Love ritual

Short, buggy, frustrating.

Big issue I will point out that most don't: The decision to use screen flashes for the final battle. So many screen flashes, some of which were bright white. This was extremely painful for my eyes, a potential migraine trigger, risky for people with seizure illnesses, and honestly looks bad anyway. Using something like the effect from when she threw the ring would've been a better option for the attacks (no screen flashes! Please people. T_T)

The save files also seem to reorganize themselves which complicated my trying to do the neutrals as I couldn't tell which path the save was when loading since it moved (I save often in case of crashes, which the game did crash sometimes.) Also sucks not being able to get steam acheivements.

The models for the male options were quite nice, but everything else brings it down. :( I liked the cat though.

I really wanted to like this game as it has beautiful art (animated sprites AND backgrounds!) and a fun story with the promise of cool gameplay. But after I spent 5 minutes trying to get a damn cauldron up during the first puzzle, I had to return the game. If you have the patience to deal with the weird laggy gameplay, good for you. I unfortunately didn't, even though I wish I could have continued with this game.

I got this on sale for $2.39. Overall, I liked it. It was definitely worth the sale price, so I'd recommend waiting for a sale.

Pros:
- Sweetie boi LI
- Music was nice
- It's real spicy ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- Fun plot twist I genuinely did not see coming

Cons:
- English translation was pretty rough in places and it was kind of hard to understand
- I don't really like the Live2D animation style, it makes characters look like they're made of Goo. I'd prefer static portraits.
- One of the two LI's is a B hole
- Bugs (but I could get around them)
- Very short
- Full price would be kind of expensive for what this is. Wishlist it and get it on sale.

The game is really pretty but there are glaring problems with it so is not worth its full price. the story is ok but the script seems like maybe its translated but not the best and so the language is both awkward and sometimes the words fully incorrect. There are also a lot of bugs like the puzzles wont trigger complete or you have to fight to be able to complete them. if the game didn't have a decent auto save it would actually be unplayable. the 7 hours i spent in the game was largely fighting bugs. it is a valiant effort it just needs work

An interesting mystery game with some romance on top. The MC isn't useless - she is smart and driven, which I really appreciate. The two love interests aren't bad, and both have a mixture of good and bad personality traits. You have your super sweet and kind of bumbling Druid and your jaded and bitter Necromancer. Something for everyone!

The puzzles are kind of fun the first time through, but you can't skip them on repeated plays which gets annoying quickly.

The art is very pretty. I enjoyed the character art and the cut-scenes. The uncensored version of the sex scenes were ok. On the topic of the sex scenes... the writing in them is BAD. I've read plenty of otome with bad sex, but this is one of the worst offenders. The word "privates" is not, and never will be, sexy.

If you don't mind some awkward intercourse, I'd recommend!

I do enjoy this game. It was quite cute with an adorable rivalry between the two love interests. There are quite a lot of bugs which is a pretty big downer. All in all I give it a 6.5/10

I want to be able to write a good review for this game but... I can't. The story seems like it would be interesting and I adore the artwork! However, I have hit a game breaking bug in the first investigation scene that put me into a continuous text loop that I can't seem to break. I've tried everything I can think to fix the problem. I've posted in the forum, hoping for help but, none seems forthcoming. And, looking back, it looks like there are a lot of bugs that aren't being addressed.

If the bugs are fixed and I can actually play the game, I'll come back and give it a real review. But, in the meantime, I'd avoid it just because you may find that you can't even play it.

I didn't expect the plot to be as engaging as it was, always a pleasant surprise. The artwork in this game is unique and gorgeous, it really pulls you into the world instead of feeling like you're looking at sprites on a background. Shanrea's route was so sweet and lovely, and Kalaseth is my spicy bb, really enjoyed both. In my 11-hours of playtime I did not experience any of the glitches that are mentioned here, aside from not having the achievements save in steam. Solid 6.5/10.

I enjoyed this game. It's funny, it's sexy, it's interesting, and it's beautiful. There are some frustrating bugs, including 1 game-breaking bug that occurred once during my 3 playthroughs (DISCLAIMER: this MAY have been patched since my last playthrough), but I wouldn't consider them enough to warrant passing on the game. That said, there is at least 1 community guide to get you passed these bugs, so I may have just gotten lucky.

The story is unique enough that it made me want to get to the bottom of the mystery. The relationship between the characters are funny to watch, particularly when funny situations are animated out (e.g., the men shuffling around the crack of the door after the "nose" incident). I also like that the MC is not a simpering daisy, but a more realistic-feeling adult woman.

Speaking of adult, nudity and adult content are optional and can be toggled on/off directly from the in-game options/settings menu -- an improvement IMO from the usual "download adult patch from a separate website and merge it into your game files" method.

All in all, it definitely needs some polish, but I would definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a sexy, supernatural ADV-VN game.

I wish I could recommend this game, I really do, but...

Allow me to start with the good:
+ looks great
+ music doesn't drive you crazy
+ story is decent
+ (few) interactive scenes (I think it's a nice touch)

Now the regrettable:
- broken steam overlay (I hope you don't need your screenshots, or achievements, I mean there are achievements but you can't get them cause they're broken)
- freezes
- bugs (including "I hope you save often" game breaking bugs, like getting stuck on a screen because transition doesn't trigger, or getting stuck because you interacted with things in wrong order and game really wanted you to interact with thing b after thing a, but because you already interacted with thing b you can't do it again and tough luck right?)

Well this was underwhelming and disappointing. Not that I expected something outstanding, but the game looked quite enticing at first glance. It has excellent visuals and is a 18+ otome, which is so rare that attracts attention. After playing the game, I can say gorgeous visuals are the only thing it has going for it. I had more fun captioning and commenting my screenshots than actually playing it.

Story is the weakest part, world building non-existent. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect some deep elaborate story, but at least something more engaging. The plot is fairly simple, when you strip it down, but it looks convoluted by confusing and boring magic technobabble. Yes, that’s right, this game makes magic boring. I don’t know if it’s full of plot holes, probably. I was long dead from boredom to pay attention to such details. It is also repetitive. There is no variation in the two route story/plot wise. Everything happens in the same way, just with a different guy as a bystander. This is not the problem of translation. The language itself is easy to follow and more or less natural (to my ears). There are some grammatical errors but nothing that would make it hard to read. The problem is deeper, the writing itself.

This visual novel attempts to incorporate adventure/puzzle gameplay into it’s structure, which is interesting, I guess. It feels more like HOG in that aspect (although hidden object scenes are more challenging) You have a few scenes where you ‘perform’ a ritual, but that’s actually just clicking on hotspots. You may or may not listen to her technobabble (thank god, ugh) So this puzzle gameplay is severely watered down and doesn’t really make the game more engaging, only more buggy.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2091090097

So ok, it’s not a good story (or puzzle game), but who cares, it’s a 18+ otome. Surely I can enjoy it as a trashy romance novel at least. I wish! When the story and especially world building are weak then characters don’t have the ground to stand on resulting in pretty thin characterisation and consequently romance. Although I’ve known quite a few fictional works with so-so stories but interesting and engaging characters. That’s not the case here. I don’t even have much to say about them. Generic western MC: likes to technobabble and info dump..........has nice bo*obs. Two love interests are supposed to be polar opposites. Shanrae, the Druid, the half-naked flowerboy is sort of naive, nice, young..........has a six-pack. Can’t quite think of more. He’s definitely a more striking eye-candy, abs on display and all. Seth, the Necromancer, is more interesting, but very tropey. He’s confident, cocky, blunt. The most entertaining thing in the whole game are his drunken rants. It’s like the writer had limited access to personality clay and used it all on Seth, forgetting to leave some for Shanrae.

With a story and characters like these it’s no wonder that romance suffers. It’s very rushed and unconvincing, there’s barely any tension. It follows the same pattern for both guys:

1. one initial interaction (at that point the vn still showed promise)
   
2. the obligatory ‘caught you naked’ scene (a source of much entertainment for my screenshots)
   
3. then you choose one of the guys to stay with you (for iffy reasons)
   
4. another romantic scene (where you suddenly realise you like the guy-what, when?)
   
[*]sex (which you can nope out of...but why)

[quote]Join Drugoja In The Dreaming on a lookout for better otome smut[/quote]

This is a very qualified "Recommended" on my part.
As others have noted, the game itself is beautiful. I don't go in for background music, but others have said they like it and I will defer to their opinions on the subject. I enjoyed the characters, especially Seth, who is a self-centered asshole but is good for a lot of oneliners (check out the screenshots in the Community Hub for examples). There's a minimal amount of grammatical errors, which makes me happy.
HOWEVER. However. There are parts of this game that are absolutely infuriating. It freezes up at times, some of the challenges require you to do things in a very specific (but not explained anywhere) order before you can proceed, and it doesn't really interact well with Steam. Maybe that last is because it was built using a system other than Ren'Py? Whatever the case may be, it doesn't play nice with Steam, so you can't toggle between the Steam backside and the game (using shift + tab) the way you can in other games, F12 will not do screenshots for you, and the achievements listed at the top of the game page cannot actually be achieved.
So, I would recommend the game if you can get it on sale, like I did, and don't mind being annoyed with bad programming once in a while. It's not the worst, especially if you're looking for something a little sexy, but it's not great.

Okay, so I saw negative reviews here and there, but I looked at the game and it seemed interesting enough to check it out. Plus, I got it really cheap on sale.
I should say that the game is really good. I'm not going to leave a negative review, because I enjoyed it. It was absolutely beautiful, the music was nice, animations were great, the plot was good. I really enjoyed solving puzzles, because I was looking for a game which would provide stuff like this. It's very short, ye, that's why the romance seems so rushed. It doesn't mean the game is bad. I played other short games like this. Sometimes you just want a short VN It's way better than reading one and the same repetative stuff for 8 hours. I didn't actually notice any bugs. Maybe they were fixed? Perhaps I didn't count them as bugs...Anyways, my experience was rather positive. I just spent 3 hours in a beautiful game. Thank you, please make more X)

A Neutral Option would be better, but well since this is not possible I would say you can buy it if its on sale.

Pro:
- Animated Backgrounds & Characters
- Nice Art
- Cats hidden! (I found this kinda nice :))
- Option to choose if Censored or Uncensored Content
- Nice Story
- Epilogs (kind of nice)

Neutral:
- Music is okay
- You need to solve some puzzles

Pros:
- Some minor bugs for me (like skipping works, but then it doesnt stop sometimes unless i go to autoread mode, which i didnt want)
- The ending with all the revealing feels rushed
- To read i needed to click with my mouse instead of my keyboard (yup, lazy me :P)
- Romance part feels rushed

If its on sale and you want to give it a try, go ahead. It has a short nice story with amazing art.
If you expect something breathtaking and long, then dont.

I would have really loved to be able to recommend this game but I just can't.
It has some great aspects; the story is enjoyable, the art is lovely and the 2D animations bring a sense of life to the game as well as being unique, however, the translation/proofreading is terrible. There are constant mistakes in the text throughout the game such as added words, missing words and at one-point, repeated text. It was extremely immersive breaking. These errors became far more frequent as the story went on. Considering the nature of these ‘games’ I believe far more care should have been taken in this department. I’ve played free otome/visual novels that were far more polished than this one.
The other huge issue for me was that the “skip text” option just wouldn’t work properly. I could only skip all text; changing the option to only skip “seem text” would cause the game to act as if I hadn’t read anything prior in 95% of cases. That or the game would glitch and no text would show at all forcing me to have to restart from a prior save.
Another minor nuisance (and I can’t say for a fact that it was a problem with the game and not steam itself) but I unlocked achievements in game but received none on Steam, despite having a legit copy of and verifying the game. Bit annoying for an achievement hunter.

Overall, I’d say if you were interested in this game, wait for it to be on sale at least!

The art and backgrounds in this game are absolutely stunning with the exception of a few anatomy issues. However the writing, translation and pacing are total garbage. Half the time I wasn't sure exactly what was going on. The romance is lackluster and I'm not sure how anyone even fell in love considering the fact that they mostly only had a few work related conversations. The game is also very short. I managed to finish both routes (good endings) in 6 hours, that includes leaving the game running while I made food or wandered off to do something actually interesting. Im not a fan of point and click but if the devs were going with that mechanic as gameplay I feel like it should have been used more. The idea and premise is interesting but the execution is just terrible and I cant recommend this game at all.

Was really liking the game until it came to pick out runes for a magic ritual. I did selecting "these ones" and then NOTHING. Ten minutes of nothing. It was like the game was stuck. Judging by the other reviews its probably a bug. So beware. Beautiful game but still has some game stopping bugs in it. Am disappointed that I won't be able to finish it.

PROS
Good art
Good story
Fun gameplay
Good characters and romance
CONS
Many bugs
One of the puzzles is difficult
The game stops working a lot

It's a good game but I never finished the good endings and watched the endings on youtube because of all the bugs and stuff.

A very pretty otome with awesome character animation and music. I really enjoyed the world it takes place in and hope to see it expanded on in a future installment. Definitely worth it for the price.
I didn't encounter any of the bugs people mentioned in previous reviews.

This game does have a few bugs, primarily with the saving and loading features (Don't overwrite your save!!). But ya'll this game is so worth it! I've been so excited for Love ritual since I stumbled across it and immediately fell in love with the beautiful animation style. It is worth your time 100%!

Love ritual is an “interactive” Visual Novel