well paced, so I figure this was written in advance. The following chapters have a rough episodic style and it feels like chasing after the proverbial carrot. You have little to no influence on the events of the story, and the MC often makes decisions that I find dumb and frustrating. The pace picks up again in the later parts, but by then, I was skipping a lot of stuff, because I wanted it to finally end.

The sex scenes are formulaic and here's where the stupid 'mute premise' hits again as there's a lack of any banter or dirty talk (one of the endings makes good on that, but it's too little too late). Also, the body type of the LIs are all more or less the same.

For a game this scale and ambition, you really want to give it more than three stars, but that would be overlooking its massive flaws. Recommended at your own peril.

I played this game 2 years ago waited for it to be completed but after reading the comment section below and this dlc plan I think I will passed this game. Unlike the previous game of love joint when palmer is alive and still in charge the story telling of the game is simple and straight forward DH and DFD are far more better games compare to Shale Hill's Secret. The only advantage of SHS is that it has sex animation. Other than that, the two previous games are better. The Female design alone is one i will compare it DFD and DH has diverse style of female character while SHS female design is like a copy of a copy of a female character in the game only the hair style, hair color and eye color are different.

I will still give it a 3 star ⭐ rating for average. Don't get me wrong it's a good even though I did not finish it. But if I compare it to the 2 previous game. SHS pales in comparison

The story was a bit of a snoozer but the animations were pretty good. Sound is always nice because not all games in this genre have it. I would like to see more variations in body types as well. The sex options are always nice to have... unremarkable but not bad.

This game has amazing graphics. One of the best from finished games so far. The female characters are really attractive. The details are quite good.
From the bad sides:
The game mechanics
Not a very big variety of kinks
Endings (basically one more sex scene...not an ending).

An honest review, this is a master piece that is worth a try. The story is filled with thriller, mystery, action and romance, where it gets better as you progress through further. Not to mention, this game has over 10 episodes, having over 2 days of content depending on how fast you skip through the dialogue. Animations are pretty good including the rendering, so it doesn't feel choppy or weird at all. The only downside is that the story sometimes could get a bit boring, because it is a little repetitive, go out solve mystery, come home and sleep.